I’m currently in the process of hardening off the first round of onion and leek seedlings in preparation for permanently planting them outside. To recap, here’s the planting calendar that I follow:
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Hellebore, Huh? Lessons from the Hellebore Whisperer (+ giveaway)
UPDATE (April 10, 2013): My plants have flower buds!
Are you afraid to grow hellebore? I am. Like clematis, they are a plant that I have long associated with hoity-toity gardeners and their fancy pants gardens. Their ticket price doesn’t help matters. Hellebores are notoriously expensive plants, often coming in at the $20-30 mark in most retail garden centres. That’s a lot of money to sink into a plant that I am almost certain I will kill.
And then I met Barry Parker.
Barry loves hellebores. He also loves clematis (but that’s a story for another day). And you know what? Barry’s garden is awfully fancy. Few fully staffed, public gardens I have visited have been able to pull off what Barry achieves in his urban Toronto backyard. While the initial shock has worn off, after 4 years, it still blows my mind every time that I visit it.
It may be fancy and a little bit intimidating, but I never walk away from Barry’s garden feeling like a failure in my own. I think this is owing to Barry’s heart of gold and his cheerful, encouraging, and generous charm. Instead, I always leave Barry’s garden with a can-do attitude and the drive to do better. Whats more, having Barry as a friend has helped me come a long way in undoing old, self-imposed stereotypes about gardeners, plants, and gardens.
Leave a commentOn Identifying Cold Spots in the Garden
How much sun does it receive? That’s the first question we gardeners tend to ask ourselves when we start out to garden in a new space. It’s an important question for sure, but over the years, I have come to understand, that if you want to make the best use of your space, there are other, equally meaningful factors to consider.
Growing in the city, where heat-absorbing materials abound, my focus has often been on observing patterns of extreme heat. I earned my real gardening chops battling what I often refer to as Full Sun ++ for 15 years on the rooftop of my former apartment building. Times have changed and now I garden in a thin, bowling alley style urban backyard. Naturally, I spent the first winter carefully observing the way light fell onto the yard (throughout the day) in an attempt to identify how to tackle the space come spring. I also paid mind to heat, wind, drainage, soil, and the slope of my garden, and I have made adjustments over the last two seasons that address those issues or work best with them. Now that I am about to embark on my third spring in this garden, I have come to see with clarity that one condition that I had failed to fully acknowledge — probably out of habit — are the places in the garden that are the coldest.
What are Cold Spots?
In my Toronto garden, these are places where the snow and ice lingers the longest. While the rest of the garden is waking up from its winter dormancy, these cold microclimates remain asleep. In the fall, these also tend to be the spots that are hit first and hardest by the killing frost. Even if you live in a climate that does not receive a hard frost or snow, you will still have spots that are cooler and warmer than others.
Leave a commentSend a Seed-filled Card That Celebrates the Arrival of Spring
January of 2011. I was not feeling the New Year vibe. I realized then that for the gardener, the New Year comes when we can once again dip our hands into the soft earth, and I made a resolution to make a big deal about spring when it arrived.
And I did. That spring, Davin and I made our own holiday cards and sent them out to friends. Each card included a packet of seeds and a piece of paper with simple instructions for growing them. I chose mesclun mix, an assortment of easy, quick-growing, cut-and-come-again leafy salad greens that are harvested early while the plants are young and tender. I felt confident that friends with a wide range of living spaces and varied gardening experience would be able to handle it.
Leave a commentGuide to Growing Lettuce and Salad Greens
Salad greens are one of the first crops that I start outdoors. It snowed today, but as soon as the soil is workable, I will be out there, seeds in hand, to get started. As with Seed Starting 101, I have created a permanent page that lists all of the best posts around the subject of growing (and eating) lettuce and salad greens. If you come back looking for it in the future, you will find it over here on the Resources page (link in the top bar).
The photo (above) depicts a winter salad mix that I grew in a big washbasin the last two years. It includes a really pretty burgundy mizuna variety called ‘Red Frills.’
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