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Tidying up the garden on a nice fall day

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Do you ever just go in your garden and start chopping away at the plants?

Of course you do, most of you are gardeners. Naturally by chopping away I simply mean you see a dead branch on a rose bush or shrub, some dead leaves here and there on other plants, flowers that need to be dead headed and so on.

Sunday was on of those days for me.

I went into the garden in the early evening and it was 10 pm by the time I came back inside! It’s a good thing we have one of those big security lights at the back of the house to light up the yard!

Several of our roses were overgrown and needed pruning. That’s what got me started. As I made my way through the garden beds I found many flowers that had started to go to seed so I got some of the small jewelry bags that I keep on hand and collected the seeds.

I’m keep the little bags of seeds that I collected open slightly so all of the moisture can leave the bag. I’ve also got to remember to put a few grains of rice in the bag to absorb moisture as well. There’s nothing worse than collecting seeds, sealing them up and then having them go moldy because you didn’t store them properly or because they weren’t fully dry when stored.

When the seed baggies are totally dry I’ll take them and store them in a nice cool place. Usually that ends up being the coolest corner of my basement.

Have you been pruning any of your plants? Collecting seeds for next year?

Oh … I overworked myself. I’ve got an aching back. One of the woes of gardening!






It’s really cooling off at night!

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Is it getting cooler in your area? It’s getting cooler here and the temperatures seem to be dropping lower than they should at night for this time of year.

On Sunday I happened to look at my weather widget on my computer and I saw that it was supposed to go down to 0 Celsius overnight. Yikes! Zero at this time of year? I’ve still got tomatoes, Cannas, Passion flower vines and other tropicals outdoors!

My husband and I talked about how low the temperatures were going to go and I thought about just covering the plants with a sheet of burlap. We have plenty of that for winterizing so it’s handy! Instead we decided to bring some of the more delicate plants – passion flower, jasmine, ornamental pepper and two potted tomato plants into the back porch. Yes it still gets cool in that room but it’s enclosed and it always seem to stay a few degree’s warmer than whatever it is outdoors.

The enclosed back porch faces south and it’s been an ideal room to use when I’ve got my act together and have started seedlings in the late winter or early spring. Some winter days with the sun shinning fully into the room it can get up to between 70 and 80 F in there even when it’s close to zero outside! Of course at night without the sun it cools substantially.

Anyway, I think I might leave the potted tomatoes in the room for as long as I can. Perhaps I’ll be eating fresh tomatoes long after you’ve pulled yours out of the ground?

We chopped down most of our sunflowers

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On Monday afternoon and into the evening we finally got around to cutting down / trimming our Sunflowers as per the notice that we received from the city last week.

Last Tuesday or Wednesday we were given notice that our Sunflowers that grow in the boulevard in front of our house were causing an obstruction and had to be trimmed to three feet in height.

They weren’t obstructing anything, but I wasn’t about to find out what the fine might be for not complying with the bylaw order.

So on Monday, Chris started torturing our sunflowers by cutting down the biggest one which I’m sure was at least 14 feet tall. We had to go out for an appointment in the afternoon so we didn’t finish trimming the rest of the sunflowers – perhaps 20 in all – until we returned in the early evening.

What a shame.

Some of the sunflowers grew multiple sunflowers at various heights so there are still some flowers growing on the three foot tall stumps. Still, I don’t know if the sunflowers will survive as we cut so much off the plants that they might just die down now.

People passing by kept stopping to ask us what we were doing and when we told them what and why they couldn’t understand what the problem was. The whole neighborhood loves our sunflowers and it’s a fact that we grow them and other flowers in the boulevard to help beautify the neighborhood.

One of my site visitors had suggested, when I first posted about this city bylaw order, that we take the cut sunflowers and hang them from a window so that the birds could still use the flowers. I took that suggestion and expanded on it.

We have two flower boxes hanging outside the two windows at the front of our enclosed front porch. Since I didn’t feel well most of the summer I never did get around to planting annuals in the window boxes so they were bare all summer.

I decided to stick several of the cut flowers on their stems in the window boxes. It actually looks quite nice and the flowers are holding up well. I scattered a few of the remaining flowers in the garden bed below the window boxes and the flowers that had been almost finished or that were starting to dry into seed heads were cut off and scattered in the boulevard at the base of the sunflower plants.

I’m sure the neighborhood squirrels will scatter the dried out sunflower heads throughout the neighborhood. Did you know they nibble on the whole head? I find bitten sunflower heads in the strangest places sometimes!

The nicest cut sunflowers were set aside and when we were done cleaning up our mess I brought them inside and put them in two vases.

I figure we might as well enjoy the flowers for as long as we can.

Stupid city bylaw.

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