Time to get rid of the pumpkins

Winter has come early this year. Here are the jack-o-lanterns, even more scary now that the mould has set in, but out of place in the new snowy landscape. Snow has covered everything, and it looks like the kind that is here to stay. But white snow reflects light, and it's a lot brighter than gray rain and cloudy days.

Here's what Avery the cat thinks about the cold:

He is actually outside a lot in the winter. When the snow gets too deep, he appreciates it when we shovel off the deck so he can get some fresh air. I've also seen him jumping from one deep footprint to another to avoid being buried in the deep snow.

Life persists

It's been raining like crazy every day for a week, and we noticed that water coming off the roof was not running though the evestrough but right over the side. Today the sun shone fitfully, and I prodded my husband Wayne to check out the situation, with the promise that I wouldn't make him do anything else for the rest of the day. (A hard promise to keep!)
He climbed to the top of the ladder only to discover a weed growing out of the seam of a tubular evestrough!
After much unscrewing of sections of evestrough, he discovered the insides were packed full of dead leaves, evergreen needles, and bits of roof. It had decomposed into lovely dark compost that was fertile territory for this weed.
And of course the compost was blocking the rain from going down where it needed to go.
I felt a bit of a pang as I dug out the weed and tossed it away. Against all odds, this plant sprang from a seed that just happened to end up in a section of sealed evestroughing that separated enough to provide some light. This is a pretty inhospitable enviroment, even for a weed. Yet after this brave effort, it is still at our mercy. It's not easy being green.

Heidi and the beanstalk

While cleaning up the garden, I picked the dry pods hanging from the scarlet runner beans. These beans are just beautiful - shiny black with pink edges. I'm going to save them to plant in the spring. With beans these pretty, I'm not surprised Jack traded his cow for them.

Here is some kind of mushroom I found by my raspberry patch. I've never seen this particular kind in my garden before.
They definitely don't look good enough to eat.

Mystery birds

Every afternoon around 5:00 for the past 2 weeks, a flock of these birds has landed on a tall dead pine at the back of the garden. I have counted up to 9 at once. They are a bit smaller than a crow, grey with stripes, and I often see them rubbing their heads on branches. The most amazing thing about them is the noise they make. It's like being in a pet store. Trills, whistles, croaks - it sounds like finches and parrots and canaries all at once. I would love to know what they are - any suggestions?

Glorious Glads

I always considered gladiolas as funeral flowers - the sprays of white glads were a fixture in every funeral arrangement. But when I started growing them myself, I was fascinated. Glads have a very interesting way of reproducing. The small flat bit under the pink one is the corm I planted in the spring. The corm flattens and puts its energy into growing a new bulb on top, which sprouts and produces a lovely spray of flowers. The one in the picture is quite unusual, because it has produced a new bulb on each side, each of which will also sprout new flowers next year. Most corms produce tiny bulbils (second picture) around the roots. If these fall off and take root, they will grow to full size in a few years. Even though they are considered zone 7, glads survive in the ground over winter in my zone 6b garden. I take them out in the fall anyways, because I like to put them in a new place every year. And besides, I love seeing what they have been up to!

making room for new flowers

When I want to buy new plants (which is a big weakness of mine) I don't have room to put them anywhere. If anything, I should be weeding out plants to make my garden less messy looking, more controled. But the plants keep reproducing and I feel like a murderer when I destroy a plant. Instead, I make more beds. My newest bed started as three clumps of hosta. I had a mad impulse to make a new bed because a new peony arrived by mail order, and I had no place to put it.





Instead of weeding my present beds, I decided to start digging. After much huffing and puffing, I had a bed. Shapes aren't usually hard to design, but this time I wanted a straight back so It would be easier to mow. That left me with no ideas of how to shape the rest of it. The bed ended up looking like boot, which is pretty bad. In the end, I just expanded it to an oval 11 feet by 6. Unimaginative, but it will look good once it's full of new plants.
Next spring, it will be full of bulbs and perennials, and I will be looking for more space to grow!

The colours and critters of fall

Fall is a time when plants slowly come to a stop. The annuals are on the brink of dying, and the perennials are losing their leaves, preparing for a long winter's sleep. But before they go, they put on quite a show.
Staghorn sumac is unsurpassed for fall colour. I call it the poor man's japanese maple. It's the first tree to show its colours. As a kid, I used to press sumac leaves between the pages of a book, hoping to hang on to those sunset reds and oranges forever. Like the expensive, often winter killed Japanese maple, it's a small tree which can become artfully twisted or arched, but it's as tough as nails and free, if you dig one up from the wild or are lucky enough to have it appear on your property.






My zebra grass has been in my garden for many years, and has bloomed for the first time ever. Shining silvery seed heads move with every puff of wind.




Meanwhile, a single ladybug clings to a seed head of feather reed grass, hoping to find a spot of cosy leaf litter to spend the winter.





And a dark-eyed junco feasts on the seeds of liatris and rudbeckia. Birds don't sit still and pose like plants and bugs do, so it's much more of a challenge to get a good shot. I'll keep trying, though. It's certainly worth it.

Fabulous October

It's October, and the weather is just getting better. The days are sunny and warm, and it feels like the good times will never end. After keeping a low profile all summer, the chickadees are back. They just love the tiny ripe seeds from the many-headed sunflower that popped up unannounced in my garden this year. These birds swoop in, peck for a few seconds, and then they're gone. I've always wondered about the energy they waste with all that movement, but I suppose if they stayed put for too long, they would be an easy target for predators.






Here are the beans that just won't quit. Even though it's October, these green bush beans called Valentino are still providing a nice meal every two days. And if I had planted them further apart, I'd be getting even more.
Next year I swear I'll be the perfect gardener.

Tomato strategy

I have a bumper crop of Roma tomatos this year, but they are taking longer to ripen than they should. That's because I planted them way too close together, and they are not getting the sun and air circulation they need. I should know better, and I hope next year I will plant smarter. I always try to cram too much into my 20 x 50 foot plot. At this time of year, the beans, which were also planted too close together, are crowded right beside the tomatos. The rest of the garden is bare because it's all been harvested. Next year, I swear to forget about planting peas. They take up a lot of space for a small return (but they're so good!). I will plant things further apart so they will ripen more evenly and be easier to pick.
When I harvest my tomatoes, I pick everything with even a hint of red, and let them ripen inside on a windowsill. Why don't I let them ripen on the vine?
Check this out. My ripe tomatos have been hit by late blight, rotted on the ground, or chewed and hollowed out by slugs. Underripe tomatos redden up quickly in the warmth of the house, and it beats the alternative of leaving them to fend for themselves in the wilds of the great outdoors.

crocus in the fall

It's late September, and the crocuses are blooming! These flowers look very much like spring crocus on steroids. But they are really a different plant altogether.
Colchium, aka Fall Crocus, comes in different shades of pink, purple and white, with single and double varieties. They send up a few thin leaves in spring, which soon wither and disappear. Then in fall they send up huge flowers. One variety of colchium is crocus sativus. The yellow stamens of that plant are dried to become saffron - the world's most expensive spice.


It's a lovely surprise to see such a spring-like colour pop our with no warning. They don't last long, but they're really stunning.

Sour grapes II: What's eating Heidi's grapes?

Last year, my grapes were reduced to twigs before I had a chance to eat them. I blamed the bluejays. This year, I did everything right. I draped fine netting over the vines and tucked in the ends so the birds couldn't get close. And yet this happened:
Many of the bunches were reduced to partial skeletons. I decided to look closer, and discovered a great many grapes on the ground under the vine. It wasn't the bluejays after all - the grapes ripened and dropped by themselves. I pulled off the useless netting and picked a surprizing amount of fruit - over 4 pounds! They are safely tucked in a bag in the fridge, and I'll be enjoying them for quite a while. Sorry about playing the blame game, jays!

Garlic 101

If I do say so myself, my garlic is far bigger, juicier, and more flavourful than those palid pretenders in the grocery store. It's really easy to grow, and it's the first thing to pop up in the garden next spring.
You can choose to plant garlic in the spring or in the fall. Because it has had more time to grow, fall garlic will get much bigger. It's important to buy garlic that has been grown close to home. Most garlic we eat comes from California, Florida, or China, from climates much milder than ours. That stock will not survive our harsh winters.
The best time to plant is in September or October. First, prepare the soil. Garlic is a heavy feeder, so enrich the soil with well-aged manure or compost. Use a string suspended between two sticks to make a straight row, and with a hoe make a 3-inch deep trench on both sides of the string about 1 foot apart.

Separate the heads of garlic into individual cloves. I found that one pound of garlic yielded 28 cloves, each of which will grow into a new head. Drop the cloves into the trench about 8 inches apart, and press them into the ground root side down, pointy side up. Cover and firm the soil, and you're done! Next spring, even before the snow is all melted, your garlic will sprout. The plants grow about 2.5 feet tall, and at the beginning of July produce a twisted stalk with a seed head called a scape. These should be cut off so that the plant concentrates on making a bigger garlic head. The scapes have a mild garlic flavour, are good in salads or stir-fries, and keep a long time in a bag in the fridge.
Next August, when the leaves are almost totally dry, dig up the plants, brush off the soil, and cure them outside on newspapers. Brush off the rest of the soil, tie together, and hang in a cool place away from direct sun. Presto - beautiful garlic that will put the store-bought stuff to shame!

Yes-what you see in this picture is my garden with weeds and volunteers that have not been cleared out. That is a new columbine smack dab in the middle of the garlic rows, and it will look a bit strange next year in amongst the garlic plants. But an organic farmer I know assures me that he gets a better yield of vegetables when he does not pull out every weed, so I will follow his advice. It has nothing to do with the fact that I may have let the weeds get ahead of me this year!

Critter damage II: Sour grapes

All summer, I've been waiting with some anticipation for my grapes to ripen. This variety, called Valient, produces blueberry-sized grapes in delicious clusters. There must be 50 clusters this year, and I'm waiting patiently for October, when they will be fully ripe.

Two years ago, I was able to enjoy a bunch of my lucious grapes every day for a month. Last year the crop was even bigger. But just before they were ready to eat, I suddenly found that there was nothing left but a bunch of skeletonized twigs. Every single grape was gone. I have no proof, but I'm blaming the blue jays.
This year, the grapes are being attacked by a new enemy. This has to be racoon damage. I woke up one morning to grapes scattered all over the deck. And they aren't even ripe yet. You may not think I should begrudge a few bunches, but I'm afraid this is just a taste of what's to come. I don't want to lose out on the taste treat of the season.
Now I'm hauling out the big guns: netting. Birds and other critters are terrified of getting caught in netting. I've put netting over my compost bin and voila! no more kitchen scraps dragged from the bin to the lawn. Since draping a large piece of netting over the entire grape vine, there has been no damage, and my grapes are ripening nicely.

And there's a bonus. Tiny grape seedlings have sprouted in my vegetable garden. I'm guessing that last year's hordes of bluejays dined on my grapes and then used the garden as a toilet and left the seeds behind.

Critter damage

I had a really poor carrot crop this year. I seeded twice, because my first try yielded about three carrots. And the second got me about four. Now that it's time to harvest, to add insult to injury, I'm finding a black hole in this carrot. The culprit is the carrot rust fly, a tiny insect that can smell carrots far away. The fly lays its eggs close to the carrot, and when they hatch, the larvae take up residence inside by chewing their way in. For years, I've been following the rules: plant the crop in a new location each year, and harvest the carrots before the second week in September, when a new generation of carrot rust flies is ready to move to a carrot near you. I pulled this one September 1, and it was already too late. I'm thinking that because everything seemed to mature early this year, so did the fly.

Sick trees

For the past three years, maples in the Charlottetown area have been getting sick. By mid-August, the leaves are curled and brown and starting to fall. Looking closer, the leaves are dotted with black raised dots called Tar Spot fungus.

Tar spot won't kill the tree, but it sure makes them ugly. And there won't be the traditional amazing display of colour that only a maple can show off in the fall. This fungus thrives in warm damp conditions, and it is less likely to be killed off in cold conditions because our winters have been mild. Experts advise raking up and disposing of fallen leaves, but that is difficult because they take their time, and don't drop off all at once. They are also blown around by the wind and disappear. It also means I can't use leaves as mulch or compost them, because that fungus will still be present.
Most of the maples in the area are affected - and they all happen to be non-native Norway maples. But not 20 feet from this ugly specimen on my lawn are two maples that show no sign of the disease. These are sugar maples, a native variety, and it's great to see that some maples are resistant. And the fall colour show will happen in a smaller way this year.
Norway maples were planted everywhere because they were cheap, grew well, and were resistant to cold. But now they are all looking terrible. This is a good example of why we should be careful not to plant a monoculture. Too much of the same thing is definitely not a good thing. When we have more variety and one species is attacked by disease, it doesn't make such a big impact.

2-faced oddities

Seeds usually grow up to be like the picture on the package. But sometimes seeds a plant dropped in your garden last season offer some surprises. Sunflowers are great for this. Volunteers sprout like mad in my garden, and I don't have the heart to pull them out. And I want to see what happens. Sometimes the seed from a regular one-headed sunflower grows into a beast with many tiny heads. And sometimes this happens. These two plants have two faces on one stem. Very strange!

The hurricane that was a "hurri-can't"

"Hurri-can't" - my son Tristan's word for what happened on PEI on Saturday. We were warned days in advance that Hurricane Earl was on its way. Hour by hour, minute by minute, media updates flooded in. We were hyped up about this one. We secured flower pots, patio furniture, anything that could become a flying missile. When the storm blew in on Saturday, there was heavy wind and hard rain. Some branches broke free, but here's the extent of the damage in my back yard: a trellis with such a high centre of gravity that it falls down regularly. The roses and honeysuckle must be quite dizzy. The bush the trellis fell on is a mock orange that despite my best efforts has never bloomed in the 10 years it's been there.
I took a short walk through the back fields to the Vesey's Seeds trial gardens. The corn was flattened and the sunflowers were down, but that was the extent of the damage. I should be grateful that it wasn't worse, but sometimes we just crave a bit of excitement.

Here is a downed branch with some very interesting fungus attached. It gave me a new perspective on what could be happening just over my head.

Don't turn your back

It doesn't pay to turn your back on happenings in the garden.
I was given a lovely plant with a pink frothy flower that behaved itself in my garden for at least 5 years. But this year, I didn't keep an eye on it until - surprise - it took over most of the flowerbed, choking out nearby irises and black-eyed susans. Its roots formed a mat so dense that I can't put a shovel through it. An organic herbicide turned the leaves brown, but then new green ones popped up. Even Round-Up is not killing it.

My staghorn sumac is finally putting up it's distinctive brown horns for the first time this year. But it's also being attacked by a mysterious culprit that is turning every group of leaves white at the tips. I cut off each blasted tip as the damage appears.

Tent caterpllars moved in on my PG Hydraneas, but I countered with potato dust, and that seemed to do the trick.

If I turn my back on the pests and problems, they won't go away. Sometimes my efforts work to irradicate the problem, and sometimes I'm helpless, like with black tar spot on the maple trees. Maples all over PEI are affected, with black spots turning the leaves crispy and dropping early. I can't save the leaves for compost, because the pathogen will stick around, and we won't have the blazing colour we expect from our maples. It's a lesson in perseverence, but also in patience and acceptance.

Spiders in our midst

On Saturday, I spent about an hour sitting on the deck, reading and napping. When I finally shuffled to my feet, I felt numerous sticky invisible threads on my head, arms and legs. It felt like the scene in Gulliver’s Travels when Gulliver is tied down by the tiny Lilliputians and taken prisoner.

Spiders have taken over my corner of the world. They started out this spring as tiny spiderlings huddling together for protection. A breath of air would cause them to scatter, then come together again. But they have had all summer to grow, and now they are huge and lurking everywhere.

Today I couldn't even sit down in my chair. Spiders have taken up residence, and I'm outnumbered.



This lady is a yellow argiope or writing spider, and she made herself at home in my garden last summer. Thank goodness there was only one, because I really am faint of heart and cowardly about getting too close.

My assailants are gray-brown garden spiders, not very beautiful, but very busy making webs on anything they can find, including plants, deck chairs, and me. After laying their eggs, they die. I remember reading Charlotte’s Web to my kids, and when Charlotte’s life was over, I sobbed like a baby. My kids, unaffected by the tragedy, kept wondering what was the matter with me.

Reaching my garden's potential

Well, contrary to what Betty says, the garden doesn't always reach its full potential.
Take my carrots, for instance. For the past few years, I've been having fabulous luck with Rainbow carrots, whose colours range from dark orange, through yellow, to white. They are sweet, delicious, and usually so plentiful it takes a day to harvest, wash, and store them. Not this year. When only a very few plants emerged long after planting two packages of seed, I went back and planted two more packages in July. No better luck the second time. I spent about $15 for seeds, and I have seven carrots.
When I planted sunflowers, the same story. I painstakingly planted a row of 10 seeds at the correct depth and the correct spacing at the correct time - nothing happened. I replanted new seeds and three lonely specimens appeared.

But the sunflower shown above sprang forth without any effort on my part. I didn't plant that seed. It's a volunteer, and where the seed came from is a mystery.

The garden's potential lies not in anything I do, but what happens naturally. In spite of my best efforts, things I plant thrive or die, and the power I have to control my garden is an illusion.

A first look

I have decided to start a blog to bring together my thoughts about gardening - the plants and the creatures that live among them. My garden is just outside Charottetown, Prince Edward Island, on the east coast of Canada.

This little fellow is a potato bug. He and his brothers and sisters devastated the one volunteer potato plant in my garden, and have now invaded the sunberry patch.

Sunberry (Solanum burbankii) is part of the nightshade family, which also includes potato, tomato, pepper, and eggplant. There is very little information about it on the Internet, and so when I bought the seeds at Vesey's Seeds and started them on a window sill in March, I didn't know what I was in for. But they grew like mad. I planted them outside in June. The leaves immediately got scorched and sunburned, but soon recovered, and now the plants are 3 feet high. As new green leaves appeared, they were quickly turned to swiss cheese by the dreaded flea beetle, a tiny black jumping insect that puts hundreds of small holes through the leaves.



As delicious as sunberry seems to be to the insect world, I was really disappointed by the flavour of the huge crop of pea-sized berries it produces. And something about knowing it's from the nightshade family makes me wary. I picked about four cups of berries, and they are still in the fridge - should I try cooking them into jam to see what they will taste like, or just give up and toss the berries and the plants into the compost? I'll leave that decision for another day.