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I wonder how many of my neighbors grow toxic plants?

by Tricia

I think I’m going to have to become an expert at picking out toxic plants.

When we take our puppy for walks she tries to investigate everything and often tries to taste everything she encounters. I don’t know how many small stones I’ve pulled out of her mouth!

Now that the cold weather is here the plants in peoples gardens have all withered up and I can’t tell what the heck they are. As a result going near enough to any plant to taste it is taboo for our little pup.

It’s bad enough that I have some very toxic plants in my own garden, but since I haven’t been walking around the neighborhood much this year, now that I’m out everyday walking around the neighborhood I have no idea what everyone else has been growing or whether it might be harmful to my pup if she tries to taste their plants.

I guess for proper dog walking etiquette it’s best anyway if she’s not wandering onto everyone’s lawn to investigate their gardens.

For those of you with dogs how do you keep them out of the plants? – your own or your neighbors.






Filed Under: Home and Lifestyle, Pets and Wildlife, Recreation, The neighborhood Tagged With: cold, cold weather, dog, garden, gardens, grow, growing, lawn, neighbor, neighborhood, neighbors, plant, plants, The neighborhood, toxic plants, walk, walking

Crazy Squirrel

by Tricia

Earlier today I was upstairs and I happened to look out the window at my garden. Much to my surprise and amusement I saw a grey squirrel running around doing some strange stuff.

You see, yesterday evening I was cleaning out our freezer and I found some disgusting frost bitten hamburger buns. Instead of just throwing them in the garbage I decided to crumble up the bread and threw it on the lawn in the backyard for the birds or whatever else was out there to discover.

I had actually expected the bread pieces to be gone this morning since there are raccoons in the area – but it seems they haven’t been coming into our yard as much as they used to, so most of the bread was still scattered across the lawn this morning.

So, anyway, I was upstairs watching this grey squirrel. He’d run into the backyard and carefully select the piece of bread he wanted. Why he chose one over the other I’m not sure, but he was being selective.

He’d take a piece of bread, run through the back garden flower bed and climb the short fence. From there he’d jump onto the curved wooden trellis we have had clematis vines growing on. In front of that trellis we have this huge ugly silver wire that supports the tall wooden electric pole in our neighbors backyard. I grow a honeysuckle vine on this eye sore of a wire and it disguises it somewhat.

Well, the squirrel climbed up and stuffed his piece of bread between this wire and the the entwined honeysuckle vine. He then climbed down to select another piece of bread and repeated the procedure.

I guess he was storing his bread for later. Like a bird or another squirrel wouldn’t find his stock pile?

Later in the day I saw the same squirrel in the garden. There was still some bread left and he was back to selecting his favorite pieces but this time I think he was storing them in the Rose of Sharon tree or the fence behind it. I couldn’t see clearly, but the branches were sure moving around a lot. I suspected he was stuffing them in the crock of a branch.

What a crazy squirrel. Have you ever seen a squirrel do anything like this? I’m certainly used to them digging little holes in my garden beds to store bread, nuts, peach pits and so on, but I’ve never seen one stuff bread between vines or branches!

Filed Under: Home and Lifestyle, Pets and Wildlife, Recreation, The neighborhood Tagged With: backyard, Beds, birds, branch, bread, buns, cat, Clematis, feed, flower, flower bed, food, garden, garden bed, growing, honeysuckle, honeysuckle vine, my garden, neighbor, neighbors, Raccoon, rose, Rose of Sharon, squirrel, tree, Vine, window

Our sunflowers got us in trouble!

by Tricia

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Can you believe we got a notice today that we’re breaking a city bylaw?

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I have to cut down my beautiful sunflowers! We got an official notice stating that the flowers in the boulevard are overgrown and must be cut down to 0.92 meters (3 feet) by September 12th. The notice doesn’t say what will happen if we don’t do it, but I’m sure it will be a fine of some sort.

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I guess it’s because we let the sunflowers grow as they wanted – all over the boulevard instead of just a thick line of sunflowers this year. We also have one that’s grown to about 14 feet in height!

I could see the complaint if we were a house on a corner and or if all our neighbors used their driveways, but we’re the second house from the corner and we are the only people out of 8 houses on our block that actually uses our driveway! We don’t use our car much since we live close to work so it’s not like seeing around the sunflowers as we back out is a daily issue and it’s not that hard to see around them anyway. Grrrr.

Sorry I’m so behind on my Green Thumb Sunday post. We had our family reunion over the last five days and I really didn’t have any time to get my blogging done. All the guests are gone now so I should get back to normal blogging again. I hope! I’m very tired though.

Gardeners, Plant and Nature lovers can join in every Sunday, visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

Filed Under: Family, Garden Buzz, Garden Maintenance, Green Thumb Sunday, Home and Lifestyle, Photography, Recreation Tagged With: Beautiful, blogging, bylaw, driveway, Family, flower, flowers, garden, Green Thumb Sunday, height, House, neighbor, neighbors, obstruction, photo, plant, September, Sunflower, sunflowers too tall, Toronto bylaw

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