The Wrath of Spring?!?

These last few days have been very depressing weather wise. We have had rain/ snow mix for 3 days in a row! The temperatures have been hovering around zero at night and only managing to climb to +5c or so during the day. Feels like early April, not the end of May!!! 
The worst of it is, a person feels helpless to do a darn thing about it!  (Except maybe take a trip to southern Ontario where they are basking in +30 C weather!  Nothing like rubbing our noses in it!)

Unfortunately when the weather was +20C a few days ago, I was lulled into a false sense of security by a very temperamental Mother (Nature) and I planted out the 6 tomatoes, 3 spaghetti squashes which I started from seed. And remember the canna lilies and 3 huge dahlias that I started in March?... yes, I planted those in the flower beds, too. Lets not forget the cosmos, the pink Gauras, the marigolds, and snapdragons, and even 2 delicate beautiful red tuberous begonias. 


Did I mention the 5  big green wooden tubs in the yard, or the 2 flower boxes which I had planted full of enticing annuals already?  (dark blue petunias, white Diamond Frost euphorbia, regal geraniums, sapphire blue regatta lobelia, white osteospermum daisies, deep blue giant pansies, Orbit Pink geraniums, lime green lysemachia (creeping jenny)... and the list goes on! 


And how can I forget the 2 big deck pots which I planted lovingly with Samba red geraniums in one and mango colored osteospermum daisies in the other.... At least those I can drag up close to the house under the roof of the covered deck to keep them from the wrath of Spring!

The purple 'ghost' in the garden is protecting some of my more delicate plants...




To try and foil Mother Nature's nasty mood, we have been going out every evening for 6 days now and covering up as much as we can with the old sheets and towels that we have on hand for that purpose, (being wise to Mother Nature's temperamental 'nature", pun intended!).  ( I draw the line at raiding my linen closet, though! LOL!)


On a more positive note,  the Hyer apple tree is trying to bloom, and the white blossoms usually look wonderful!    But I'm afraid that those blossoms may have fallen victim to the spring fiasco this poor excuse for weather, sadly...  The crab apple blossoms are presently still in bloom, although they may just be frozen onto the branches! At this point it's hard to tell!  Which means, we may have a very meager crop of Hyer apples and crabapples this fall....

Funny how things have the tendency to come back and haunt you... (I was going to say, "bite you in the ass" but this is a public forum after all....   :)   
We have had such a bumper crop of apples and crabs in the past  that we had far more than we knew what to do with. Dare I say, I got tired of making crab apple jelly... We even bought a juicer and made apple juice! I peeled and chopped apples, made pies and froze some apples for future baking. My husband cooperated by making a batch of white apple wine which tasted delicious!


There were so many apples on the little Hyer tree that many would fall to the ground every day. I didn't want to leave them there because they attract the porcupines that live "next door"  in the ravine, so each day I would crawl around under the tree, scooping up the fallen apples and loading them into my trusty laundry basket to carry down to the compost at the far end of the yard. Needless to say, I was getting a little tired of apples. 

Now this year NONE of this may even be an issue at all!  Time will tell...  

The lilacs were looking lovely as well, but they are pathetically drooping their little clusters now, heavy with the wet slush weighing them down.  


Generally this has been my favorite time of year, but not this year! I'm afraid to plant any more of my bedding plants right now and they are left sitting frigidly, huddled together on the plastic trays next to the front door awaiting their fate.


The dandelions are still blooming, of course and doing great in spite of all my efforts to dig them up! But I don't want to talk about that...

Trying to stay positive...  Environment Canada says that this ugly streak should smarten up by Wednesday or Thursday ... or Friday... or maybe Saturday... or maybe by July?

Have had lots of opportunity this weekend to quilt, to read, to catch up on housework, to blog...

Tempting Fate

Woke up to a sunny morning this long weekend Monday. No rain, no clouds, only +1C temperature at 8:30 AM, but it looked promising. The temperature rose steadily as the sun continued to shine so by 11 AM, I had made up my mind... I'm planting some of these bedding plants today, one way or another.  I hope I won't regret this decision tonight!

Parrot tulips

I spent the better part of the day planting regal geraniums, white euphorbia ( Diamond frost), blue petunias, white osteospermum daisies and vinca vines in 3 of the 4 large green tubs in the yard.  Also tackled the 2 flower boxes and filled them with pink geraniums, dark blue pansies and light green lysamachia (creeping jenny.)  Worked on two of the deck pots as well, Then I planted the pink Gaura out in the stack stone flower beds. All in all, quite a nice day's work.

Then 2 days later I planted out the 5 tomatoes plants that we had been babying along on the deck as well as the 3 spaghetti squash plants that I had grown from seed.
I put a couple of floating begonia pond plants out on the pond and checked the goldfish. Then I watered the flower beds and proceeded to dig out another basketful of dandelions.

Garden helpers- Phoenix and Spirit

After that I cleaned out the flower bed next to the house... dug out grass and weeds and dug back the edge of the lawn a little. Then I planted 2 red nonstop tuberous begonias in that bed in front of the clematises.
My clematises both came up, growing strong and long green shoots up from the roots. (One is a General Sikorska with dark blue flowers and one a Jackmanii which gets dark purple blossoms.) Time to trim off the old dead last year's growth now.  I haven't had a lot of experience with Clematises yet. Have only had clematises for 3 years now, but I really like them! They bloom the most gorgeous flowers for many weeks and even in the fall they have attractive curly seed pods on them.

I have found, though, that it is best to leave the old growth over winter because sometimes in the spring the new growth will start from the old growth part way up the old vines.... If you twist the old stems and they are dry and brittle and brek off, those are parts you can cut away. If the stem doesn't break then that part might still be living so I would leave it fora week or two longer to see.
This year the stems didn't do that though. They all seem to be dead. Maybe it depends on how hard of a winter they get.

I checked my peonies and the one close to the pond has numerous long shoots which seem to promise a good number of flowers this year! Three fat buds that are evident and possibly more. That's two more than it had last year! Not sure why it only had one flower. I read recently that peonies need to have that cold winter weather in order to do their best in the spring and not to mulch them. I did the opposite 2 winters ago and instead of helping the plant to thrive, it hardly bloomed at all. Then to make matters worse, the deer ate the one and only blossom on that whole entire peony!
Two of the other peonies in the wild bed at the far end of the yard have shoots, too. The other two don't show much sign of life yet... But I'm not feeling daunted. They both were very slow in sprouting in the past and just about the time I was ready to give up on them, the little shoots cut through the ground.

I still need to dig out some grass from the lower level of my rock garden and some of the huge clumps of shasta daisies which have self seeded there... I really hate to dig up a perfectly healthy thriving plant, but they are just taking over!  They have long 10 inch flower stems with fat buds on the ends...

I want to plant calendulas there this year along with the Swan River daisies, (also known as Ice Flowers).

Photos to follow! :)

A Deer Fence

A deer fence ...  we're hoping that that's not an oxymoron....

Planting rows of delectable green edible vegetables out in the yard is asking for trouble around here, I know. There are 3 acres of environment reserve right around our acreage where the deer roam freely.
One can see the path that the deer have made from the ravine next to our acreage right past the garden plot.  Each spring it's only a matter of time before they discover the greenery there, like their own private salad bar waiting for the taking! LOL!

Of course it doesn't help that in the winter I put sunflower seeds out in a pan below the bird feeder for the deer to find. It all started one evening when we looked out the big bay windows in the kitchen to see the deer sneaking into the back yard by the bird feeder. The bravest one came close and gazed longingly at the bird feeder  high above their heads, which I had just filled with oiled sunflower seeds that day. The deer contented themselves with scrounging in the snow for the fallen seeds that the messy, fussy blue jays had thrown out of the feeder in their search for the perfect seeds.

There were usually only 2 or 3 at a time, but one day we counted 10 deer here... only got a photo of 6 at once, but we were amazed!

What to do to keep them at bay in the summer months? One way is to grow things they don't like.
What kind of vegetables don't they like to eat?  Rhubarb is one. There is a huge rhubarb plant out in the yard within striking distance, but it always gets ignored, so that's a safe bet to plant.

What else? They stay away from anything with fuzzy or sharp leaves, so squashes might fall into that category.  Deer are suspicious of anything with odd looking leaves so red leaf lettuce might work, too. But if your heart's desire is to plant green lettuce, beets or carrots, broccoli or cauliflower, they all start out as tender irresistible young  green plants that deer love to nibble on!

The first year we tried to plant a vegetable garden, the broccoli plants which I had chosen, purchased and so lovingly put into the ground, lasted 3 days before the deer found them. Deer don't like smelly plants either, so I thought I would try planting a geranium plant or a marigold next to each broccoli and so I bought more broccoli plantlets and tried again. Three days later, same result...

The deer are smart. They didn't eat very many plants whole, they just slowly nibbled them down to nothing taking days to do so, that way stretching out the 'salad bar' pleasure.

I tried the Irish Spring soap in a nylon dangling beside the tender enticing greenery and it worked for a little while, but then a storm knocked over the stick with the soap and we were back to square one with munched plants.

About that time my tiny new carrots starting disappearing. They just vanished without a trace from one day to the next. Just like that Bugs Bunny cartoon where Bugs is underground and pulls the carrots down from the garden above to eat. It reminded me of that....

Turns out I wasn't far off. Now, not only did we have deer decimating the garden, we had moles, better known as Pocket Gophers. They are long black rodents who spend their time digging tunnels under the yard and in my garden beds only to dig a big exit hole with the resulting mound of dirt usually right next to my flowers, completely burying some of them!

We tried pocket gopher traps, but the gophers outsmarted us 4 times out of 5. Every fifth time or so we did find a dead one in the trap. Phoenix, our big orange and white cat had a better track record than we did. He catches them with great regularity and puts them to good use, too, not wasting any parts nor leaving much of a trace behind.

The odd time, when Phoenix has had more than enough to eat already, he brings them to the front door and lays them down on the mat as gifts to be tripped over by  hasty humans the next morning, as we exit the door.  After a few surprises, we have learned to step out the door onto the door mat with a certain amount of vigilence each morning ...

One other thing to try in regards to the pocket gophers is to plant castor bean plants in the flower beds.  They grow huge dark brownish green leaves and take up quite a bit of room, but apparently their roots are poisonous (as well as the leaves) and the gophers will move their tunnels out of the flower beds to avoid them or so the theory goes.

Back to the deer...
For 2 years we solved our vegetable stealing deer problem with a bright orange 5 1/2 foot snow fence which we strung around the veggie garden in the spring after planting and took down in the fall after we had gleaned all we wanted out of the plot. But Mother nature has a sense of humor and she would, from time to time, after a stormy night, leave a low spot in the fence for the deer to discover. Not only that, but the plastic was fairly wide and it kept out the much desired sunlight to a certain degree.

Now we get to the good part... We built a permanent 6 foot wire fence around the vegetable garden this week, which will let the rain and the sunshine in, but keep the deer and rabbits out. (Did I mention we had rabbits, too? Yup we have those critters roaming around here, too, much to the dogs delight, as well as a marmot pair and some overly friendly porcupines. Never a dull moment! LOL!
So once we get the gate built,  we'll see how well this works....

Moody Mother Nature

Mother Nature has been very unpredictable and cantankerous this spring to put it mildly. At the beginning of the week the weather was glorious and sunny, although very hot and dry for May. The temperature here at the lake was 21C one day, then 24C the next, then it rose to 27C the following day and finally 33C for 2 days after that!
OMG!  Does this portray shades of things to come? Are we in for a hot dry summer, I thought.

New batches of mosquitos were buzzing around, making their unpleasant presence known and generally making life miserable, (unless you were a Tree Swallow in which case they made a delicious feast!) These mosquitos are a bit smaller than the usual ones but they are more brazen and hardy, it seems. They will come out even in the hot sun at noon to attack and wreak havoc! Their bites swell up and are itchy for days thereafter. Thank goodness for products like SSSting Stop! It certainly made my life more bearable under the circumstances.

Then the clouds rolled in and the wind whipped up and the weather turned ugly overnight. The rainstorm began in earnest with the wind driving the rain almost horizontal against the house! The temperature dropped to zero overnight.   Unfortunately I had planted out my 3 dahlias and 2 canna lilies, which I had started from tubers in late March, in my flower beds a few days previous...
My poor plants, I thought! So I went outside, braving the ugly wind and rain, to cover them and my 3 little cosmos plants up with sheets and old towels to protect them.  One of the dahlias still got a touch of frost at the top that night though right through the towel!

My husband I carried the trays of bedding plants (which were sitting on the picnic table and on the deck waiting to be planted) up against the house under the deck roof and some of the more delicate ones went right into the house. Now it looks like a mini garden inside the front door with a 'hodgepodge' of lacey tomato plants, squat spaghetti squashes, regal geraniums, blue convolvulous vines and yellow blossomed green lysemachia.

I'm itching to get these plants all planted out in their designated spots and have done so many times over in my mind already....  I'm looking forward to it with great anticipation! Maybe tomorrow...

In the meantime, I have been attacking the dandelions again, not that you would notice a huge decrease as your eyes scan the yard. If fact, can it be possible that there are even more dandelions daring to bloom today than there were before I even started digging them up???  Must be an optical illusion of some kind, I tell myself consolingly....

The Never Ending Story ( or Dandelion Wars)

For the last few mornings I was just warming up to the dandelion battle and walked around the yard picking the cheery little yellow flowers that dared to sprout. Not much of an offensive, I admit, but I thought at least those little yellow heads wouldn't be turning to seeds and floating around creating more. 

This morning I waged a full scale dandelion offensive! We had a bit of rain last night and after some moisture is always a good time to dig out dandelions.  I don't like to use chemicals on our lawn here for a number of reasons... because of the 3 acres of environmental preserve around our acreage, out of courtesy and for safety to the birds and bees, and also the danger of it leeching into the pond (and I have enough pond problems already; see Pond post).




I have a handy Fiskar weed digger which works pretty well if you have good aim and can line it up exactly with the centre of the offending dandelion. Otherwise it takes several tries and you end up with 3 or 4 holes on the lawn and the dandelion is still mostly intact.  So I find the best way is the old fashioned offensive, a sharp narrow garden trowel and a steady hand and some muscle. 


This works well and I was feeling pretty successful, filling my large gardening basket (an old laundry basket) almost full with the little pests, until I looked up and realized the extent of the job ahead! How many hours was going to devote to this? Okay time to scale back a little.... I concentrated on digging out the largest ones and plucking the yellow heads off the tinier ones to speed up the process. Of course that leaves the inobtrusive ones there to fight again another day, I know... 


Isn't there a bird out there I could entice to our yard to come and eat the dandelions or something?  I did read some place that the pretty little gold finches like to eat dandelion seeds, but I really would prefer that the little yellow heads don't get to that stage, or realistically, not too many of them anyway. 


There must be some natural product that can safely be sprayed ( or dumped) on the little green lacy leaved clusters... maybe something as innocuous as vinegar....
 (Vinegar seems to be good for so many things besides salad dressing: cleaning the water scale off my fish aquariums, cleaning windows, killing slugs in the garden, eliminating ants, body odor in your armpits .... Seriously! I read that on the internet!) 


I know vinegar is supposed to be good for killing the grass in between flagstones and cement sidewalks, but in this case I want to preserve the grass and just magically vanquish the dandelions, if possible. 


On the other had, as I look out over the stretch of lawn it seems that the majority of the green color comes from the dandelion plants since the lawn itself seems pretty sparse. Is the lawn so sparse because the dandelions are taking over or are the dandelions being allowed to encroach because the lawn is so sparse?  The old "catch 22", cause and effect ...


As my mind is perusing all the permutations of that question, I started to notice a stinging in the palm of my hand. 
"Drat! Those pesky mosquitos have infiltrated my gloves!" I thought.  (I fought and valiantly lost the mosquito battle yesterday... another story.  Thank goodness for the salvation of 'SSSting Stop'!)


I took off my right glove only to see that I had a blister on the palm of my hand, a popped blister at that! I guess in the heat and sweat of the battle I didn't notice how my hands were sweating. I was wearing a pair of those gardening gloves that have fabric on the tops and a rubbery material on the palms and undersides of the fingers. I guess my leather gloves would have been a better choice under the circumstances...


So the dandelions drew blood so to speak. I guess they won a huge point today, especially as I looked over at the edge of the driveway at all the mocking little yellow heads still grinning at me, which were all going to be safe from me that day. I looked down into my laundry basket at all their fallen comrades and felt I had made a certain amount of  progress in the ongoing battle, so I raised my trowel in victory! 


"I'll be back!" I shouted viciously, as I picked up the basket and triumphantly made off with their brothers!

Digging and Digging Creates Muscles, Right?

More digging of the flower beds this week....

I have 12 flower beds in all, 4 huge, 3 medium sized and 5 tiny ones... One of the huge beds at the end of the yard I allow to grow wild. Mother Nature mostly cares for it, although I did plant a few things there to improve the variety, another peony, 2 bleeding hearts, a globe flower, 2 hostas and some lupins; and I do chop off the perennials in the fall, but leave a lot of dead material to hopefully turn to mulch and eventually improve the soil... or that is the theory, anyway!

There was soooo much grass and 3 foot/ meter long grass roots everywhere in the rest of the flower beds, mainly originating from the huge overgrown clumps of perennials in the middle, (maltese crosses , shasta daisies delphiniums, ) also a big current bush, and a potentilla shrub in the middle of one of the beds.

I decided the only way to deal with the problem head on was to dig up all the perennials, pull out the grass roots, and thin out the clumps of growth. With my husband's help we dug out 14 clumps of maltese cross from the large bed in the middle of the yard and put back 9 of them with spaces in between ( and a whole lot less grass!)

The other clumps of maltese cross plus a half dozen shasta daisy clumps are up for grabs! Guess I'll make up a sign for the post office bulletin board like in years past to see if I get any takers.




The lawn itself was also encroaching on the same bed and the grass was creeping in around, through and under the rocks on the perimeter. We rolled back all the rocks from around the edge and my energetic husband dug a 10 inch trench around the bed. He then cut pieces of boards and filled the trench with them. After that we cut 24 inch widths of black plastic and laid it in the trench with the sides extending into the flower bed and out onto the lawn for a few inches. Then we placed the rocks one by one back around the flower bed on top of the black plastic.

 After that I filled the flower bed back in with soil from the pile beside the shed and with some "Sunshine Mix" from a local gardening place, shovelful by shovelful.  (Who needs to go to the gym when you can get a free work out in your own back yard!?? LOL! )
Then I shoveled poplar mulch from the remainder of the huge 900 pound bag of same (which we had bought 2 summers ago) around the rocks onto the black plastic to hide it. Now there's a circle of mulch, a circle of rocks and then another circle of mulch around the entire bed with black plastic underneath to hopefully deter the grass.

We have tried black landscaping cloth in previous years, but it only really worked well the first year. After that it gave the grass roots a handy foothold to speed up their descent into the garden beds!

Did I mention that I did the same thing to my little step stone and moss pathway between the beds?  I removed the stones and dug out all the grass and weeds trying to grow there.  We cut a large piece of plastic the size of the path, cut holes where the Irish moss was growing and laid it down on the pathway. Then I placed all the step stones back on the black plastic and shoveled mulch in between the moss and stones on top of the plastic. (see  photo.)

The bad news is that I  still have one more similar step stone walkway that needs the same attention....

I had gone to a meeting of the Buffalo Lake Naturalists last month and the guest speakers were from the Ellis Bird farm near here. The woman who looks after their entire gardens showed a power point presentation of how they 'built' their beds and that is how they solved some of their grass problems. Apparently the black plastic will kill all vegetation underneath it in about a year.  Maybe it will kill the grass and dandelions trying to encroach on my flower bed! Or maybe it will just serve as a slippery slide for all the earthworms and insects in the early morning while we are still in our beds sleeping and not able to witness the fun they are having!
Or just a slippery spot to step on when exiting the flower bed after vigorous weeding! ( I may regret this...)

Pond Algae Problems and other Fish Issues

I enjoy having a pond with goldfish and the birds love to have a spot to drink and bathe. Right now the water is crystal clear, but keeping the pond clear is a huge problem.

Once the hot weather hits, we have problems keeping the algae down. We do have a filter system, which circulates the water and also shoots some out in a spray at the centre of the pond which helps with aeration. But it sure seemed to fall down on the job last year! We had such a problem with black algae growth that we had to drain the pond partially and refill it with fresh water several times. Sometimes it helps to put a bag of barley straw near your water flow.  Plants in the pond are supposed to help replenish the oxygen in the water as well, since algae uses up a lot of the oxygen supply if it's present.

Last year we had a very hot summer and the algae bloom was extreme. Little did we know exactly HOW extreme until we came home after being away for a few days and found all of our large goldfish dead and floating on top of the water! The water was the color of coffee! We saw one small white fish come to the surface gasping for air and then disappear again!  We quickly found the net and scooped him out along with one other goldfish that still seemed to have a bit of life to it. That one didn't make it, so we lost a total of 15 large goldfish that day. Some we had had for a number of years already. They were between 5 and 10 inches long and they had had babies many times.  The lone survivor, strangely enough, was the runt of all the other fish.... 

It was very heartbreaking to say the least. I felt very negligent and felt responsible for their deaths.  We went through the whole process of draining the water out and cleaning the algae off the sides of the liner as well as we could. We filled the pond back up again, mainly because the birds use the pond for drinking water (and to bathe). We put the lone 4 inch survivor back in the pond by itself and after a few days I felt sorry for it and decided to buy a few buddies to keep it company.

I went into town looking for goldfish. I thought a few others the same size would be nice. Who knew that 4 to 5 inch goldfish cost $10 each! I was flabbergasted! What??? Are you kidding???

Now I felt even worse knowing we had lost $150 worth of goldfish!

And to add insult to injury, I felt somehow cheated that I should have to spend a lot of money to get replacements because each September when my goldfish had had babies, I would give them away FREE! I just put up an ad on the bulletin board at the post office in town each September and people would come out here for free goldfish!  

"Where's the justice?!" I thought.  Whatever happened to "We reap what we sow" and "What goes around, comes around" all of which I firmly believed. Well that certainly shook that theory!

So, no, I did NOT buy any $10 goldfish. I settled for three 4 inch goldfish the following week for $5 each and then 5 small feeder fish for about 60 cents each.  Two of the tiny ones didn't make it till the end of the fall but we had 7 healthy fish to over winter ... not our usual 20-something, but then I only had one aquarium going with one filter to clean instead of the usual 2 or 3.

If you have a heated garage you can put your goldfish in a large plastic garbage can or a rubbermaid container and over winter them that way. But I like to see my fish and to notice changes. Did you know that goldfish change color!???

The tiny babies all start out a grey color and as they mature, parts of them start to turn orange slowly. It is funny to watch, as one may have a dark grey fin or and orange 'moustache' for a while and then one day it's gone. Eventually they turn a solid gold color. But after turning gold, some fish then turn white after that and I don't know why. I could not find any information on the internet about that.

The 'survivor' goldfish was white. All the new fish were gold except for 2 that were still in the grey stages. The biggest orange fish one day, started turning white. I have no idea why... Now I can't tell it apart from the original white one anymore!

We recently discovered 2 things...
First we realized that the ultraviolet bulb casing inside our pond filter system was cracked and likely was interfering with the bulb doing its job of 'zapping' the algae. We tried to get a new part for it but have been unsuccessful....  more likely will have to get a new filter system altogether.

I recently discovered a product called "ponder" which is supposed to deal with the pond sludge and clear up the pond water in a natural way without harming the fish, plant life or natural environment. I put some in the pond today so I hope it works and doesn't cause a problem for the birds either. When I first added it it made the water darker! Horrors! I reread the container and it says it will take a few days to work... Will have to monitor this situation closely since right now the water looks like weak tea! 

I have an excellent book called Alberta Naturescaping written by Myrna Pearlman, the naturalist at the Ellis Bird farm.  It has a section on ponds and it mentions putting an air bubbler in the pond to add oxygen which algae may deplete. It also says that the surface of your pond should be 50 to 60% covered with floating plants which provide extra oxygen and also shade the pond from the hot sun thus cutting down on algae growth, not to mention giving the fish some places to hide.  Guess I will have to try and get some floating plants and see if that makes a difference....

Sigh! I completely understand why some people give up on their ponds and fill the darn things in!
(That would make a great spot for a new flower bed!!! )
Just kidding!   LOL!  :)

Goldfish Pond

Having a pond is something I always wanted. It is very satisfying to see flashes of gold as the fish swim by under the water and quite comical to see the little chickadees, sparrows and finches drinking and bathing at the edges of the pond. Even the cat will go there and help herself to a drink of water instead of making the trek across the yard up to the deck to the water bowl there.

What I didn't realized was how much work looking after a pond can be.

Today I cleaned the winter debris / dried leaves out of the tops of the pond plant pots which we took out and left all winter at the edge. I checked for growth and this year I put small pebbles on top of all the pots to keep the soil and any dead vegetation I might have missed from floating in the pond water. (I used a bag of aquarium pebbles because they are a nice small size and are clean.)

I had bought a couple of new Umbrella plants at a local greenhouse and replanted a couple of the pots which looked dead.  I had over wintered my pond lily in a pail of water in the laundry room and I added some new pebbles to the top of that pot, too and submerged it in the pond. I wonder if it will grow again. I have had it for 2 years now and it did re-grow last year but only got one blossom. Maybe it's time for a new one....The rest of the pots, which mostly sprout a type of tall water grass, were submerged in the pond by my husband.

Now the pond was sparkling clean and ready for the goldfish! I netted the goldfish out of their aquarium and put them in a pail of water with some aquarium water added earlier, then took them out to the pond.  I always enjoy watching them swim out of the pail each spring when they gleefully swim around the pond checking out their new living quarters!

I usually add some Cycle to the pond, too, to get the healthy bacteria to grow.

The outdoor temperature is important to monitor when you have outdoor fish. You should NOT feed your goldfish if the temperature is low, (5 to 10C).  At lower temperatures the goldfish's digestive system shuts down and if they were to eat food then, it could kill them.

It's great to have the goldfish back outside! I enjoy peeking into the water to try and spot them when I'm outside doing my gardening. Often they are hiding by the large rocks or next to the plant pots, but I try and count them every few days to make sure they are still all there. I wonder if there will be any babies this fall?

Tomatoes, Potatoes, Chives and Onion sets

Vegetable garden and pond

Finally Mother Nature has taken pity on us and eradicated the remains of the last snowstorm that she hit us with on May 4th.  Monday, May 3rd started out as a warm, relatively sunny day, then some much needed rain rolled in late in the afternoon. The rain started as we were driving west on Hwy 11 towards Red Deer for our "date night".  (Went to see the movie by the same name, LOL! ) It started raining here quite heavily not long after we returned from Red Deer later that evening. The wind picked up shortly thereafter and was driving the rain almost horizontally out of the northwest.

During the night we heard the frozen sleet against the windows and woke up the next morning to a winter style of blizzard in progress! The cold and storm continued until for the next 3 days!!!

Saturday evening we worked on the vegetable garden, adding some compost from the rich layer at the bottom of our compost pile. We planted two rows of onion sets and 7 hills of red potatoes (which had grown very long eyes already during the last few weeks while stored in the house.)

One thriving bit of greenery is the chives plant! If you want a sure thing which will sprout early and give some greenery try planting a chives or two.  We have been harvesting it for over a week already and using it in salads and a stir fry!  We have one rogue chive plant that sprouted by the deck stairs and it rarely gets much rain or water, but it still grows valiantly and gives us fresh chives for most of the summer.

We have decided to build a permanent 6 foot wire fence around the veggie garden this year to keep out the deer, instead of the plastic fencing we usually erect in the spring and remove in the fall....  A project to add to the "To Do" list.

Deck pots being hauled in and out every day...

I have been hauling plants in and out of the house almost every day (except during the snowstorm of course!) to start hardening them off to eventually plant them outside. There are over 30 pots and I admit I'm getting a little tired of dragging them in and out, but the weatherman says that by Wednesday of this week ( May 12) the night time temperatures should stay above zero. Hopefully by then I can leave all the plants out on the downstairs deck all night without fear of frost. If they are kept close to the house they should survive even a -2C night.

(But then again, last year I thought the same thing! Big mistake!  My 3 week growth on my dahlias, my 10 baby squashes and some of the geraniums froze pretty badly.... Can't totally trust Mother Nature!)

I have 3 pots of dahlia's which I planted in pots in March all of which are over 24 inches tall now. (I dug the tubers out of the flower beds in early October once the frost had killed the dahlia tops and I stored the tubers in bags of peat moss in the laundry room.  I have had these red cactus dahlia tubers for 6 years now and they are just as beautiful every year!)

There are 2 pots of canna lilie, 2 pots of calla lilies, a dozen pots of geraniums and various pots of flower seedlings ( lavatara, bachelor buttons, and some puny portulaca) in my living room, as well as 4 pots of tomatoes and 3 pots of white tuberous begonias. They are outside on the balcony off the living room right now soaking up the cool morning sunshine.

I planted a few other seeds that have not germinated yet, some which were planted in early April, so they likely won't sprout. ( Bad luck with the Red Durango Marigolds, the hollyhocks and the castor bean seeds. I also tried growing bartlett pear seeds without success.)

Last year we had a tomato plant called Black Krill which had the ugliest looking blackish red tomatoes, but they were plentiful and very tasty! We saved a few of the seeds from one of the tomatoes on a square of paper towel wrapped in a baggy. I planted the seeds recently and they sprouted over the weekend! I now have 5 scrawny little Black Krim seedlings of which I hope at least 2 or 3 mature into a decent sized plant.  (My sister-in-law wants a couple if they survive.)

Today I plan on transplanting 6 little 2 inch Velvet Blue petunia plants which I bought for 99 cents each on Saturday. I usually stay away from petunias because everyone else usually plants them (sounds a little perverse, I know) plus the deer around here love them! But I have discovered a product called "Plantskyd" that you can spray on your plants every 2 or 3 months which the deer don't like and it saved my lilies last year from being 'deer lunch" as usual. ( It was the first year since we had moved here 3 years previously that I got to enjoy my lilies blooming for more than a day before the deer discovered them and they got eaten!) More about deer later!

We also cleaned out our little goldfish pond this weekend, and refilled it with clean water. The birds love it! They drink the water and bathe on the edge of the pond regularly! Even our cat will go and take a drink. We over wintered our 7 goldfish in an aquarium in the laundry room.  They have grown quite a bit and are ready to go out in the pond now.  More about the pond and goldfish maintenance later, too!

The Persistence of grass

Tulips April 26th

Delphiniums are doing well...

Maltese cross and columbines have sprouted

Monkshood has sprouted

Rhubarb is up first!

Once the rainstorms abated this week, and the sun shone bravely, albeit weakly again, it was wonderful how fresh and green everything looked! My new tulips (planted last fall) finally trusted the weather enough to pop open! They are a deep red color with black centres. The rest are not that far behind.

I can't recall if I planted all the same type of tulips or not. I need to dig out my gardening journal and see what I wrote last fall. I used to believe that I would remember all theses types of things about my gardening from one season to the next, but I learned the hard way that it is a loooong stretch of time from October when the snow flies, and April when it melts again.

The tulips were beat hands down by the dandelions, though. Three tulips blooming ( so far) versus 8 dandelions. Because of all the birds and wildlife around our acreage I don't use chemicals on my lawn or garden. When the dandelions start to bother me, I go after them with a narrow trowel and dig them out by hand. Back breaking work, yes, and I admit, in all my years of gardening I have never won the dandelion wars; maybe the occasional battle, but in the end, the dandelions always prevail! I haven't got enough time or energy to eradicate them all, but I console myself with the thought that there are some birds and/ or insects out there that benefit from dandelions (aren't there????)

My other very stubborn and even more persistent nemesis is grass roots. You have to grudgingly admire its ability to grow against all odds in every crevice and corner, no matter how hard a person tries to prevent it; Like a bad virus that seems to mutate and get stronger and more invasive the harder you work against it! I have been stubbornly digging out grass shoots sprouting in my now freshly rained-upon flower beds all week with a big shovel, small trowel, whatever works. I'm floored by how long some of the grass roots are once you start pulling one end out. At the very least, it's a job that has much more success if its done after a rain when the soil is soft. But grass is so resilient that if you even miss one tiny little root it morphs overnight into a veritable lawn in the flower bed, or so it seems.

I use a handy laundry basket out in the garden to fill up with grass and weeds as I work away. I like the handles on it to cart it around and the holes in the sides to easily dump out any accumulated water when it gets left out in the rain in between weedings (which I admit it often seems to do).

I have completed the weeding of one of my large beds, my two tiered rock garden bed and part of the long narrow perennial bed in the middle of the yard. You would think that I was getting ahead in the grass weeding game, wouldn't you, but alas! It seems that each morning Mother Nature has sprouted even more grass in areas that I thought I had already finished weeding. Eventually though, the perennials get tall enough that the grass blends in better and I come away with the illusion that I am done weeding! :)