Dear gardening friends,

I’ve started a new website, called Hearts into Home. I hope you will join me there for new posts about gardening!

Amy.

A few days ago I was taking the long way home from doing some errands. I had Nate in the car with me and he was having a good snooze in his car seat, and I didn’t want it to end early. I just kept on driving. In my travels I came across a little plant sale not too far from our home. I made a mental note to check it out later on, maybe on a walk with the baby.

Later that evening Graham and I decided to take a walk to the store for an ice cream after dinner, and after we picked up our treat, we continued on to the home and plant sale I had noticed earlier.

There were campanula, lilies, perennial geraniums, hostas, ferns…the lady of the house had divided all kinds of her perennials and set them up for sale in her front yard. Most were $2, but some of the larger pots were going for $5.

We got talking about the plants as I asked her some details about a few that she had. “Oh, you know your flowers!” she said to me when I asked her what colour bloom her pulmonaria (lungwort) would sport. “How do you know so much about plants?”

I told her I had been gardening for several years, and just learned as I went, and that I was always on the lookout for unique plants for our garden.

“This is something special,” she said, and pointed to a pot containing a plant with tongue-shaped leaves, deeply veined in burgundy. “I don’t know what it’s called, though,” she went on. She had lost the plant’s tag years ago and hadn’t been able to identify it since.

“That’s bloody dock,” I told her. I had just acquired it myself last weekend at the You Grow Girl plant swap. She was absolutely delighted to learn the plant’s name, and said she’d be going inside to look it up on the internet.

I bought a pretty deep red hens-and-chicks and a perennial geranium with a red pattern on the leaf before we continued on with our walk, and introduced myself to her. She’s been gardening and composting for forty years. She offered to show me her garden sometime.

It’s always such a pleasure to meet a fellow gardener, especially in my own neighbourhood.

Last Saturday Nate and I went into Toronto together for a get-together of gardening buddies. The annual You Grow Girl plant swap was hosted by the lovely and gracious Melanie again this year. Last year I was pregnant and too tired to do anything resembling a trip into the city, so I was very happy to reconnect with this group over some yummy homemade snacks and amid the homegrown greenery.

Gardening buddies Julianna, Sarah and Gayla getting in on the plant swap action.

I didn’t start any vegetables from seed this year, so I dug up a few plants in the back yard Saturday morning to give away. I brought lemon balm, raspberries, anise hyssop, feverfew and chocolate mint for Mel. In return, I took home a TON of new plants for the vegetable garden!

All my new plants, grown by friends, waiting patiently in the kitchen to be planted outside.

Bloody dock
Broadleaf thyme
Tomatoes: Uncle Charlie’s, Zapotec Pink Pleated, Moonglow, Cherokee Purple, Ditmarsher, Red Pear, Tie Dye, Sungold F1 and Black Seaman
Giant Red Mustard
Kale
Peppers: Buran Sweet, Joe E. Parker, Numex Big Jim
Eggplant
White violets
Seed potatoes: Banana, Russian Blue

Eighteen plants in all! The forecast is looking good over the next few days, so I hope to get these all hardened off and into the garden soon.

Yesterday I went into the city to attend a plant swap (more on that later…) and when I got home, Graham had installed two new beautiful wrought iron hooks on the front porch. Hanging from those hooks were two of the most beautiful hanging baskets I have ever seen!

It’s May ninth. Three days ago it was 25 C here in Ontario and today there is a frost warning here in Durham Region! If you’re lucky like me, and you received annual plants as a Mother’s Day gift, give them a fighting chance at surviving the summer by bringing them inside today. Brr!

Happy Mother’s Day!

The Durham Organic Gardeners‘ annual plant auction is coming up very soon! This is a really fun gardening event to attend. I’m sorry I missed it last year…I was pregnant and tired. This year I’m planning to attend, though. You can get lots of great, healthy plants and seedlings at bargain prices. You don’t have to be a member of COG to attend; everyone is welcome!

Wednesday, June 2, 2010, 7:30 pm.

Durham District School Board Administration Building

400 Taunton Road East, Whitby, Atrium

In 2008, I brought plants from my garden to auction off.

For further information, contact Dianne Pazaratz at 905-433-7875 or Peggy Clark at 905-623-5278.

I came home with quite a haul, too!

One of the features of this blog is the Friends & Family Garden Tour. I haven’t posted a stop on the tour in quite awhile, but I hope to remedy that during this gardening season.

In a similar vein, I’ve been thinking about adding another virtual tour to Playing in the Dirt: The Neighbourhood Garden Tour. There are so many pretty gardens of all shapes and sizes in the town where I live, and I’d like to show some of them to you on a regular basis.

This is one of my very favourite springtime gardens in our neighbourhood. I call it a sidewalk garden, because the garden is elevated above the level of the sidewalk, at about waist height, so as you walk by it, the flowers and plants are so close by. This spring, this garden is particularly lovely. It features a combination of blooming ground cover plants like phlox and dianthus, emerging low-growing sedums and spring flowering bulbs such as narcissus and grape hyacinths.

The garden is located at the corner of Concession Street and Bradshaw Street in Bowmanville, Ontario.

We have a lot of projects on the go in our yard this year, as is usually the case. We seem to like to bite off more than we can chew. Take, for instance, the fact that we recently tore up our deck. The wood has been laying around the yard in piles such as this one.

This wood pile is special, though. At its feet lays a lone tulip. Did I plant that tulip there? No. Do I know how it got there? No. I have a sneaking suspicion that some dirt got moved, the tulip unwittingly scooped up and displaced. Or perhaps a squirrel dug up the bulb and “hid” it over there. Or perhaps I threw what I thought was a dead bulb into the compost bin, where it fell out again. Nobody knows! It’s a tulip mystery.

Last night Graham and I took Nathan for a walk in the early evening. This time of year all of the yards and gardens in the neighbourhood are looking so nice. All of the trees and grass have really popped and since it rained yesterday afternoon, all of the colours in the gardens seemed extra saturated and vivid, even in the overcast light after dinner. All of the perennials are so pretty this time of year. They have yet to become scraggly, overgrown, or damaged by winds or bugs. They are new and perfect, full of promise.

This is a good time to divide perennials, too. I noticed one of our neighbours had been busy doing just this. I love that they decided to share the garden’s wealth with…well, whoever wanted to share. This is one way to get rid of those divisions and cuttings!

Join

Gardeners, plant and nature lovers can join in every Sunday. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

Everyone who grows mint knows that it spreads. Everyone who grows mint knows that it should be grown somewhere:

a) where it can spread to its heart’s content, like a large patch in a vegetable garden;
b) where its ability to spread is limited by its location, e.g. surrounded by concrete on all sides; or
c) like a pot, sunken in the ground so it doesn’t invade everything in the vicinity.

And yet here is my chocolate mint, planted in the border, where it is clearly taking advantage of the fact that there is plenty of space all around for it to spread, even into the lawn.

To be honest, I actually don’t mind it growing into the lawn. Whenever Graham cuts the grass in that area, the air smells divine.

If there’s one thing that this spring has inspired in me, it’s that we need more spring flowering bulbs and perennials in the garden. All around us there are tulips, hyacinth, phlox and daffodils in bloom. We have some dwarf tulips and grape hyacinths in our back yard, but nothing flowering out front.

These double daffodils are growing a couple of streets over at a friend’s home. They seem like more than double blooms, actually. They’re very frilly. Aren’t they pretty?

Join

Gardeners, plant and nature lovers can join in every Sunday. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information.