Tricotomania and more

Yesterday, we had the first meal of broccoli and beans from our garden. This evening I looked out the kitchen window and saw something furry in that patch. Our cats were both indoors. I went to investigate.

The little varmint rushed back into his (her?) den but peered out at me from the doorway and didn’t seem bothered when I spoke to her. At that point I wished I had brought the camera because I could have got a photo. I went back in and took those shots. I waited for her to appear in the doorway but she didn’t so you will have to imagine her little nose peeking out of here:

I’m not sure what the long term solution is but for now I’ve blocked that particular door (which is less than a metre from the broccoli).

I have no doubt that there is another door to this den. It is under our shed, by the way. I suspect we’ll have to trap her and take her somewhere else. I’m not sure where, though. And I have no idea if groundhogs are tasty. Nor how to kill her if they are. They are certainly not endangered.

Well, not barley but you get my drift. More photos of the garden. The weather has been a bit odd. We had a real hot spell and now it is coolish again (well, the English folks in the house don’t think so, but I left England for a reason). Lots of rain so stuff is growing. Today you get to see the broad beans and the peas.

Nice flowers, eh? They grow all up the stalk like that. And lots of flowers means lots of beans eventually. I think the plants are still getting taller, too. And they’ve filled out enough that Blitzen doesn’t even try to sleep between them.

The peas are going a bit crazy, too. And they are flowering. Aren’t those flowers pretty? I’m not sure but the colour of the flowers makes me hopeful that these are the purple peas we acquired from the gardener at Upper Canada Village last summer. (There are real advantages to chatting to the gardeners.) He gave us permission to pick some purple peas and suggested we dry them and plant them next year. So we did.

The cucumbers and zucchini are also flowering. Mat even saw and actual zucchini the other day. I suppose I should go check that out before it gets too big. We are eating strawberries though there are lots that would appreciate a bit more sun. I also went out the annex at J’s place to weed the other day and came home with spinach, beet greens, and some spring onions. The potato plants are looking very happy.

I mentioned my honeysuckle the other day and I have finally taken some photos. Our front porch is mostly shaded by a Norway maple in the front yard. But in the late afternoon we get sun shining right on us from the west. Last year, I came up with a solution. We bought a bit of white trellis (to match the white railings) and started training the honeysuckle onto it.

  This year it is large enough to make a nice shaded corner on the porch there.

We planted that honeysuckle a few years ago. Last year we planted a clematis in the corner near the house to fill in the blank spot. It isn’t big enough yet, but it’s almost to the point where we can train it onto the railings.

Maybe later in the summer we’ll have blooms and everything. And next year, it might be really nice on the porch when the hot sun is coming from the west.

Summer arrived all of a sudden at the end of last week. It usually gets hot sooner so everyone got to go from complaining about how cool and rainy it was to complaining about how hot and humid it is. We’ve been having highs of over 30C and it is pretty sticky.

Gardening has been happening anyway (and the tomatoes are more than happy about the heat). And the new camera is being used.

It is sitting on the Salvia.

This is one of two wasp nests that were under construction on the inside of the shed door. It took me a while to work out how to get the flash on despite the sun so that the corner could be lit properly. The nests (and wasps) were destroyed after the photo was taken. (Can’t miss a bloggable moment. )

I suppose I should get a photo of the honeysuckle that is providing shade on our front porch…

We went out to help J. with her garden (which is also partly our garden) on Tuesday. One thing we did was mulch between the rows with hay. We brought a bit home to mulch the garden here.

Blitzen thinks that was a GREAT idea.

Look how content he looks.

Of course no one thought of that when the spacing for the planting was decided. He had to be moved from that particular spot as one of those broad bean plants is bent over a bit.

I had a request (from Mat’s mom) for photos of the vegetable garden so here they are for all who are interested. This year it has been quite cool (there was even frost this week out in the country) so although tomatoes and things are in the garden they are not growing very quickly. The peas, beans, and lettuces, on the other hand, are very happy.

This is most of the left hand side of the garden as you look at it from the patio under the kitchen window.

The peas are growing along that sideways trellis. You can see the rhubarb in front of them and a bit of garlic. The rest of the bed will have eggplant and carrots, I think. The carrots have been planted a couple of times but don’t seem to be germinating. There are cucumbers at the base of the obelisk which will be trained up it when it gets warm enough for them to grow more. Those two green clumps in the back corner of the bed are echinacia (which I’m probably not spelling correctly).

To the right of the other bed we have very orderly broad beans (which I think North Americans call Fava beans) with lima beans planted under the chicken wire. They seem to come up a lot later. Any green in that part now is self-seeded tomatoes that will be weeded out. In the front of the bed is a row of dill and a row of celery and then some leeks and garlic. Maybe the eggplant are going here. Hmmm.

Off to the right, and not visible in that first photo, is the bed that is first to be snow-free in the spring. So it has the salad greens in it, since they can go in before the danger of frost is past. We’ve tried a new green called Mizuna (the frilly one on the right in the aerial view) because it is early and hardy. It is also pretty tasty. You can see a couple of kinds of lettuce. There are also radishes, spinach (though not much has come up) and beets (ditto). The onions are Egyptian walking onions that a gardener at Upper Canada Village gave us a couple of years ago. They grow little onions at the top, fall over and plant themselves. We’ve been using them as green onions.

Today Mat planted out the peppers (weeding out the arugula, though he is confident more will pop up somewhere) and has started working out how to build a support system for the tomatoes. The zucchini and broccoli are under the apple tree at the back (first photo, next to the compost bin). Strawberries are starting to develop fruit. Heat would help that for sure. Herbs are all happy.

This morning Tigger pointed out some odd flowers in our garden and I thought I’d share them with you. Our approach to flower gardening is somewhat haphazard and has benefited greatly from donations and things that self-seed. While there is some planning of colours, it hasn’t been that strict. That said, there are a couple of plants that seem to have come out of the blue, so to speak.

First up this one yellow iris in a patch of purple. Apologies for the light, the weather is a bit gloomy today.

Those purple irises came from my neighbour when her daughter-in-law was splitting hers a couple of years ago. I think Mat has now split the clump at least once, too, as we have them in two places in our garden. They are all that purple colour you see in the back (with lighter centres) except this one yellow one. I notice the purple ones do have a bit of yellow on them, so this seems a logical mutation. Quite pretty.

The second is this orange lupine.

Quite a nice colour actually, but I have no idea where it came from. We have planted both pink and purple lupine in the past and each year they self-seed and we just move the seedlings from where they are growing to where we want them (including giving them away to friends). These are the more common colour lupines in our garden.

Yes, those pink ones are in front of the compost. The trellis you can just see (with a round top) is to support a clematis that should hide the bins from view during the summer. I wonder if the orange is a mutation of this pink or if there was some cross pollination between the pink and purple (both are growing quite close together in the front garden).

Someone declared a photographic emergency the other day and bought a new digital camera to replace the one out of the stone age that we’ve been using. Tigger monopolized it for a bit but I’ve managed to get my hands on it. In addition to the knitting photos in the previous post, I have a few of the front garden. Although it warmed up pretty quickly once the snow melted and the tulips and daffodils came out very fast, it then cooled a bit. We have had tulips in bloom for a good long time this year. Here are the end of mine and the first blooms on the iris.

first a photo from ground level of the bed to the right of our front path. This is not the same bed where the crocuses and snowdrops were. And that is my neighbour’s house.

I love the colour of these. It was only when I downloaded the photos that I realized that that stripe was almost purple. If you look right down the middle of them, they are yellow inside (sorry no photo of that).

  I’ve had lots of comments on these ones. They are very dark purple but look almost black. Very dramatic mixed in with those other ones. I’m pretty sure that it was serendipitous that this dark purple and the dark stripe in the others are so close in colour.

  And these are the irises. I got these from my neighbour (other side) a few years ago when her daughter-in-law was dividing them.  We have some others that are darker shades of purple (almost like that tulip) and red but they flower later.

The back garden is mostly vegetables though we do have a lovely show of alliums right now. And the lilac is in full bloom. We are eating baby lettuce, mezuna, radishes and arugula out of the garden already along with some green onions and herbs. The broad beans are up as are the peas. The strawberries are in blossom as is the apple tree. Cucumbers, tomatoes and the like have been planted out though peppers and eggplant are still in pots on the front porch. Pole beans have been planted out (started from seed indoors) and bush beans have been sown directly.

This year we have an annex at a friend’s place in the country where we’ve planted potatoes, onions, carrots, beets and other stuff that doesn’t need to be harvested daily once it is ready.

I did some weeding this evening. I filled an entire yard waste bag with dandelions. That’s a lot of dandelions from my little lawn.

KC has a great idea — photographs of plants at regular intervals throughout the season (go read her whole post there are pretty pictures). She’s doing it for her own gardening purposes (though I bet the kids are learning, too) but it would fit really well with botany studies like those Rebecca is doing. I’m thinking about studying botany with Tigger as soon as we can see some plants. I have the Elpel books on the shelf.

That might be some time. The following photos were taken on Sunday from the kitchen window. (click for bigger) That’s a bird feeder. It’s on a post, believe it or not.

I took another one later (not knowing Mat had taken that one) after the “hat” had fallen off.

You can sort of see the remains of our WWI trench (ha ha). Mat had been maintaining a path to the shed so he could get his bike out. It is now chained to the railing on the front porch.

And yes, my patio furniture never got taken in. That is the top of my parasol sticking up on the left there. The table is now completely buried. As are the chairs and the bench. Shame really because the cats can jump into the house via the window I took that picture from if they can spring off the back of the bench.