A noun. A verb. A blog.
This is one of Sarah’s tomato casualties, which I think we’ve IDed as being felled by beet curly top virus, an insect-borne malady. The leaves have curled upward and become stiff (Sarah says: like rigor mortis for tomatoes), with purple veining on the undersides. The whole plant has become stunted and curled, not older or […]
Today’s headline is the punchline to the joke: Why will Toronto gardeners never go hungry? The gas-main excavations in many Toronto neighbourhoods have been revealing. What they’ve revealed on our east-end, upper-upper-upper-upper-upper Beach street is sand, lots of deep, inert, yellow sand. This was the beach of prehistoric Lake Iroquois, making our street, which runs […]
With shade gardening, there’s a difference between plants that are shade lovers and shade tolerant. Hostas, for example, are often considered shade lovers. Some do require shade to produce their best leaf colour. Yet, most hostas are simply tolerant of shade. And here is my baby corkscrew hazel (Corylus avellana ‘Contorta’), which does best in […]
If you want to hook kids on gardening, let them plant beans. They’re one of the best veggies for the impatient gardener. A week away, and our late-sown crop has sprouted its first set of true leaves. They quickly turn a bare garden into something that looks like it’s really happening. What fun. Now we’ll […]
This pretty double soapwort (Saponaria officinalis) has been sharing my Microgarden for more than 22 years. I say “sharing” because soapworts have this wacky idea that the garden belongs to them. They have, after all, lived here longer than me. We tussle over ownership for a while, but they usually give in without much of […]
“Better lit than Neva” is the punchline of a long, involved story about Rasputin. I won’t go into that here. I’ll just say that holidays and Harry Potter had something to do with my being a day late for July’s Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. July is the time when my climbing rose Rosa ‘New Dawn’ […]
I’ll own to being lazy. It’s mostly on account of my curmudgeonly front yard. I say “English cottage garden” and it snarls back with sieve-like feet upon feet of inert yellow sand. (Thank you, Lake Iroquois.) I think “peonies” – it hands me a thirsty webwork of impenetrable Norway maple roots. And shade. Lots of […]
To all our neighbours south of the longest friendly border in the world, I wish you a happy Independence Day. Here to celebrate with me is Rosa ‘Fourth of July’, complete with broad stripes and bright stars. All you need to complete the picture is a blue sky. And, as it’s a climber, that might not […]
Getting to know many bloggers in California has introduced me to the concept of lawn controversy: the fact that there is a strong and vocal movement against having lawns altogether. One of my first posts about lawns here got a heated comment from Twitter friend and California blogger Billy Goodnick. He described it as unleashing […]
Sarah lives on one side, I live on the other. And, in the middle, are our neighbours Z. and K. Last month, Z. came to see me, all excited. You should see my orchid! It has buds! What did you do to it? Nothing! Sure enough, there were the orchid buds. Z. looked very proud […]
With the garbage strike on, and no system in place to get rid of your green waste, unless you have a backyard composter, it’s a great time to worm your way back… to vermicomposting. I experimented with this in the early 90s, but the standard bin left too much room for escaping worms. I gave […]
Have you heard of the Spuria beardless iris, a cousin of the Siberian iris? I hadn’t. And I certainly hadn’t been prepared for the Wow-ow -ow! factor of seeing one of these five-foot-plus-tall giants in a garden. It happened yesterday, when Sarah and I took an interesting detour. While looking at a new community garden […]