Gardening, flowers and veggies: 2013

[pbear]

Thanks Lady tehMa for the pinecone idea. I did try scattering them last year but these cats are all farm cats and they must wear steel-toe boots cause nothing stops them!

I still have SO much snow but now I can see the tops of the tea roses in the front yard so I guess that is progress. Sure getting itchy to get started out there.

Has anyone heard if it is forecast to be an early warm spring? The last 2 springs have been so cold!

[JLives]

According to the groundhog, yes there will be an early Spring. I'm getting the itch to get out and dig in the dirt too. All of my herbs have new growth. Time to start planning on how I'm setting up my square foot setup for this year. I think I'll give celery a try.

[Lady tehMa]

Let me know how that goes jennylives, I've never tried celery before.

I slung buckets of snow this afternoon, under the trees to "water" that bed. And what did I discover? Bulbs are starting to poke through!

[Queen K]

Yup.

And facebook has a new page called Okanagan Plant and Information Exchange.

Someone started it with the idea of people exchanging or giving away their overload plants and sharing good gardening ideas.

[normaM]

I want to plant a moon garden, anyone ever done so?

[Queen K]

Not on purpose, but the Datura I planted years ago bloomed at night.

[normaM]

yes thats what I am looking for .. all night blooms, all white

[grammafreddy]

I have grown celery in the past. It worked well. I planted the seeds in the garden, then when it was up about 3-4 inches, I cut the bottoms and tops off 2L milk cartons (I had saved them for this) and put the cartons over the plant so it grew inside the carton. Celery stalks will separate and not grow in tight straight-up bunches like we get in the stores if you don't contain it. The cartons also help to keep the sun from bleaching the green out of the plant.

I may try some again this year. It was a fun experiment. Good luck with it, Jenny.

[JLives]

Thanks for the tips Grammafreddy!

[grammafreddy]

Hmmmm ... http://www.everchanginggarden.ca/wpblog ... xperiment/

That says she used the milk cartons to bleach the celery - not to keep it from bleaching. More research required, I guess.

[Lady tehMa]

I want to plant a moon garden, anyone ever done so?

normaM,

I noticed Vesey's this year has a mood garden set [url]http://www.veseys.com/ca/en/store/springbulbs1/moongarden
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[Lady tehMa]

I want to plant a moon garden, anyone ever done so?

normaM,

I noticed Vesey's this year has a moon garden set http://www.veseys.com/ca/en/store/springbulbs1/moongarden

[pbear]

I want to know more about composting like you do it, pbear. Would you mind posting a tutorial for me? If I remember correctly, you used pallets, didn't you? And you have three "bins" for different stages of compost? The stoopid city here has a really dumb garbage collection thing going now and I refuse to play with them.

So sorry grammafreddy. Somehow I missed your post. If you google cold composting it is the closest to what I do. Basically we built three sides out of pallets and have three separate bins connected. We do have a couple of bins at the back but it is too shady now to use them. We also have three black plastic composers. I find that I am using the pallet areas as storage for leaves,etc. that get dumped into the black plastic bins when I need a layer on top of the vegetable waste. It manages to work out slowly so that I get enough every year to top things up.

Back in the day,we would move the layers from one compost/pallet bin to the next. It worked really well, I could keep it wetter, and we got compost quicker. Now it just feels like too much work!

We drove 2by4 spikes into the ground and set the pallets on end over them.

Hope that helps.

[normaM]

I'm hoping some crazed gardener will come do it for me!

[Bpeep]

Mathiola is a wonderful addition to a night time garden.
The aroma is amazing. Just a couple of plants will permeate your whole yard with a mix of licorice and vanilla.
It blooms at night and on cloudy days. Makes for the nicest smelling yard.
Unfortunately it looks like a scraggly weed on sunny days.
I like to hide it amongst other flowers.
I grow it every season.