The vegetable patch
 

So, 1st lot of broad beans up, just done the second sowing, 1st lot of peas in today and I have beetroot and carrots up.

Red and white onion sets on their way and i have just put in lettuce that i had sowed in the greenhouse 3 weeks ago.

Sowed corgettes, french beans, toms and steet squash in the greenhouse for planting out in a month or so.

How you getting on in Canada? Or the UK for that matter!

fletch

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..... Calgary.

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High-rise condo although I do grow some herbs.

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Hence the reason you can fish so often....maram lakes for me in the Morning.

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Not even the tip of a tulip yet - I checked again yesterday, after the previous day's snow had melted!

I really quite dislike April. It teases you constantly, then dumps some snow, then warms up and teases you again - then dumps again. And it's still brown - though I can see a hint of green on the golf course greens.

I won't even plant anything till June. 'Tis a wickedly short growing season here.

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Keep me posted.:) What are you planning to grow?

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:( It will all thaw soon.

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Yeah but, no but ..... see Ann m's post above! :p

Actually I HAVE seen some (I think they were) tulips and some lilies of some sort in somebody's sheltered south-facing flower bed that were several inches high this week, and most definitely green. So things ARE starting to grow in certain situations .... :fingerscrossed:

We had breakfast out on the deck this morning, me in short-sleeved top, although there are still some lumps of snow in the garden when the sun hasn't got to it. :thumbsup:

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No, herbs for cooking. I don't get into any of that hippie malarky. I leave that nonsense to the locals to stupefy themselves.

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:rofl: that did not cross my mind. :rofl:

If you don't approve of tobacco, you can guarantee I don't approve of the other.

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We are only just seeing more grass than snow this week. My job later this afternoon is poop patrol:sick:

Then we are putting out the second best patio set (the spare, the good one is at the new house) and the muskoka chairs to make the front porch have more curb appeal.

This year our gardening efforts will be chopping down the knee length grass at the new place and dismantling the crumbling pond feature, clearing the land of where the big garage is going and hopefully building a deck and putting up some 'keep the dog' fence.

Someone please remind me why the new place was a good idea...:confused:

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Will you bother to grow anything that you an eat? fruit trees for example..A nice plum should rippen before the frosts come again?

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We will get to have a proper veg patch eventually, it won't be this year and as for plum trees, I think we are too frosty for those in Alberta and we certainly won't get anything planted this year and probably what we do plant in future will get eaten by deer (according to a friend who plants flowers every summer and ends up with green stalks and no colours).

We will be interested to see what grows in the new place, to see if we have anything but grass and trees, ahh we'll see. We were talking today and we hope that the grass will stand up so it'll make it easier to cut at the moment it's pretty flat to the ground and really long - that's the first summer, outside job:unsure:

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Probably keep it simple - carrots, beans, onions, lettuce - maybe some tomatoes in some pots. We have this nasty habit of going on holiday for a couple of weeks in the summer, and due to not having installed any irrigation, stuff keeps dying off. So - it all depends on our plans and how much I want to bug my neighbour. ;)

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I'm sure it will all look lovely, oh, in about 8 years! :p

Coaxing the land here into looking vaguely garden-like takes more effort and money than I have at my disposal. I add a few more plants each year, and my first ones (that have survived) are actually big enough to start splitting now. I even got bucket loads of stuff from a guy at work last September, so I'm excited to see if it all comes up again soon. I reckon in another five years, it'll look pretty good! :lol:

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My immediate plans are cut the grass and start a wild flower patch (a bit less to mow and look after). We'll not have time for much else this year.

Here is a glimpse of our project - the gypo wagons should be collected by the scrappy now the snow has gone:fingerscrossed:

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I have a tiny "living" basil plant on my windowsill bought in Coop last night. It looks dead already:thumbdown:

Planted some daffs in a pot and have kept in the basement for the last few weeks. Now starting to see a few shoots after putting out in the sun for a couple of hours a day, they may actually be flowering by August;)

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Now that the broken arm and tendon surgery are healing, I am spending time in my yard. Sooo much to do. I did manage to get the Broad beans in a while ago, the garlic is looking good and raspberry canes growing like weeds.
Yesterday I put the spinach, peas, potatoes in, moved a couple of things around. The chard and sorrel are about ready for picking. Strawberry plants and perennials growing well, tulips and daffs in bloom, roses looking promising.

Two years ago I started a new veggie area by layering cardboard, comfrey, nettles, newspapers with a little horse manure. This year I have beautiful dark loam with tons of big fat worms. :thumbup:

My living room looks like a greenhouse with lots of seeds growing. I started 11 different kinds of tomatoes :ohmy:. Lots more seeds I would like to start this year.

And the cherry tree is about to burst into bloom. My yard is always a little later than others because the sun is behind the ridge until late February.
Can you tell this is my favourite topic? :lol: (One of my paying jobs too.)

Today I went to the beach and gathered 3 buckets of seaweed for the garden. Just the best. And the slugs hate it.

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This sounds like a very nice garden, you and i know, you get out what you put in. If you like, you reapwhat you sow.

We had chickens until very recently, we used wood/bark chips as the floor covering to stop it getting too muddy in the wet weather, once it is pretty smelly, we compost this and that was dug in yesterday, we are expecting some very good veg this year.

i think that our choice of VI for our future home has much to do with what we can do in garden through the year. Snow and Ice is Ok for a few days, but I think it would drive me slowly gaga.

I shall use that seaweed idea when we arrive. fletch

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Sounds really lovely, glad your all mended and fighting fit:thumbsup:

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Our next door neighbour (at the house we are selling) is an avid gardener and from late winter onwards he has his garden lamps on growing his seedlings (looks like a grow up) and now the snow has virtually all gone he will start digging, the man lives to dig. The only problem is he doesn't confine his digging to the back yard, he digs the front as well. Then when the grass is long enough - he only cuts it a few times a year, he smothers the veggies in grass cuttings to help keep the moisture in, this results in a big smelly untidy mess:thumbdown:

Hmm, I wonder why our house is lingering on the market....

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Have any of you considered building raised beds? I built double brick raised beds 4M x 1M, 5 bricks high and capped to stop the weather ruining them. You would be surprised how easy they are to keep weed free, the weeds seeds don't seem to make it into the beds, i suppose it is because the wind just blows the seeds around the bases and not into the beds? the also act as pretty good seats when you have friends around for drinks and the obligatory burnt food off the BBQ.

They also seem to keep the soil just that little bit warmer so I can get started a little sooner. All the bricks are recycled, i'm starting another collection to make a summer house, it doesn't take long, you would be surprised what folk throw out.

The victorians once built them much higher and kept compost and rotting manure at the bottom of them and them would cover with a top layer of soil for growing the veg in all year round. Central heating for veg! Just an idea.

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Jeez, that's gonna keep you guys busy - but how bloody exciting?! You HAVE to keep us posted on progress. I think I'm too genetically lazy to work on a project like that. ;)

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Glad to hear you are feeling better.

The jealousy around your garden is sticking in my throat, just a little bit you understand. :p

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We've just built some raised beds for this year's veggie patch, not sown anything in them yet though! And also planted 10 fruit trees, although they're only about 6-7ft tall at the moment so it'll be a while before they become the orchard I've envisaged.

They are our first steps towards a garden though, as it didn't have anything in it when we bought it, not even a single flowerbed!

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Last year we had a veggie patch for the first time - approx 18ft x 10ft. The weather being what it is in this part of the world means that planting is really a late May/early June experience. (In fact last June was bloody freezing so nothing really started growing to July). Nevertheless we had success with root vegetables, some lettuce & brocolli. Not so much with tomatoes.

For a brief period of a month we had an aluminium and plastic 8x5 greenhouse donated from a neighbour. It was a brief period one Fall as having moved it from next door. I failed to secure it to the ground strongly enough and it blew away in the first gale.

Having learned from that experience I started the construction of a wood and poly leantoo greenhouse next to the garage. Made from 2x4's and bolted to railway sleepers, it 'aint going anywhere no matter how windy.;) I ordered some super-duper poly from these people: http://www.northerngreenhouse.com/ but with one thing and the other, didn't get the poly fitted to the frame before summer so it wasn't worth completing. As soon as we get a nice weekend, I'll fit the poly to the wooden frame and we should be able to get an early(ier) start to our veggies this year. In a climate like ours where it doesn't get massively hot and is always windy, a greenhouse or cold frame is essential IMHO.

Anyway, the Mrs is in charge of the gardening, I'm merely in charge of construction! Which is why it's taken so long...

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I've half a dozen fruit trees (cherry, pear, peach and apple) which all do really well, but they're a bear magnet in the fall.

Veggies aren't worth bothering with due to the local deer population. We planted a dozen trees last year and most have ended up as winter sustenance for them despite anti-deer this that and the other that they've been sprayed or painted with.

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You should have a great garden with that composted chicken manure. I know I said seaweed is the best but really chicken manure is the best. :)

Where are you moving from? and to?

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Lots of it is a big mess. :lol: Not to mention my gatepost that fell down and took a section of fence with it!
I haven't even done my fall clean-up yet. :ohmy: But I'm hopeful I'll get to it soon.
It's been so darn rainy that noone has felt like being in the garden and it's raining again today. Oh well, it will water the seeds in. :)

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What kind of fruit trees?
It will be lovely.
:thumbup:

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moving from York to VI (somewhere between Duncan and Colwood), i see you're quite nearby. What are the transport links like to Victoria from you.

Also, I see there is a train line to victoria from duncan/colwichan, I can't find the train timings, does it operate year round? Yesterday i was begining to think that we had seen the last of the cold weather, storm came through and those that had been on the high ground near york caught snow, bazaar seeing cars driving into York with snow on them in April.

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:rofl::rofl::rofl:

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Various, a couple of apples, pears, cherry, apricot, plums, almond, peach and crabapple.

It will be lovely, but at the moment it's not a proper garden (more just a big field really). Having been renovating the house over the past year so that we could move in, that's been our priority and I'll worry about the garden next year!

Getting the veggie patch and some chickens up and running were essential though as I really missed them last year, and we've just had the collapsing front wall rebuilt so I may try and get at least the front garden looking sensible soon.

:)

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We'll be neighbours :). If you are between Duncan and Colwood, you must be up on the Malahat Highway. Cobble Hill?
Lots of folks from here do their grocery shopping in Duncan. There is a 20 min ferry from here.

We also have a lot of traffic between here and Vic... a 35 minute ferry from the South end of the island to Sidney (which I really like), but then it's a 45min drive from Sidney to Vic. At the moment I am getting free ferry tickets on medical to go to Sidney for physio on my arm.










)

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With my garden it's a toss-up over who is in control... me or nature. ;)
It was all wild when I moved in. The first thing I did was to fence 1/4 acre to keep the pesky critters out. I still see the odd rabbit that sneaks in or my neighbour's cat, so I let my dog out :sneaky:.
Glad to see I am not the only one with collapsing structures. :lol: I envy all you couples though. I live by myself and I'm getting old. I'm looking for a fella with skills :nod:.

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http://www.realtor.ca/propertyDetail...Key=-639630161

We quite like this, though it won't be there when we move unless the property market is stagnant. That is why i'm trying to get details of the trains and timings to Victoria. It seems that the road journey is about 40 mins to The Royal Jubilee Hosp. That is the best place for work for Mrs fletch.

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I have a very good friend that is devistated that we are moving, a big fan of canada, hates gardening, that would be your job! He is a young 60?;)

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I hope you have dwarf rootstock, always easier picking and pruning when it is only just above your head. It is such a shame when large trees have fruit and the wasps and birds are the only benefactors.

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Ontario Caledon region.

We have lettuce up in the green house, and some tomatoes (from seed) onions and shallots that have overwintered outside are showing good green stems, tulips and daffodils and some crocuses are up and flowering.

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Nice house and garden - I'd check out what the condo/strata fees for something like this would be though :unsure: