travels abroad

In July, my husband and I visited Switzerland and Italy.  Italy was much as I had expected - beautiful architecture, but bleak countryside (at least what I could see from the train.)  But Switzerland was green, mountainous, and full of beautiful plants.  Here are some pictures to prove it:

Zurich has a river running through the middle of the city, which drains into Lake Lucerne.  You can walk for miles in the shade of big plane trees.  The many churches all have clock towers.  The cobbled streets hold many beautiful fountains, with water cold and clean enough to drink. 

An edible garden in Lucerne.  Sage around the outside, swiss chard, mint,  peppers, and fennel in the middle.  These veggie gardens are every bit as pretty as flowers.

After visiting Castle Chillon, we walked 45 minutes along the shores of Lake Geneva to Montreaux.  Along the way were stuning flower beds, beautiful mansions, and mountains in the distance. 



Another view of the walking path to Montreaux.



A huge fountain in Geneva



Pollarded plane trees on the streets of Geneva.  The branches are cut to prevent the trees from reaching their full height.  In the summer when they leaf out, they form perfect balls of green leaves.  I'm sure they are not as pretty in the winter, when those monstrous knobby branches are revealed.



where the mushrooms grow

This is the Woodlands trail at Prince Edward Island National Park.  Today I intended to walk the 4-km trail briskly, to get some much-needed exercise, but I was totally distracted by the many kinds of mushrooms and other fungus along the way.  My brisk walk turned into a dawdle, but check out the beauties I found.

 Look closely under the cap to see what's eating it.

This bright yellow mushroom has a visitor - a slug is making a meal of it.

phantom webworms and a gall

Webworms - at least I think that's what they are - have invaded my poor sumacs.  The trees grew particularly well this year, even with the drought, and have produced a large number of new plants, which are growing into a thicket much more attractive than bare grass.  But the tips of each branch is disfigured by grey, curling, dead leaves bound together with webs.  I haven't seen any actual worms (caterpillars), but there are also long webby strings attached from one tree to another.

I snipped off all the affected tips, put them in a bucket, and covered them with a mix of dish soap and water. I hope that kills the little buggers.

Here is another interesting find:

I really don't know what this is - fungus, or a gall, which is a home for an insect in the process of growing into an adult. It's pale green with a rosy tinge near the base where it is attached to the sumac stem.  Kinda pretty in an otherworldly way.  I'll keep an eye on it and report back!

garden weeds

Weeds come in a remarkable variety of shapes and sizes.  But one thing is for sure.  We will never get rid of them all.  Their seeds can hide in the ground for many years, just waiting for us energetic gardeners to turn the soil and expose them to light so that they can germinate.  Many send out runners above ground (hawkweed) or below ground (sheep sorrel - the worst weed offender in my garden).  Others have roots so deep and persistant that they will produce a new plant from a tiny bit remaining in the ground.
Here are some of the weeds I deal with:

This is everybody's favourite - dandelion.  The plant itself lives for many years, and produces hundreds of seeds every year.  It blooms in spring, slows down in the summer, and then blooms and produces another crop of seeds in the fall.  It's best to pull this guy after a rain, when the ground is soft enough to get the whole long root.  Any root pieces left in the ground will produce a new plant, and a new headache for us.

This type of grass forms a clump which has courser, lighter-coloured leaves which stick out like a sore thumb.  The only remedy is to dig out the whole clump and re-seed with lawn seed.

Hawkweed makes up a huge percentage of my lawn.  It puts out runners which creep across the vegetable  garden and flower beds.  The yellow flowers and the seed heads look very much like dandelions.

Lamb's quarters, often afflicted by leaf miners, have more vitamin C and other nutrients than many of the vegetables we grow on purpose.

Another distiction - when is it a weed and when is it a wildflower?  This is jewelweed, which produces lovely orange spotted flowers that hummingbirds love.

Queen Anne's Lace, a wild relative of the carrot, brightens up a drainage pipe.  This plant is always alive with insects taking nectar from the flowers.  I always spare a few to pretty up a bare spot.

volunteers in the garden

Is it a volunteer or is it a weed?  When it's a plant in the wrong place, there is a fine line between the two. 
 A volunteer is a garden plant that has spread by seed or underground runner and has popped up in an unexpected place.  A weed is just that - unwanted and unloved.  With volunteers, I hesitate before I pull them out, because their effect can be unexpectedley lovely.

I never could have purposely planted this apple mint between the cracks of this retaining wall and had it flourish.  But that's exactly what it did on it's own.

This pumpkin is a volunteer that sprang from a seed from a volunteer pumpkin that appeared in my garden last year. Welcome back!

When putting together my containers, I ran out of purchased soil, and topped off this container with soil from the garden.  Out popped a tomato seed that had waited all winter in the cold ground. 



I planted one sumac a few years ago.  Now they are popping up all over the lawn.  I hope to have a mini forest soon.  They are easy to snip off if they become too many to be a good thing.





Volunteers are not always a good thing.  This is a sunberry seedling, full of flea beetle holes, but thriving.  Three years ago, I started sunberries indoors from seed, carefully planted them outside, and was rewarded with a bountiful harvest of black berries that tasted awful.  And I have been pulling out seedlings ever since.  





  



The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago

The next best time to plant a tree is today!  One of my norway maples died, and after wrestling with a hand saw to cut it down, I figured it was a perfect time to plant something a whole lot more fun and interesting.  Buying a tree in August means there is not a lot of selection left.  But I was happily surprized to find a bunch of Sunburst Thornless Honeylocust (Gleditsia triacanthos var. inermis 'Suncole').  These trees are quite graceful, and their branches droom artfully.  
Being August, the trees were not in the best shape, and with much hemming and hawing, I picked the least damaged specimine.  We stuffed the pot between the front seats, and the top branches hung out the back of the car.  Covered in plastic to reduce wear and tear, we got it home. 
Water well while still in the pot, so that the water leaks out the bottom.  Cut off any bushy growth at the base of the tree or anywhere you don't want a branch to form.  
Picking a location for a new tree isn't easy, because you know it will be something to look at for many years to come.  I picked a spot beside the stump of the old tree.  I marked out a circle about 3 feet in diameter, stripped off the soil, and started to dig.  With so little rain this year, the soil was like concrete.  The digging was a slow process.   
The hole should be as deep as the pot, and at least twice as wide.  Set the tree in the hole and lay a shovel across to determine if the depth is level with the base of the tree.  Then loosen the soil in the bottom of the hole, fill it half full of water, and let it drain.  Gently pop the roots out of the pot (this might take some doing), tuck the tree into the hole, and if it was pot bound, loosen the roots.  Set the tree so its best side is facing the way it will be seen.  Water the hole again, put half the soil back in the hole, tamp it down, water again, and add more soil.  Don't amend the soil with good stuff, because the roots will not want to travel away from the rich soil, and the tree won't become well established. 
Top off the planting with mulch to keep the soil moist.  Support the tree for the first year.  After I got it planted, I noticed that I missed trimming a dead branch.  Now that it's in the ground, it's too high to reach.  Since it has been so dry here, I make sure to give the tree a gallon of water every day.  It looks pretty scraggly, but I'm pleased with the result.

goodyby garden

Tomorrow Wayne and I are leaving for Europe.  18 days in Switzerland and Italy.  I'm full of excitement, anxiety and dread about the trip, but that's the way I always feel before a big event.
I said goodby to my own garden today, deadheaded the spent flower heads, crushing a few scarlet lily beetles, and picking the last wild strawberries.  I will miss most of the day lilies in bloom, as well as the few lilies I missed pulling out. 
I got to enjoy the first Japanese iris.  The rest will bloom and fade without me.

I brought this rose bush with me from Chesterville Ontario when we moved to PEI 17 years ago.  And every year it has rewarded me with fabulous blooms from July until frost.

This malva is about six feet tall and full of flowers.

I hope to take pictures of some Swiss and Italian gardens, and post them when I get back.

the wild world of strawberries

Wild strawberries are considered by some to be a weed.  Their runners snake through flower beds and the grass, and they give the lawn an uneven look.  But if you are patient and just leave them be, you will be rewarded with a tiny treat.  The most lucious, flavourful bite of heaven, nothing like those hard, bred to travel the continent commercial berries.

On the left is a normal size strawberry, and on the right is the biggest wild berry I have ever seen - about the size of a big blueberry. 
I have a special stash of a wild patch in the hedgerow behind my house.  The berries are there for the picking, but for the mosquitos, who I swear defend the patch furiously by swarming and stinging any exposed flesh.  And there's another enemy - slugs.  This guy is just one of a legion of slugs which eats a hole in the berry and then hollows it out.  I grab a berry that looks ok, only to find it collapses in my hand.

After posing for the picture, this guy was dispatched with a shake of salt.

free mulch

Most people who would encounter a beautiful view like this would be thinking sublime thoughts of the beauty and serenity of nature.  Being a gardener, I immediately thought:  free mulch.  This is Lord Selkirk Provincial Park in eastern Prince Edward Island.  It is a very shallow bay.  At high tide, huge amounts of eel grass, a finely-cut seaweed, is washed ashore.  At low tide, it's free for the picking. 
Eel grass is ideal for mulch.  Compared to purchased mulch like shredded bark or wood chips, it decomposes much more slowly, and it adds nutrients to the soil while wood chips rob the soil of nitrogen as it decomposes.  And did I mention it was free? 
I actually did stop to appreciate the fresh air, the blue sky, the red cliffs, and the blue herons chasing fish in the shallows.  And then I snagged 6 bags of eel grass and headed home.



two weeks early

The weather here on PEI has not exactly been balmy - 18 C is a warm day.  But I was surprised to notice that the plants in my garden are moving along more quickly than usual.  Everything is about two weeks early.

This is something I didn't expect to see until the second week of July.  The garlic leaves are browning, and scapes (seed heads) are twisting everwhere.  It's important to cut off the scapes as soon as they appear.  If you don't, the garlic bulbs will be much smaller, because the energy of the plant has gone into making seeds, not making food for itself.  That's the beauty of reproduction - parents sacrificing themselves for the sake of their offspring!

ivy revitalized

This is my English ivy monster.  The vines travel half-way across the room, and some have even developed suckers that stick to the wall as they make their way up to the ceiling.  It has been about 3 years since I repotted it.  Some of the leaves are developing a reddish tinge, and they are certainly becoming smaller.  A sign of nutrient deficiency.  The pot is so crowded that with every watering, it overflows and makes a mess.

The ivy has made its way right through the roof of this little weather house, and continued on for 10 feet to curl around the window.
Something had to be done.  I couldn't move the plant to repot it, so radical surgery was required.  I thought about making a few cuttings to start a new plant, but I haven't always had luck with that approach.  And I felt sorry for the main plant, which is only doing its job by growing so well.  So I cut off a huge ball of vines.  Cutting should be just below a leaf node, which will encourage branching.

I was left with a much shorter plant that I could actually carry outside, where with great difficulty I pried it out of the pot, loosened the roots, and tucked it into a bigger pot with fresh soil.  Unfortunately, I ran out of soil before the job was done, so the final picture will have to wait.
One job leads into the next.  Once the plant was gone, the shelf was revealed in all its dusty glory, with spilled soil mixing with dust and dead flies.  I spent an hour taking down and washing knick-knacks and shelves and vacuuming fallen leaves.