Over the weekend I got outside into the garden with the camera to take a few photos of the plants under the snow. Today we are expecting enough rain to wash away the white that has blanketed the garden out back, so I thought I would post a few wintery photographs before it’s gone completely. Even as I sit and type these words, the sound of rain drumming on the roof of our house is all I can hear.

The snow that fell on Saturday night was very fluffy and pretty. It sat, stacked on shrubs and seed heads around the garden.

I'm glad I left this rudbeckia intact over the winter.

My little helper was happy to be out back, digging. If he can’t have dirt and sand, he’ll take the snow.

Even the heads of the broccoli plant that I left in place looked cool. (More on broccoli, later…)

Now I’m off to brew another coffee and watch the snow melt. If only it were March or April…

This is the time of year that I go to the mailbox quite happily because more often than not, lately, there are seed catalogues to be found inside, which makes the arrival of those pesky bills much more tolerable.

So far I have received mailings from Terra Edibles, Renee’s Garden, Richter’s and McFayden. In fact, just a few days ago I sent a tweet saying that I was thinking about starting some seeds.

If I can’t have morning sunlight I can at least having morning grow-light. Got to get some seedlings going soon!

— playinthedirt (@playinthedirt) January 17, 2012

That very day when I went to the mailbox, there was a package from McFayden waiting inside. The package contained a selection of seeds including a variety of Echinacea called “PowWow Wild Berry” along with several vegetables such as Crookneck Early Summer Squash, San Marzano Tomatoes and Corentine Hybrid Pickling Cucumber. Just typing about seeds makes me excited these days. I’m itching to get some going in my little home office where I sit and write about gardening and family life.

The new coating on Jiffy pellets.

There is one other thing that I dislike about Jiffy pellets and that is the fact that they contain peat, which is a non-renewable resource and therefore not terribly environmentally-friendly. However, since they were sent to me and the mesh is gone, I plan to give them a try to see how the plants do, and to determine if the outer coating needs to be removed the way the mesh did.

There is still a lot of garden planning to be done before many seeds are started, but I think I’ll begin with a few that I already have here in the house as a form of horticultural therapy.

What are you growing?

Happy New Year!

I spent about twenty minutes wandering around in the garden this morning. We have had a remarkably mild winter so far with very little snowfall, and certainly not enough to blanket the yard and garden at all. We’ve had one very cold snap that lasted a couple of days, the kind of weather that prompts the City of Toronto to warn the homeless to take shelter indoors.

January Sage

My Pumpkin Experiment

What I’m trying to work out is how this strange weather will affect the garden this coming season. It might be a good year to try winter sowing.

Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a shrub of holly outside your door to clip from and bring inside during the holidays? I have a small holly bush in my back yard garden, but nothing like this hedge of the stuff I saw at my friend Jude’s home in Powell River, British Columbia seven years ago.

Back then my camera was a Kodak EasyShare CX4230 Zoom, its 2.0 megapixel images a far cry from the Canon I use today to take photographs in the garden. My trip to British Columbia came just as I had first met Graham, before I had ideas about becoming a college teacher, before I made valuable ties here in my community with respect to gardening and growing food. This photo serves as a reminder of how far I’ve come.

May your days be merry and bright! Merry Christmas to all of my gardening buddies, and Happy New Year.

What a bizarre year, weather-wise. I always hope for at least a dusting of snow in time for Christmas, and almost as soon as the clock strikes midnight at the end of Christmas Day feel ready for it all to melt and for the growing season to be upon us.

Even now as I write this blog post, I am looking beyond the lit boughs of our Fraser Fir Christmas tree to a rather bleak and dull yard that is being pounded by a driving rain, a rain that is trying very much to become freezing rain or snow.

We took Nate to see the Santa Claus parade for the first time this year, which was held on November 19th if memory serves correctly. As we walked to find a spot from which to best view Santa himself, I gasped as we came upon a cluster of cosmos still blooming in a church yard garden. I couldn’t believe it! I have never seen annuals growing so long into the fall before.

Nate also has continued to enjoy eating broccoli right off the stalk in our back garden, and there are also some violas, or johnny jump-ups in bloom in the back lawn as well.

If only spring will be as early to arrive as winter has been late!

We’ve had a gorgeous, mild, late Autumn weekend here in Durham Region and I took the opportunity to capture some of what lingers in the garden this November. There is still a lot of beautiful colour to capture and the autumn palette is my favourite combination of colours.

The pale green of the artichokes which did nothing all summer but came to life this autumn (my experiment is to bury them in leaves in desperate hope they’ll survive the winter)…

The rusted leaves of the raspberry canes…

The pink-edged leaves of thyme…

The chocolate-chip brown of the garlic chive seeds…

The red-tinged leaves of bergenia.

All too soon it will be covered in snow!

I’ve decided to revive Playing in the Dirt! I’m still writing about my family’s life over at Hearts into Home but I see that a lot of folks are still visiting this site in search of gardening-related posts and information, so I’m going to start writing here again. I’ve also begun as a Master Gardener in Training, and I’m taking my first course as part of the educational component of this designation (Introduction to Plant Identification through Ridgetown College in Guelph, Ontario), and I look forward to sharing my learning here, as well.

The perennial garden is filling in nicely this year, but I’m a wee bit behind in getting things started in the vegetable garden. I have a nice little flat of assorted plants that I grew in the basement hardening off outside, tucked into a corner of the fence at the side yard, near the hostas, and I’m hoping to get them into the ground over the next week.

As you probably know, in Canada this is the long weekend that most gardeners devote to planting, and with yesterday’s mid-twenties temperatures and sunny skies, I have no doubt that the area’s garden centres were full of anxious customers willing to hand over their hard-earned dollars for greenhouse-grown annuals and perennials. Today would have been a better day for planting, though, with overcast skies and a few drops to top things off. I managed to plant my asparagus crowns and a small row of ‘Zlata’ Yellow Radishes (thanks for those seeds, Gayla) before the rain got too heavy and we headed into the house.

While I sorted through my seeds, Graham sorted through the compost bin, tossing tough and fibrous pieces of garden debris into the next bin, and leaving a nice mound of “black gold” usable compost behind.

We are only just beginning the season here in Southern Ontario! Let the growing begin.

(Please stay tuned while I putter around the place, sorting out menus and layouts and whatnot…in the meantime you can still follow me on Twitter @Playinthedirt. A new Facebook page is also in the works.)

Wow. The weather here this long weekend is nothing short of spectacular for early April. The temperatures have been in the low twenties, breaking previously held records all over Ontario! We spent a few hours out in the back yard yesterday, puttering around the yard and poking into the shed. We even brought Nate out onto the deck for one of his naps in the playpen.

Lots of plants are growing in our garden.

As usual, the chives and garlic chives are among the first to make an appearance. They’re such show-offs. They are right beside the kitchen door right now but they’re going to be moved into the big garden soon.

I totally forgot that I had rhubarb in the garden until I found it this morning! I love finding forgotten plants.

Not all signs of spring are green…this valerian is a pretty plum colour.

These are my old faithful orange daylilies. I need to move them this year, too. It’s much more shady in the place where they are growing than it was when I first planted them.

Time to finish up our coffee and head back out. The only question is…where do I start?

Oh, dear, it’s been over a MONTH since I posted here! I can’t believe it. My only excuse is that I’ve been busy gestating. Our baby is now officially three days overdue, actually.

There hasn’t been much action out in the garden since early autumn. My husband, Graham, helped me out a lot this year in getting things cleaned up out back. We actually managed to clip back all of the perennials and he helped me pull the finished plants from the vegetable garden after we harvested the tomatoes.

This year we didn’t keep all of our harvest to ourselves, preferring to keep things simple and give a lot of it away to friends and family members. (Although we did, of course, manage to roast several big baskets of tomatoes and froze four large ziplock bags of roasted tomato sauce.) Our next-door-neighbour traded us some nice little potatoes that he grew for some of our tomatoes, too.

Baskets of homegrown tomatoes, peppers and eggplant for our friends and family.

That little veggie trade had me thinking, actually, that since there are three of us now in a row on my street who grow vegetables, we should try to co-ordinate a little bit, and share our harvest.  We could collectively grow more food than we could individually.  I’ll have to give this some thought over the winter!

But now here it is, late November, and it’s been an unseasonably mild autumn this year, for which I’m grateful. Now there is the potential for snow flurries this coming week, the same week our new family member is expected to arrive (we have an induction scheduled for Monday).

I hope that although we’ll be busy with the new baby, I’ll have more time in general to devote to writing online over the coming year. We’ll be sure to post when the baby comes!

Today I am thankful for the life that is growing inside of me,

for the man who loves me unconditionally and has agreed to walk through this life with me,

for wonderful, supportive friends,

for safety and health of my family members, near and far,

and for the glorious colours of autumn.

Happy Thanksgiving!