Category Archives: Gardening

My pansies are safe from even the tallest bunnies this year!

Gardening, , , ,

I’ve always loved pansies. I love their bright vivid colours, and how unique and fun they are. Like little rays of flower sunshine in a garden. We always had purplish pansies growing in our little flower garden behind our house on the farm where I grew up. They were my favourite flowers in the world.

Every time I’ve planted them at this house they never seem to bloom very long. Last year finally figured out why. It is those sneaky bunnies! Those rascally rabbits hop their not-so-innocent little bouncy hop out of the forest and sneakily munch away at my pansy flowers! They are even conservationists – they eat the flowers and leave the of the plant intact so they can grow more flowers!

Now I’m all for supporting the rights of wildlife, but come on, isn’t it bad enough the deer eat my tulips? Do the bunnies have to eat my cheery little pansy flowers too?

This spring I think I have outwitted the bunnies for sure this time. I’ve planted pansies in the containers on the rail along the top of the of the side porch. No bunny under 6 feet tall will nibble on ‘em now!

Here are a few pictures I took with my iPhone quickly before dashing off to work the other morning:

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Wishful thinking?

Gardening, , ,

The deer already ate my crocuses, and they were sooooo beautiful, for a day.

And the tulips are coming up now.

So to prevent my future tears when the damn deer (and no you can’t shoot her Jeff) (yet) eat my tulips, I went on the offensive today.

But there was just no Deer Off in the stores.

Think I’m joking? It’s really a product! It is made with stinky eggs, garlic, and pepper and keeps bunnies and squirrels away too.

I thought about fencing the entire garden, but that didn’t seem logical.

So I surrounded the tulips with tomato cages.

Still doubtful this will work at all, I tied long strings of orange flagging tape to all the cages.

I’m still not convinced this is going to stop our mischievous deer.

Garden update, swimming for Monty, and of course a hurricane update

Gardening, Weather, , , ,

Every year we get better at gardening. Another few years and we might have an entire salad ;-)

Here’s what we planted this year:

  • Green Beans – We moved these to the back of the garden so they don’t hog all the sunshine this year, but they really don’t seem to be growing up the poles like they did last year. I don’t know if they were mislabeled and aren’t pole beans, or if it is because of the wet season, or just because they are too close to the edges of the garden. We have had 3 small green bean harvests. NOTHING like last year when we had many extra to freeze.
  • Yellow Beans – aren’t doing well at all. Too close to the edge of the garden (aka the fence). We’ve eaten fewer than 10 of these beans.
  • Broccoli – tried broccoli this year. Planted 6 plants. Harvested our first head of broccoli yesterday. Had some of those green mini caterpillar worms. Picked them off and boiled it extra long and stubbornly ate them anyway. It was slow to mature because of the weather. Maybe it would be less wormy if it matured faster? Or is broccoli a don’t-even-try-to-grow-it-yourself kind of vegetable?
  • Tomatoes – bumper crop of Scotian tomatoes coming in the garden. Also have some bigger tomatoes (forget their kind) and cherry tomatoes in pots on the deck. I grew those from seeds under the grow light and they were light years ahead of their schedule when I planted them. I planted way too many per pot though and they were not doing well at all until I started slipping them a little Miracle-Gro once a week. Now they are green and the cherry tomatoes are plentiful. LOVE cherry tomatoes. Reminds me of the plant my Dad had outside of the barn when I was a kid and when he was done working we would snack on some cherry tomatoes. Remember that Dad?
  • Green Peppers & Jalapeno Peppers – stubbornly, we’re trying to grow peppers again. We just don’t have the heat, and living on the side of a valley, we don’t get enough sun probably. Luckily we have two peppers coming along nicely now, and a bunch of flowers on the other plants. With any luck, and with our long fall, maybe we can get a small crop! Or realistically, maybe 3 peppers?
  • Pumpkins – I planted a couple pumpkin plants late in the season. They are the type that grow the little cooking pumpkins. We have lots of blossoms but there isn’t a pumpkin to be seen, so that may be a write off.
  • Cucumbers – first time growing cucumbers! I love them! They grow so fast and have attached themselves to the chicken wire fence around the garden. We’ve harvested 2 in this last week and now there are plenty more just starting. What an easy thing to grow. I could eat fresh cucumbers every day!
  • Lettuce – We planted Boston lettuce this year and it was done a month ago. From now on I’m going to grow lettuce from seed, and I’ll stagger it, because we planted 6 plants and they all were ready at the same time, around the time we went back to Ontario for a week, so we only had 1 head of it. Delicious lettuce though – better than the romaine we grew last year!
  • Herbs – Still have herbs growing – oregano, parsley, rosemary. I don’t dry much of them – I prefer them fresh. Before winter, I’ll transplant smaller plants and put them back inside on the kitchen window ledge.

I think that is it. Our garden isn’t too big, just 12×12 or so (is that right Jeff?). We’re surrounded by woods on the side of a hill so it’s not the ideal gardening location, but we’re learning how to cope with it.

The fence keeps the deer out, and most of the time it has kept the bunnies, squirrels, and chipmunks out, but there was another tunnel dug in there this week, and a tomato look gnawed on, but I guess they get hungry too!

Slugs and snails are always a huge problem here in wet Nova Scotia. I’ve given up on the beer in a tuna can approach and have been using a safe-for-animals-and-people-but-definitely-not-safe-for-slugs product. I sprinkle the little buds in the garden every few weeks and they are really helping! The only problem is the beans are too close to the outside edge and grass is growing up through the fence and the bugs are travelling in on it.

I haven’t grown zucchini yet, but I did buy a big one at the market and made a new recipe. They were zucchini/oatmeal/buttermilk/raisin/bran/whole wheat muffins. Unfortunately rather bland, but had very little sugar and were moist. I think I can figure out a way to spice ‘em up a little. The recipe did call for walnuts too, but I opted out! (see recipe: Zucchini Muffins)

Swimming

We took Monty down to the picnic stop on Lochiel Lake after work. No one was around so he had a good swim. The water was so clear. Beautiful. And other than horseflies, there were no bugs!! Often I’ve been down there and the blackflies and mosquitoes are horrendous.

I should have taken the camera. I thought of it. But his ears need trimming so bad, I didn’t want to show him all shaggy. Silly me – you can’t see his shagginess when he is all wet. He is very quiet and sleepy tonight!

Hurricane Update

We’re going to miss most of this one, but I’ll be watching it like a hawk anyway because I love extreme weather.

I’m really worried that the media are going to blow it so far out of proportion that unless it wipes 55 million people off the planet, it will seem to be a dud. I think 24 hour news broadcasts have killed legitimate news coverage.

I will be on my computer all day tomorrow working on assignments for the GIS course I’m taking, so I’ll likely have Twitter open for news from real people.

I’m so sad

Gardening,

The deer I shared photos of a couple mornings ago ate all my just-about-to-bloom tulips and my lilies out of my front garden over night.

I know deer eat tulips. A deer ate my tulips two years ago out of the same garden. I didn’t plant the tulips because I know deer love them. A previous home owner did. They didn’t have a great year last year, after been eaten the year before, but this year there were dozens of them just about to open.

I’ve planted a lot of daffodils since we moved here because deer don’t eat them. This deer took the time to go around every daffodil and bite the tulip stems, and leaves, right to the ground.

I wish the deer no ill will. It’s not her fault.

But I love flowers. Seeing them all gone this morning felt like someone ate the sun out of my sky. I cried. I’m sad. I know they are only flowers. But they waited all year to bloom for me. And now they are gone.

Wait until you see the vegetables we’ll grow this year!

Gardening, ,

electric tillerA co-worker of mine was telling me about the electric tiller he has for his garden.

Electric tiller? They exist?

Our garden isn’t very large, but we’ve toyed with the idea of renting a small rototiller so we could bust up the ground better.

I told Jeff about the electric tiller so we did a little research and found one at Canadian Tire.

Desperate to fill up both sheds with our tools and supplies, we bought it!

I’ve gotta tell ya – this thing is GREAT!

It’s got a 10 inch width and goes down 4.5 inches (according to the box). It’s easy to handle (32 lbs) has a nice padded handle. We made it a 2-person job because we were afraid of running over the cord, so one of us was always on cord duty (I would love that for vacuuming!)

Within 10 minutes we had tilled up the soil better than we’ve ever done it with a shovel, hoe, and a rake. Then we mixed in 10 bags of sheep manure, a 2 small bales of peat moss. This is our first time trying the peat moss, so we’ll see how it works out.

I’ve gotta tell ya – buy your shit at a garden nursery. Seriously. The sheep manure we got this year was so lovely compared to the smaller, cheaper bags we had been buying at the Central hardware store. Those bags had manure mixed with wood chips and even some sea shells. The bags we bought this year were 100% good shit.

For another 20 minutes, Jeff tilled it all into the soil. It’s so airy and puffy and weed free!! And the motor on the tiller wasn’t even hot (well the metal shaft underneath was, but only one of us was silly enough to touch it) (no, really, not me this time!)

There are 4 blades on this electric tiller. The owner’s manual said we can remove two of them to do a smaller width at once. This could easy go between rows in your garden if you had a weedy mess. I’m thinking of using it on a couple other flower garden that need a re-start.

I think we’ll give the garden another till before we plant, and then probably again in the fall after final harvest!

Two thumbs up for the Yardworks Electric Tiller from Canadian Tire!

End of August nears, green beans flourish!

Gardening, ,

As the end of August nears, I am seeing the signs of the shortening days, and the damp nights.

The sun is almost tucked behind the other side of our valley at just 7:20pm tonight. Fog forms a layer between the surface of the lake and the top of the valley each night. By morning our vehicles are completely fogged over and I need to keep the defrost and wipers on for the first few minutes of my drive to work to keep the condensation off my window.

This year was our second attempt at vegetable gardens and we are having success!! Our green beans are incredible. No bean I’ve ever had tasted this good. What are those green things they label green beans in our grocery stores? They certainly don’t compare to these green pieces of heaven.

Our tomatoes are doing better than last year too. We’ve eaten 3 of them now, and Jeff brought in a few more that should be ready for tomorrow night.

Our garden is little, and it is an on-going experiment to see what we can grow here. Our red cabbage is growing, but still hasn’t really folded itself into a cabbage yet. The lettuce only gave us one good salad before it flowered. Our green and jalapeño peppers are just starting to produce peppers that are about 0.5cm in size still so I guess we don’t really have a climate for peppers here.

Next year we’re thinking about having a chicken coop with some meat birds. I used to “help” my dad when he “harvested” our chickens, but I’ve grown into such a softie I am afraid I will think of them all as pets and not want to “harvest” them.

My indoor garden

Gardening

Jeff gave me an indoor light garden for my birthday!

I love growing plants.  We tried out a vegetable garden this past summer, but the vegetables weren’t ready for harvest until the frost was setting in so this year we are going to try to grow some starter seedlings for outdoor planting to get a head start.

But I just couldn’t let an indoor light garden collect dust through the winter!

On December 30th I found some herb seeds I had left from an unsuccessful herb garden attempt.  So I planted the remaining coriander, basil, and oregano.  The grow lights are on a chain so they can be lifted or lowered and I set up a timer to control the light period.

We set up the garden in a corner of the basement near the wood stove.  Jeff put a peg board on the wall for me so I can hang up my gardening tools :D

Here it is:

My Indoor Light Garden

After Christmas we finally lucked out finding seeds at the garden co-op store.   I did a bit of research to figure out what we could grow inside, so we selected tiny tim’s (cherry tomatoes), parsley, chives, and a lettuce mix.

The lettuce mix was sprouting within 48 hours!

My Indoor Light Garden

In this one (shown above), the first row from the left is tiny tims, then a vertical row of chives, then parlsey. The 3 rows on the right were the herbs planted a few weeks ago – oregano, then basil, and on the far right, coriander.  (:oops: confession: I have no idea what coriander is.)

My Indoor Light Garden

Here is the lettuce mix.  I planted an entire tray.

My Indoor Light Garden

My Indoor Light Garden

My Indoor Light Garden

I learned that the oregano is very sensitive to watering.  I killed off almost every oregano sprout in the back two cells from overwatering I think. They turned brown and rotted away.

The coriander is the tallest and has started to fall over.  I don’t know if it is growing too fast, or if that means I need to light the lights up, if they already need to be transplanted, or if coriander usually falls over.  I will have to Google :)