I Wet My Plants

I’m getting ready to plant out most of my seedlings this weekend. These little guys are as prepared as they’re going to get.

On March 30th I started planting my tomato seeds indoors, setting them on a heating mat to help them germinate:

As soon as they germinated they were taken off the mat and put under grow lights:

I would turn these lights on in the evening before going to bed and turn them off in the morning before leaving for work. Once I forgot to turn on the grow lights and the pumpkin seedlings that I started way too early stretched an impressive 1.5” during the night. Occasionally they would endure the breeze from an oscillating fan to help their stems grow stronger, initially for an hour or two then for 8 hours every other day.

After a week they were exposed to indirect sun during the day while still staying indoors:

One day I left a flat of tomatoes too long in the direct sun indoors and burnt their little true leaves which really stunted their growth. I still feel bad about it, Rouge d’Irak, Roma, Juliet, Mortgage Lifter and Mirabelle Blanche!

I started hardening them off to the outdoors about mid-April by letting them hang out on the deck for an hour or so in the morning or afternoon when the sun wasn’t so strong.

Then they would spend half-days outside under a shade cloth to protect them from the sun and wind:

After a few days they were still protected from direct sun though they got the thrill of nature’s breeze through their leaves:

Throughout all this they were being moved in and out through my patio door. I had to lay down an old sheet for them to sit on indoors when the bottoms of the trays were wet from watering:

After a week they got to spend time out on the deck in direct sun and wind. Some of them even got to be test seedlings and would spend the night outdoors when the night temperature was expected to be + 4° C. Finally they all got potted up into 4” plastic pots at the beginning of May and spent more and more time outdoors without shade or wind protection:

The results were good from the test seedlings that had been forced outside during the chilly nights and all of my tomato seedlings (and other veggie seedlings) were allowed to stay outside full time in the direct sun and cool nights. Here are the majority of my tomato seedlings all lined up by variety:

From left to right is:
Sausage – Opalka (9), Aunt Ruby’s German Green (8), Black from Tula (8), Bonny Best (5), Green Zebra (8), Old Flame (4), Canabec Rose (8), Sweetie (9), Eva Purple Ball (6), Cherokee Purple (18!), Earliest + Best (7), Mosco (9), Blondkopfchen (8), Pruden’s Prurple (9), Black Pear [8] and Black Plum (9).

I’ve given away some of the Bonny Best, Canabec Rose, Sweetie and Cherokee Purple, Aunt Ruby’s German Green, Eva Purple Ball and Black Plum to my mom and friends. The rest I plan to sell at the Kemptville Farmer’s Market or at the end of my driveway.

I’ve also taken my wintersown experiments out of their storage containers and put them on the deck which has quickly become awash with seedlings:

To prepare for this weekend’s planting out I got help to move the concrete reinforcement trellis about 1.5’ out from the garden edge, giving me more room to trellis tomatoes:

This 8’ x 16’ space is really too small for all the seedlings I’ve started and I’m glad to have the extra garden space at my in-law’s.

Last night the temperature went down to + 3°C with a risk of frost in some areas. I decided that I would make an effort to cover my seedlings in case anything happened. I don’t know what I’d do, having worked so hard to have so many seedlings, if they were killed off by a chance of frost a day before planting out.

They made it through the night and will be going into the garden this weekend. Yahoo!

I went around the flower beds a week ago and took some pictures of the state of the flower beds.

This is the huge Bleeding Heart that I never got around to dividing this year and is on my MUST DIVIDE list for this fall:

I need to start picking the rhubarb as it has exploded in growth on the side of the house:

I’ve found five or six flowering stalks in this jungle and I lopped them all off - flowering stalks takes up all the energy of the plant, reducing the amount of yield from the plant. I’ll continue to monitor this and cut away any emerging flowering stalks.

The clematis tangutica I bought at last year’s Fletcher Wildlife Garden plant sale:

This year the annual native plant sale will be on June 7th and I’ll sadly miss it as I’ll be out of town. I spied a Bleeding Heart plant that had been missed during my perennial division in a precarious spot - the bottom of a gate hinge:

I’ll have to move that soon or it’ll get squished. My two varieties of raspberries are doing well, perhaps a little too well as they are now spreading into the neighbours side of the fence:

You can see some strawberry plants interspersed with the raspberry canes, a combination I like. Here’s a gigantic hosta that I was too lazy to divide this spring, also on the division list:

The Allium ‘Gladiator’ is starting to send up flowers:

The Apeldoorn tulips are almost done their bloom:

Last year’s purchased Weigela survived in its pot - it had been tossed to the side of the flower bed and left for dead during the cold winter months and has made a surprising return:

I’m pretty amazed that it’s alive and reinforces what I can get away with when it comes to plant care. Poor, neglected plant, you’ll have a home by this weekend. I bought this Garland Spirea from the same nursery and it’s already starting to flower:

The Siberian Bugloss Brunnera macrophylla ‘Jack Frost’ is flowering with delicate bright-blue flowers against its silvery, heart-shaped, green-veined leaves:

In the neighbourhood is a variegated hosta from last year’s dig at Dundonald Park:

and a Coral Bells Heuchera hybrid ‘Magic Dream’:

Finally, sadly, here are 7 neglected pots of lilies that were never planted in the ground last fall:

The only thing growing in these pots are dandelions. I have enough of those out in my front lawn.

Ottawa is home to the Tulip Festival, a three-weekend event held in the National Capital that symbolizes the friendship between Ottawa and the Netherlands. During the Second World War Canada provided safe haven for Netherlands’s Princess Juliana and her daughters during the Nazi occupation their homeland and a few year’s later they presented Ottawa with 100,000 tulip bulbs. Since then, Ottawa’s display of tulips has grown to over 3 million.

I decided to check out one of the Official Tulip Parks earlier this week on my lunch hour and headed over to Major’s Hill Park. On my way there was a cute ground hog hoofing it across steps of the War Memorial:

Entering Major’s Hill Park I saw lots of tulips:

Here you can see a stunning tulip bed:

Walking along I came across a collection of one hundred and fifty 5′ tulips, each painted by Ottawa and area visual artists during the 2005 Tulip Festival:

Some were really pretty:

Others abstract:

And others were very creative, especially this one that stood beside a row of portable toilets:

I think my favourite was this one mostly because I’m a fan of anything fish-themed:

Walking further I came across two of the tulip beds:

It was a nice way to spend my lunch hour and eventually I had to head back to work. Of course I had to take one more shot, especially with the Parliament Building’s Peace Tower in the background:

I decided to help put in a new vegetable garden at my in-law’s house this year. I came up with a design of six 4′ x 15′ beds with mulched pathways in the shape of an “H”. Then we found a good, sunny location in the backyard and staked it out with twine:

We started calling around and found a good price on some blended garden mix of topsoil, composted manure and black peat from a local landscaping company.

Using a yard calculator from Earth Depot I was able to figure out we would need almost 10 cubic yards of garden soil to create a 16′ x 32′ x 6″ deep bed. We also needed some extra to fill in along the driveway. In the end, we got 15 cubic yards as a full load on a tandem truck at a cost of $346.50 with taxes and delivery included. Here’s a shot of all that dirt:

I was tasked with getting cardboard and found an amazing source from IKEA by dumpster diving in their Customer Cardboard Recycling bin and going into the warehouse and collecting empty boxes. At first I felt a little conspicuous searching up and down the aisles until I asked a staff person if it was okay that I take the cardboard. His reply was, “Definitely! Cardboard’s free”. IKEA cardboard is great as there is no dyes or paints on it and it has a minimum of tape and plastic. Also, you can usually luck out with a few huge pieces which are great for covering large surface areas.

Once we got all the cardboard together, we started to lay it down and wet it with water from a hose. Then we dumped the soil on top using a lawn tractor and trailer.

It took two of us about two minutes to fill up the trailer before heading over to the garden site. The pile slowly started to go down:

There was a good rhythm to it: load up the trailer, move it to the site, spread and level it, lay down more cardboard, water it, get more soil, repeat. Here you can see that we’re just over half-way:

We quickly ran out of our cardboard stash:

The next day I got more cardboard to finish off the rest of the garden. We also mixed in some extra sheep manure/leaf compost that we got on sale from a local farm store, spacing out the bags at regular intervals to help spread it evenly.

We let it sit for a week so it could settle in a bit and then we started creating the pathways. Instead of doing the “H” in the initial design, we decided that two pathways would be enough. After four hours of work we finally had the garden finished and planted with rutabaga, carrots (under the white board), beets, radishes and spinach:

I watered the areas where I had planted seeds:

It even has its very own sign - a tribute to a lone rabbit spotted earlier in the day:

In the upcoming weeks I’ll be planting 2 types of corn, 4 types of watermelon, 2 types of squash, 3 types of cucumber, 2 types of potatoes, asparagus and bush beans. Hooray!

The Ottawa Farmer’s Market opened this past Sunday, May 4th at Lansdowne Park and I decided to finally go for the first time. I parked my car in the free parking lot (always a bonus) and headed towards the throngs of people.

It was really organized and there was a variety of stuff for sale. I was most interested in the Bloody Dock from Acorn Creek Garden Farm:

At $5 a pot I didn’t buy it and instead gave in to my growling stomach with a breakfast from Bearbrook Farm that included game meat sausage at the Food Court. A few vendors caught my eye while strolling through the market: the Glengyle Garlic vendor from whom I bought some Music seed bulbs last year and never put in the ground (oops!), a sheep vendor with $90 sheep skins, and Take Charge Teas with their different blends of herbal teas. There was also a couple of miniature horses from Mickie’s Miniatures for me to feed and pet:

Unfortunately these minis were only here for the one day though you can get a ride with Max and Willie, two Clydesdale horses from Navandale Farm, throughout the season. This year the Ottawa Farmer’s Market will be opening on Thursdays starting June 26th from 2 PM - 7 PM.