As the Garden Grows

What's blooming today?


Do you decorate your garden?

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I’m just wondering how many of my readers have garden ornaments peeking out amongst their plants?

I have a few very nice pieces of metalwork ornaments created by local metal artists – one is a chameleon climbing on a plant and headed towards a leaf, and another is a lovely bird sitting on a perch. I have a few mass produced ornaments like a butterfly on a stick, a wobbly metal bee on a pole etc.

Then there’s the little figurines that I have placed here and there. When my parents passed away I took their little pigs, and an over-sized cricket that they always had placed in their garden beds. I also have a foot and a half long crocodile – somehow he blends in. LOL

When my mother passed away I knew I wouldn’t be getting back to my home town very often and I just love the area. It’s where my love of nature began. As I traveled back and forth from Toronto to Ottawa- my home town – I’d stop in some of the rocky area’s in the Ottawa valley and I collected large stones- most of them flat. With those stones I made my own stone man. I cannot think of the proper name for this stone figure that means welcome at this moment. He’s about two feet wide and two feet high and I love this ornament more than any other in my garden.

What kind of garden ornaments do you have in your garden? Have you done anything creative? Tell me about it.






The card giver

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We just got a greeting card from Chris’ favorite Aunt. I think this woman is a greeting card fanatic. She sends up the usual cards- for our Birthdays, and Christmas, but then we get greeting cards for Thanks Giving, Easter, May Day, Labour Day – you name it, if she can find a card for it she sends it. She’s also very religious so we get Mass Cards and religious themed cards, plus cards when we are sick too.

She loves us- what can I say. LOL

She has the most unique address labels that I’ve ever seen too. Chris’ family is Irish and the label background has the family’s Irish Coat of Arms on it. The labels that I often use on our cards and letters are those free address labels that the salvation army sends every year. Yes, yes I should get some made, perhaps with a garden theme as a background.

My husbands aunt is such a cool lady, oh and she likes gardening too. You should see her yard. She doesn’t keep up with her garden anymore but the good bones are still there and it’s still very nice.

So, do you want to know what the latest two cards were? One was a Halloween card of course and the other was a “Happy Autumn” greeting card. It has the most beautiful scene with colorful fall leaves on it. It’s gorgeous. That one’s a keeper.

It’s freezing!

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I’m writing this post to record our first frost. Well I think it’s the first. it’s -2 c outside right now and I believe that’s the first time it’s dipped below zero. Brrrrr Well at least all the silly roses in my garden will hopefully get the message that it’s time to shut down and stop blooming. Yes – my roses are still blooming. They always seem to bloom into mid November or so.

I guess it’s time for me to get outside – not now, it’s cold – and clean up the garden and start putting it to bed. I always mound some compost or peat around the roses to protect the roots. I buried the root ball several inches below the soil level when I planted the roses but the mounds that I put around the base of the roses in the fall give them further protection in the winter.

We don’t tend to get a lot of snow here. Yes it does snow and sometimes we get quite a lot but it melts away fairly quickly. The air however stays very cold. The temps can fall to more than -20 c and worse with the wind factored in. If my garden doesn’t have a good snow cover or a cover that I’ve created with my mounds of compost and piles of leaves the plants will be more suceptable to freeze damage.

I’m not looking foward to putting the garden to bed this year. It’s a big job what with us having 60 roses plus all the other plants. We’ll manage to get it done though.

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