A noun. A verb. A blog.
How can one describe the taste of a fresh, fresh beet? Sweet, with something of the earth about it. Beets from a store can’t approach this flavour. Typically, the time from field to market gives them the leisure to transform their sugars into starch. If you don’t grow your own beets, the city has an […]
The fleeting beauty of certain flowers might be what makes a song of love such a sad song*. Now it’s the turn for the Oriental and turk’s cap lilies. Wish I could send you the fragrance of the former. These pure whites, airbrushed with pink as they age, are sweet without being funereal. The texture […]
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 […]
So-called-summer 2009 has been the summer of love for lily leaf beetles. Since I wrote about them on June 1st, they’ve been arriving by the thousands, camping out and making music. And they’re hungry. Turn your back for an instant and you’re growing poles, not lilies. The whole stem is defoliated, leaving the bulb nothing […]
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 […]
Part of the joy of travelling is the novelty of new experiences. Some are ephemeral, like the beauty of this particular sunset over Lake Huron in Pinery Provincial Park. In Toronto, not many places give you sky and water unmarked by human intervention, so this was a thrill. Also at Pinery is this shot of […]
Shakespeare has been the attraction for my past visits to Stratford, Ontario. Sure, I’ve long been a fan of the swan-dotted park along the Avon River. Yet, I’d never thought of the town as a place to go just to see gardens. What a pleasant surprise. Between Brian Bedford’s not-to-be-missed Lady Bracknell in The Importance […]
On Wednesday, Sarah and I were thrilled to enjoy a Tweetup in the Ancaster garden of Country Gardener blogger and garden author Yvonne Cunnington, joined by Hamilton Tweeter Tricia of @ycswid. It was just a few days after Yvonne hosted a garden tour, so every inch was pristine. However, my sense is that “pristine” is […]
I had a chance/excuse to go to Dyer’s Bay in the Bruce Peninsula to visit a garden Mecca: Larkwhistle Garden. As I was dropping my son at a friend’s cottage in Georgian Bay anyway, I thought, Dyer’s Bay is only a 3 hour drive from the cottage — it was a temptation I couldn’t resist! […]