What's blooming today?
Wordless Wednesday
A few weeks ago the park we take our dog to for hikes in the woods looked like this.
This was as nice as our fall colors got this year in Toronto.
That’s long gone of course.
We’ve had snow a few times, and the leaves have fallen off the trees. Winter is pretty much here.
I’m happy to enjoy the season – as long as I can stay warm!
There are many benefits to composting your household wastes like kitchen scraps, leaves, grass clippings and so on. One of the main benefits is that you can use the compost that you’ve created on your own garden or perhaps your lawn if you don’t have a garden.
Our plants and trees can gain much needed nutrients when we amend the soil around them with compost.
Here in Toronto we have what is called “Green Garbage”. Those who don’t compost can add their kitchen scraps and a few other materials to their green bins for collection each week. The city then combines this green waste with shredded, and I presume composted yard waste (leaves and plant trimmings and such), and gives it back to the residents of Toronto each Spring on certain days. Residents can pick up compost for their garden at special depots set up in various communities on specific days.
We usually try to pick up a large garbage can worth of the cities compost each spring, but we don’t rely on it as we have our own composter in our backyard.
If you’d like to learn how to set up your own composter why don’t you have a look at these videos.
Backyard Composting
Learn the basics of garden composting. Create some great nutrient rich compost for your garden from scraps and yard waste. Improve your soil the organic way.
Garden Girl TV: Simple Easy Compost Bin
Patti, the Garden Girl, shows you a simple and easy way to make a compost bin for your organic lawn or garden.
So if you haven’t already done so, go ahead and start your own backyard compost bin. Your plants will show you how much they enjoy having their soil amended with compost and your kitchen garbage won’t be as smelly!
I’m always surprised when I look at the stats for this site and I see the search term “Rose of Sharon” come up almost daily all year round. There’s obviously a lot more people than I thought looking for information about Rose of Sharon shrubs!
My Rose of Sharon came to me 7 years ago as a gift from my neighbor. She has a Rose of Sharon, lets call it the mother tree, that is about 40+ years old.
I’m not sure how tall her tree is but lets say it’s somewhere between 12 and 15 feet tall. The seedling she gave me has grown quite a bit over the years and it’s only about two feet shorter than the mother tree. It’s trunk and branches have thickened, but they are still smaller in diam. than the mother trees – but not by that much.
This is definitely not the best picture of the tree that I’ve ever taken, but to show you how big it is this year and what it looks like in full bloom, here we go …
You can see the power line above the tree so that should give you an idea of how tall it is.
It’s been a beautiful addition to my garden. I love it’s purple blooms. Birds love the tree year round, and butterflies and other insects enjoy the tree when it’s in bloom. I’m sure it’s helped attract some of the butterflies that frequent my yard regularly each year.
The Rose of Sharon is a fairly hardy tree, but it’s slow to leaf out in the spring. It’s often one of the last plants to start to show signs of life in my garden. I usually see leaves forming by early June, but there have been a few years where it hasn’t leafed out till close to the end of June.
My elderly neighbor always thinks her tree is dead each year because it’s so slow and each year I reassure her that it will leaf out and bloom – and it does.
I’ll bet that the Rose of Sharon being slow to start up in the spring or early summer is one of the major reasons why I get so many searches on my site for this lovely shrub.
I used to have a Hardy Hibiscus that would die down each winter, but for the past two years it’s failed to come up. I think it’s gone. My tropical Hibiscus – that I keep indoors in the winter – is doing well in a large urn at the front of the house. There are several peach colored blooms on it.
Do you grow Hibiscus? What type and what have your experiences been with the plant?
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