Winter is Coming

Fall is officially here, and the changing leaves confirm what I already know: patio season is coming to a close.

That sucks, but honestly I can’t complain about the summer season we had this year. COVID-19 is a beast, but having the capacity to host a small gathering outdoors has been a huge bonus – a blessing. And since the weather this summer was so spectacular, we were able to take advantage of our little outdoor oasis to spend physically distanced time with friends pretty much every weekend (and even on the odd weeknight) all season long.

This year’s garden was lush, too, and before it gets torn out for the winter, I just wanted to capture a quick photo of the out-of-control greenery we enjoyed all summer.

Not looking forward to shutting it down. 😦

Swamp Gardening

The red hibiscus in back is clearly bigger, but the yellow one is still flowering. I take that as a positive sign.

Remember that $300 I spent on plants to get my patio ready for summer? Yeah, I almost lost about 25 per cent of them last week!

I’m still not sure I was able to rescue them, but I think they’re now on the road to recovery.

The problem was with a set of three green planters that I bought last year.

I had bought the same set of planters about 3 years ago – only in black – and had been using them without issue. The planters are nice because they have a reservoir at the bottom that helps keep the soil damp. The reservoir has a small drain hole positioned to make sure water can escape if it gets too full.

When I bought those black planters, I don’t recall having to puncture that drain hole. It was just there. So I didn’t think to look when I bought the green planters two years later.

That was my mistake.

On Wednesday, I went outside to make sure everything was okay in my garden. It had been rainy for a few days and I assumed all the plants were getting enough water, but thought I should double-check.

Well, they certainly weren’t too dry. Water was pooling on top of the soil – this wasn’t good!

My yellow hibiscus was in the worst shape. The soil had become sludgy – like the quicksand you used to see on ‘70s TV shows (back in the days when quicksand was apparently a real concern for people.)

I made a couple of aborted attempts to upend the pots to check the drain hole. At this point I wasn’t even sure that was the problem, but the pots were way too heavy, and of course any effort to tip them sent mud sloshing onto my patio.

Clearly I was going to have to drain everything and re-plant. Thankfully, I had left a corner of my flowerbeds unplanted this year. That gave me the space I needed to dump the green planters out (after carefully removing the plants of course) and to repot the flowers.

The amount of water that came out was ridiculous, but at least starting from scratch gave me the opportunity to look at the drain hole and discover that, indeed, the hole was covered. It had been scored (for easy removal) but not punctured. The water I had been adding to these planters had nowhere to go!

Was the manufacturer trying to save money by getting the buyer to make their own hole?! The drain hole is pretty important – just knock the damn thing out when you’re making these pots…Argh!

I managed to repot all three of the green planters (after adding the drain hole) and the soil is still wet, but at least it’s no longer soupy. With the empty reservoir at the bottom, the soil should continue to drain.

I think I managed to rescue the plants before root rot set in. I’ll know better in the coming days if these plants survive, or whether I’ve lost a quarter of my 2016 crop.

Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Rodents in Unusual Spaces

As I write this, I’m sitting on a sunny deck, in the shade of an umbrella, any icy drink by my side, a cool breeze blowing and down-tempo beats urging me to put away the keyboard and take a lazy, Sunday afternoon nap. (I will resist temptation, for your sake, dear reader).

It’s been slow in coming, but summer finally arrived in Ottawa on Victoria Day weekend.

Actually, the fact that it dragged its heels a bit this year isn’t a bad thing. I wouldn’t have been ready had it arrived any sooner. I only just made it to the nursery on Friday to pick up this year’s batch of plants, and it wasn’t until Saturday evening that I got them all in place.

In fact, I didn’t even START de-winterize my deck until about two weeks ago – and that was an event in itself.

For the winter, I stack all my patio furniture and cover it with a tarp, pushing it up against the building where it stays relatively snow-free. I’ve been doing that for years now and it has always worked well.

This year, before I unpacked everything, I decided I needed to scrub the deck, and as I was preparing to do so, I moved the stack of patio furniture away from the wall and started to remove the tarp.

Not in a rush, I took the tarp halfway off and turned around to fill the bucket with water and environmentally-friendly cleaning product. As I turned back to the stack of furniture, I heard scratching behind me.

A raccoon was clawing at the PVC fencing, clearly in a panic to escape the enclosed deck space and get away from me. Given the potential for rabies, the feeling was mutual.

It seems he had been using the covered space as his home and, as I disturbed him, he climbed out from the pile of furniture and snuck around behind me.

I grabbed the garden hose and, standing where I could easily lock myself indoors if he charged me, started to spray the critter to encourage him to leave.

It took awhile – raccoons are not the most agile creatures – but eventually I chased him up the tree and out of my space.

He hung around as I continued my cleaning, and he watched as I destroyed his makeshift house. By the time I finished cleaning the deck and rearranging the furniture, it was clear that any hope he had of finding shelter on my patio had been wiped away.

I assume he has found a new home somewhere nearby, but it’s not my concern. What IS my concern is figuring out how to prevent him coming back next winter. I figure moth balls will be involved somehow.

Whatever… He’s gone and I’m focused on the present. My new goal: spend more time on the deck now that it’s pimped out for summer!! Who wants to join me?

Ta-dah! I give you this year’s patio. Hopefully these plants will quickly fill out the spaces between them. Add there are more impatients in the top right corner than show up on screen – they just have darker coloured blossoms.

Brown Thumb

Mother-in-law’s tongue

I always thought I had a green thumb. In the past, my houseplants have always done very well. but over the past couple of years, I’ve been seeing plant after plant fall ill and die.

It started about three years ago when I inherited a bunch of plants from my colleague who was moving overseas. It was great. I even got a nice oleander tree. Which promptly died. I’ve since lost most of the plants I inherited, including a mother-in-law’s tongue, which are supposed to be as hardy as they come. And a Bromeliad she gave me is about to kick the bucket now. I’m also worried about my jade plant. It’s getting kind of woody and I’m not sure what to do about it.

It’s not been all bad. I have some sort of little palm-type plant that seems to be very happy in the bedroom window, and my Christmas cactus is now lush after a few years of non-growth.

We did face a major loss while we were away in Asia, though – a big palm tree that had been doing rather nicely, plus a beautiful plant that Margotinto had given us as a thank you gift. But those deaths can’t be pinned on me. They just got over-watered – and maybe didn’t like the cooler house temp. We almost lost our big peace lily too, but I’ve cut it way back and what’s left seems to be doing okay. It should come back in a few years.

So it looks like we’re gonna need to invest in some new plants soon, but I don’t really want to spend the money before I figure out what’s gone wrong. I initially thought that maybe we had inherited some plant diseases when we inherited the last batch of plants, but now I’m suspecting it’s something much easier to explain. Since the trouble started about three years ago, when we moved into our house, it seems logical that the problem is simply that there’s not enough light. Yeah, there’s a big window on either end of the house, but the middle of the house doesn’t get any direct light – and who wants to have to keep all their plants in one place?!

Unfortunately, even the skylight doesn’t let in enough to keep a big floor plant alive.

So I’m thinking our next step will be to find plants that do well in low-light. That, and I need to make sure to fertilize on a regular basis. The Christmas Cactus really only took off after I started adding just a little liquid fertilizer to the weekly water. Trouble is, I’m not sure where to go to buy plants. I could go to Loblaws of Home Depot, but I figure those plants aren’t cared for very well and you really have no way of knowing how long they’ve been in the store either.

Maybe we’ll just wait until the spring when we fill our annual flower beds and then ask the nursery if they can recommend any houseplants.

Gardening Vers. 2.0

Our first go at a summer garden produced mixed results. Our impatiens and dusty miller are doing really well, as are our boxes of petunias – but the squirrels have decimated the rest. We’ve completely given up hope of ever producing usable herbs. And our begonias and New Guinea impatiens received pretty rough treatment as well. We’re left with only one remaining begonia.

With guests arriving soon, we both felt that our garden was an embarrassment. It looked positively empty. So off we trotted to the nursery to see what we could find to fill it up.

There wasn’t much left in terms of annuals, though. So the choice was pretty much made for us: we needed to try our hand at perennials. We scouted around quite a bit to find some flowering plants that would thrive in our partly shaded flower beds. And after much looking we finally found a few that suited our needs. We picked up:

• Bugbane – a taller plant that flowers in the early fall. The tag that came with the plant promised “great fall colour” and that sold us.
• Yellow Waxbells – which we’ve planted in front of the Bugbane. They won’t grow as tall and they flower in August/September with a pretty yellow flower.
• Two varieties of Heuchera – one is called Tiramisu (which has a greeny/yellow colour) and one is called Pinot Gris (which has more purple to it). Clearly we chose those plants based on food preferences. Just kidding – there was a nice lady at the nursery who recommended them to us for shady areas. They grow only about 1/3 as tall as the others and they also flower between August and October.

And of course, the best part is that, being perennials, we’ll never have to re-plant. We spoke to the people at the nursery and they told us all our choices were hardy plants and they told us what has to be done before snowfall (very little) – so we’re good to go. Along with our existing hydrangeas, we should have a nice recurring garden come the spring… assuming we can keep the squirrels at bay.

May Flowers

Yes, our deck needs to be painted – or at least washed – but at least we have pretty flowers to distract the eye! We went out this weekend and spent our savings on plants.

We’ve got petunias (purple and white) in the boxes along the railing, impatiens (light pink) and New Guinea impatiens (lighter pink) on the left side of the garden, begonias (Orange and Yellow) on the right side, Marigolds (orange/red) in a pot, and a few herbs to boot. Add in a hanging basket (not pictured) and the two hydrangeas we planted last year (one is growing really well and one is slow, but coming along) and we’re set for a colourful summer sipping mojitos on the deck.

Now we just have to cross our fingers and hope that Ottawa is done with frost for the season.

Cracks in the Foundation

Well, it looks like the foundation issue might be put on hold (sigh of relief). It seems the only major crack is in unit 8 and the owner is looking into having a crew come in to inject polyurethane into the wall. The leak was not constant – just  something that happened in the spring with the melting snow. So hopefully the injection approach will work to hold off major repairs for a year or two until we can build up money in our reserve fund.

We agreed to raise our condo fees a bit to start building up a pot, and one of our co-owners is also looking into our insurance policy to see if foundation repairs are covered. Fingers crossed.

In the meantime, I guess that means we won’t be excavating the decks this summer. Next up, Mel and I will have to decide on an approach to planting the flower beds. We had hoped to take a course through the city on what best to plant in your own backyard, but that course got canceled due to lack of interest. Too bad. We only had partial success last year. Oh well, we’ll have another go at it and we’ll post some pics once we do the planting – likely later in May.

Green Thumbs and Rainy Days

Decked out with flowers.

The weather has been very uncooperative lately. The weekend was a wash and any possibility of playing tennis or going running has been put on hold until the rains cease.

The weather isn’t all bad though. At least it’s helping bring our new garden along.

Last Thursday we went to a nursery and muddled our way through the purchase of plants and soil for our back deck. Gardening is new for both of us, so this is definitely a test. We managed to pick a few types of flowers and on Friday, before the rains started, got the hanging boxes mounted and the flowers in the soil – Petunias and Pansies and a few others that we don’t know the names of.

All in all, we’re happy with the look. We left one bed open for planting some herbs, and we still need to get a few more large pots for the floor – we’d like to get a hibiscus, and I want some begonias – but overall, very satisfied. We’re about one week into this great experiment and everything seems to still be alive, and growing from the nice moist soil.

Still, they’ve had enough rain now. As you can see we have a hose, so we don’t need nature to do all the work. And after all, don’t plants need sun and warm weather too? I know I do.