Garden Bloggers' Fling, 2015

I'd been aware of the annual Garden Bloggers' Fling since the first one, back in 2008 when it took place in Austin, Texas. I didn't think I'd ever get the chance to go to one, but when I realised that this year's was in Toronto, I jumped at the opportunity.

I wasn't disappointed. The event was superbly well organised and in total we visited 30 gardens and parks in the three days that I attended. Those doing the optional Niagara excursion on the fourth day would have seen even more. It was a real pleasure to spend time with so many passionate gardeners and designers. I feel like I have learnt a tremendous amount and have definitely made some new friends.

It's hard to know where to begin with describing the Fling: there was so much crammed in to the three days. I'll just pick out a few themes from the 563 (!) photos I took.

There was an interesting variation of scale, from the huge formal garden of the Aga Khan Museum

 to the intimate gardens of Cabbagetown, once home to Irish immigrants.

The Toronto skyline was ever-present throughout the Fling, either up close when we headed by ferry to the Toronto Island gardens on Friday,

or glimpsed from a distance as it was from the Aga Khan Museum

and from the Hugh Garner Co-op roof garden.

This coming weekend is the Peony Festival in Oshawa, and peonies were a noticeable feature in many of the gardens we visited. From the subtle and understated,

to the bold and beautiful,

and the downright outrageous.

There were a lot of Alliums around, too,

The importance of pollinators was another theme of the Fling: we learnt about the Fairmont Royal York's rooftop garden and bee hives on Friday and at the Toronto Botanical Garden on Sunday we were told to plant up our containers to 'attract guests'  like this honey bee who was busy visiting the salvia 'May Night' at the TBG.

We saw some interesting human-made objects, too, in the course of the Fling. I completely fell in love with the reclamation work going on at the former Don Valley Brick Works, where an industrial site has been turned into a fascinating space for people and wildlife. The 'Watershed Consciousness' artwork on the site is amazing.

I also (inevitably!) loved the way that archival images have been used to tell the story of the site's past.

You don't need a lot of space to make effective use of objects. I'm not generally a huge fan of garden art (or of city skylines, now I think about it) but I did rather like this little elephant in a Cabbagetown garden.

All in all, this has to be one of the most exhausting three days I've had. It was packed full of sensory, social and learning experiences; I will be thinking about this event for days and months to come. A hearty thanks to the Toronto Fling Committee for all their hard work!

Killing frost

The good news is that the 20 greenhouse tomatoes are still going strong

It's a different story out in the barnyard, however. The weather took an unpleasant dip below freezing on Saturday May 23rd, leaving all the tomato plants looking like this at 7.00am:

And by the time the sun had warmed them up, they all looked like this:

This, dear reader, is a dying tomato. Today, all that's left of it is a sad little pile of brown.

I still had a few of my excess plants left, which I've been selling from my mini farm stand at the front of the house. In fact, a woman bought 30 dollars-worth on Saturday afternoon. She's a regular customer, so I couldn't say no, but my heart was breaking a little bit as I saw her leave with 70% of my remaining plants. This left me with just eight to replace the 40-odd I had lost.

I have sown some more, in a spirit of optimism, and have also pinched out side-shoots of some of the greenhouse plants, in the hope that they will root and be useful to fill some of the gaps.

I also discovered a couple of volunteer tomato seedlings growing in the pepper bed, so I have recruited them to the cause as well.

Then I remembered noticing some other stray tomatoes in the front garden: they must have grown from the worm compost I spread there in the spring. Sure enough, there was a respectable crop of baby tomato plants growing in among the flowers there. I dug them up and potted them into a seed tray. At this rate I will soon be over-run with tomato plants again. ;-)

Of course I have no idea what variety these little plants are, but they will all be from last year's fruit, so should all be heirloom types. I can't think of a better argument for growing heirloom plants and for home composting than this!

The frost was forecast - in a rather last-minute way - but the night before was very windy, so putting any sort of protection in place wasn't easy. I managed to cover up the corn and squash plants with plastic, but even with that layer, most of those died, too. They were only sown a week or two ago, so won't be as difficult to replace as the tomato plants.

The brassica plants survived the frost, but even they have suffered some damage - I think the temperature was more like -2°C/28°F than the 0°C/32°F that was (eventually) forecast. Ah well, lesson learned: wait until June to be safe.

Garden in!

The Victoria Day weekend is the traditional one for putting tender plants in the garden, but I was slightly nervous of doing so when I saw that the temperature was going to drop to 4°C/39°F in the coming week. I went ahead anyway, and the next time I looked at the weather forecast it had changed to 7°C/45°F - so with any luck all will be well.

It's been a madly busy week in the lower vegetable garden, which has only just dried out and warmed up after the cold Spring. There has been a lot of weeding and manuring leading up to the last two days when I've been putting in the tomato, corn, squash and brassica seedlings which had been growing on in the greenhouse. Last year I lost most of the cabbages to rabbits. so this year I'm experimenting with scattering some ground-up dried cayenne peppers around them as a deterrent. 

The tomatoes are all in the ground and surrounded by a mulch of grass-cuttings.

In the much drier upper vegetable garden I'm experimenting with some grain crops this year: barley, oats and wheat. The idea is to become a bit more self-sufficient in grain for the chickens in the future, but I imagine that this year we'll probably just keep any grain we gather as seed for next year.

Spring, all of a sudden

 The weather has just taken a warmer turn, which is just as well, as I couldn't leave it much longer to transplant my peppers, eggplants and tomatoes from the warmth of the house. I spent a happy hour in the greenhouse on Monday, potting everything on. 100 tomatoes, 33 peppers and 12 eggplants are all now in greenhouse beds or in pots waiting to go outside once the soil is warm enough. It will be some weeks before that is true!

On Saturday I was up early for a long drive to Kitchener. I had to stop on my way out of the County to grab this scene: this is at Carrying Place, with the Bay of Quinte in the distance. It was a magical moment, just before the sun came up.

The chickens are really enjoying being able to run around in the orchard again. The older Buff Orpington rooster keeps his distance from the younger one (who is Top Bird at the moment), but the Welsummer rooster doesn't seem to have any disputes with the other two. I usually resist naming the chickens, but this one looks like he should be called Kelloggs, don't you think?

Ice out

'Ice out' is when a lake is clear of ice after the winter. Usually it happens to 'our' lake at around the time of the Spring Equinox, but last year and this year it's been April before all the ice has melted. We had high winds the other night and they must have been responsible for the huge piles of drift-ice that have washed up in places along the edge of the lake. I've never noticed this happening before, but they are really quite something to see!

Spring progress report

It is beginning to get warm enough for me to get started on the Spring jobs. Looming largest in my thoughts was the need to empty the chicken enclosure of the accumulation of winter litter. But I couldn't do that until the chickens were willing to spend some time outside. They aren't happy about walking in the snow, so I needed most of the snow to be gone before I could contemplate the task.

Here's the orchard on March 26th:

Still fairly snowy: the Buff Orpingtons were willing to brave the conditions, but none of the other breeds fancied leaving the coop.

By yesterday most of the snow had gone and the birds were spending their time outside. Here they are this morning. There was a light scattering of snow overnight, but not enough to bother them.

It took two hours of shovelling to get the barn free of the woodchips and chicken detritus of the winter. And there was a rat's nest. With baby rats in it. I won't say any more about that...

The resulting chicken manure heap is huge! You can see that there's still quite a lot of snow behind it.

There are some signs of life in the greenhouse. These seedlings are coming up in the bed where I sowed peas. They're clearly not peas, but I'm hoping they are something edible, so I'll leave them for now.

It's suddenly a lot easier to walk up past the barns, with the snow going. There is still a lot of ice in places - this patch along the fence line is a good ten inches thick!

I was actually quite grateful for the continued cold weather, as our fridge went wrong on the 25th of March and was out of action for  a week. I put our cool box into service and stationed it on the porch. Fortunately the weather stayed at fridge temperature for the whole week, so we didn't have any problem keeping things cold.

It wasn't the most convenient location for a fridge, but having all the food out on the porch did turn out to be a very effective deterrent against snacking!

Springing up

The snow is going...so slowly...but it is going.

Outside enough has melted to reveal some bulbs starting to emerge.

 On the living room windowsill I've got a small army of herbs growing. I'm hoping to take these to the Seedy Saturday event in Trenton in a few weeks.

I've dug my way through to the greenhouse from the small barn and have sown peas, parsnips, lettuce, leeks and some onions in one of the beds in there. The water is still frozen, so currently the most effective way of watering the seeds is to dig up more snow from outside and sprinkle it over the bed. Effective but not necessarily easy!

Regular February service

February seems determined to compensate for a relatively snowless January. It's been cold too, with an average temperature so far of -14°C/7°F (the month usually averages -6°C/21°F here). The temperature hasn't been above freezing since January 24th, and isn't forecast to do so in the next two weeks.

I seem to have spent a lot of time digging out the driveway and my 'eggs' sign: it's a bit of a miracle that the chickens are still laying (some of them have even gone broody in the last month!).

I'm reading Naomi Klein's book about climate change, This Changes Everything at the moment. I'm sure that this cold spell is one of those unexpected side effects of global warming, but right now I'm finding it hard to get upset about the idea of a bit more warmth in my life!

Excursion

Last winter was so snowy that the chickens didn't get outside for a solid three months. I'm looking back at last January's posts and remembering how horrendous it was. There is snow on the ground now, but only a few inches and there is even some grass visible at the moment. When it's very cold or windy I don't open up the back of the barn for the chickens, but today is milder and some of the hens ventured out to take the air.

The lake has been looking very pretty, reflecting back some clear blue skies of late.

 

But it's difficult to walk along our western fenceline at the moment, which is just a solid sheet of ice.

Ontario feijoada

I love dishes which combine meat and beans: cassoulet, Boston baked beans, any kind of slow-cooked meat and beans. When I read about the Brazilian national dish, feijoada, in Jamie Oliver's new book Comfort Food, I had to try it, particularly as I had some leftover pork belly slices which I didn't use at Christmas and the remains of a smoked pork picnic shoulder joint. Not to mention a load of the black beans I harvested this year! The end result was lovely: garlicky, rich and definitely worthy of the comfort food label. I had to adapt the recipe to suit my available ingredients and I'm noting them here for future reference, as this is a dish I guarantee I'll be making again.

Ingredients (serves 4)

Stage One
2 cups black beans, soaked for at least 5 hours
1 ham bone, stripped of meat
1lb/450g pork belly slices (with rind)
4 cups water

Stage Two
1 onion, diced
2 tsps smoked paprika
9 inch chorizo sausage, sliced into 1-inch lengths
Any leftover ham, sliced into small pieces
5 cloves garlic, crushed
salt & pepper

I used my pressure cooker for the first stage: slice the pork belly pieces into narrow strips and fry them until golden. Add the beans, water and ham bone and cook at high pressure for 15 minutes. (If using a regular pan, cook for an hour, or until the beans are tender.) Then remove the bone and transfer everything else into an ovenproof dish with a lid, with the remaining ingredients. Cook at 300°F/150°C for four hours (or use a slow cooker if you have one). By the end of the cooking time, most of the liquid should have been absorbed or evaporated, leaving a thick, glossy coating on the beans and meat. Serve over brown rice.

Coup in the coop

After several months when the two Buff Orpington roosters seemed to get along just fine, each with his own little harem of hens, there was a big fight the other week and now the younger of the two is Top Bird. The Welsummer rooster, one of the 'hens' I bought this year, doesn't seem to have been affected by this change in status of the other two.

We had a few days with snow on the ground when the chickens wouldn't go out, so I tried a trick I read somewhere of hanging up a cabbage for them to peck at while they're cooped up indoors. They didn't know what to make of it until I cut a small wedge out. Then they got the idea and they seem to have enjoyed it!

The Ameraucanas are happier about going out in an inch or two of snow than the Orpingtons. It's funny how the one white Ameraucana doesn't look particularly white when you see her against the snow.

The snow has nearly all gone now, so all the chickens have been enjoying being out in the orchard over the past few days.

It's supposed to get quite warm on Christmas Eve (8°C/46°F!), but we might get snow on Christmas Day, as a storm moves through and pulls in colder air from the north. Like the chickens, I will be quite happy watching it from inside.

December harvest

The temperature is forecast to drop to -11°C/12°F tonight, so I seized the opportunity of digging up some Jerusalem artichokes while I still could!

There isn't much left growing in the greenhouse, but I did get three bok choi plants and some coriander for our evening meal. The chickens are finally getting their act together, with a respectable clutch of six eggs today. We have eight nest boxes but for some reason they only lay in two of them - and they aren't adjacent. Who knows how a chicken's mind works?

I've spent the last couple of weeks taking advantage of some of the milder days by digging over the beds in the lower vegetable garden and adding chicken manure to two of them. This year, for the first time, I'm covering the beds with a winter mulch.

I had some leaves bagged up from 2013 and there is still a fair bit of old hay in the big barn, so I've used both on different beds, as a mini experiment to see how it goes. I'm hoping it will suppress at least some of the early weed growth in the spring.

First snow

Today was the first day that the new hens had seen snow on the ground. They peeked out at it but decided that it wasn't something they wanted to investigate at close quarters.

We've been getting a few more eggs of late - two or three of the Ameraucanas have been laying for a month now, and this week we got the first dark brown egg from one of the Barnevelder or Welsummer hens. The Ameraucanas lay a double-yolked egg every so often - the one on the left of this photo, much bigger than the one on the right, will probably have two yolks.

The snow is very pretty, but I'm not sure I'm mentally prepared for winter yet...