As the Garden Grows

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2006 garden winter protection

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I haven’t really begun to work on this site. I had planned to write in it daily and I do still plan to do that, but I’ve been busy with securing the domain name that this site will be placed under and I’m still looking for a good theme that I can convert into a wonderful garden layout.

It’s been cool this week so I haven’t been doing much with the garden. After last weeks blast of heat, then rain and now the slightly cool weather the garden has really taken off.

Actually since we had a very mild winter with very little damage to the plants I’d say that the garden is about a month ahead of itself. Many of the roses are already 6 or 7 feet tall. I’m used to having to prune many of the winter damaged branches down to one or two foot stubs but I didn’t have to do that this year.

Ironically, this past winter we winter protected better than we ever had before. We gathered leaves from our neighbors as we usually do but this year we must have gathered twice as many as we normally do – perhaps 50 bags of leaves! The garden beds had an approximately 3 foot cover of leaves on them. On top of that we had mounded soil around the base of the roses as usual, and we put up a long burlap fence that surrounds the garden beds on either side. Overkill even in a very cold winter.

When we uncovered everything in the spring the strawberry plants were already green, the rose branches were tall, green and only a few had slight damage. The rest of the plants were doing well too. It was amazing!

Well I must go and see if I can muster up some energy to get into the garden and do some work or else keep working on finding a nice theme for this site.






Garden evolution part II

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An excerpt from my Gardenweb members page from the year 2002. This passage details how we landscaped the backyard.:

” Well, it’s spring 2002 and we’ve been working on landscaping our front and backyard gardens since early April. We widened and added several garden beds to the gardens. We decided to create raised beds- which unfortunately involved moving and replanting many of the 400 or so spring bulbs that I planted last November! LOL Most appear to have survived the move.

In April we purchased 272 easy-wall garden stones. We chose the red/orange colour which really seems to be a pinkish colour. After planning out the layout of the garden beds we dug out trenches where the easy-wall stones were to be placed and filled in the trenches with screening to provide a solid well draining surface for the stones to sit on. Then we began the creation of our two layered walls. We decided to have our raised garden beds run along the edges of our very small backyard (approx 100 feet long by 17 feet wide). The beds along the long sides are three feet deep, and the bed along the back of the garden is 4 feet deep.

We put in a patio that is approx 10 feet X 10 feet and laid it with red/savanah cobblestone patio stones (4 placed together form a large circle pattern). Along the side are of the patio we have a two foot wide flower bed, and at the side of the patio that borders on the rest of the backyard we built a long oval shaped 3 foot wide flower bed. The flower beds that border the patio will contain plants that grow to 3 or 4 feet in height. This will hopefully create a sort of garden room that gives us some privacy from our neighbours yet allows us to enjoy the rest of the garden while sitting at our patio table.

I purchased several perennial plants from Botanus.com (60 plants or so) and spent March to April growing more perennials, annuals and veggie seedlings indoors. It’s been a cool spring so some of my seedling planting has been delayed. However it’s been warming up nicely in the past week (May 27 to 31, 2002) so I hope to get the rest of my seedlings planted this weekend.

My garden will be a little bit unconventional. I’m planting several wild flowers, roses, and heirloom plants, but I’m mixing them with vegetables in several areas. It’s my hope that the veggies and their colours compliment the garden and don’t look too out of place mixed amongst the flowers and herbs. I really didn’t want to have a separate section of the garden just for the veggies as I felt that would break up the overall look I’m trying to achieve. If it doesn’t work perhaps I’ll go more traditional next year. ”

I’ve planted many more plants since the garden was started. Please see my “What’s Growing” page to see a list of the many many plants that I grow. It’s been a fun journey and along the way I’ve discovered that I do indeed have a very green thumb.

Our Garden’s Evolution

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I joined Gardenweb in the Winter of 2001 as I was planning our garden. The following is an excerpt from my gardenweb member page:

2001

“I’ve recently purchased a house and I’m looking forward to starting my garden next year. I plan to landscape the backyard so that it will have several areas of floral plants, a vegetable garden, and a pond surrounded by a rock garden.

I’m not new to gardening- but new to creating my own garden. When I was a child my parents always had a nice vegetable garden, flowering trees, and flower beds that needed tending. We also had two very large vegetable gardens at our cottage …. so yes I have quite a bit of past experience weeding and growing vegetables in particular. ”

Well, the garden that I was dreamily planning was started in the spring of 2001 and has grown from there. Read the next post for another excerpt from my gardenweb members page regarding the progress of our garden.

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