Weekly Walk July 29 2009

My corner of the Earth is so lush right now! It seems things are coming faster than I can photograph and/or eat them!

Hostas

There are wild flowers as well as things I have planted.

lots of wild Asters

 

This below is Engleman’s Ivy, and grows everywhere around here. I think it is spectacular! Its form is lovely during spring and summer and fall, in summer it gets clouds of blooms and then in fall turns a stunning red.

Black Raspberries are spreading, sown by the birds every year as they sit on fences.

These grow all over in the grass, hugging the ground and avoiding the mower. I love to see a subtle carpet of them on the lawn.

 

Don't know what these are, but they are sure weird and wonderful!

These fill the creek during summer, and don't always bloom. This year we are in luck, although they seem to be blooming at different times rather than en masse as before.

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Plant Lady

Vegetable Garden Project Completed!

Well, we finally finished the raised bed portion of the new veggie garden, which we have been calling phase 1. What a big undertaking it has been – like most of my landscaping projects it was more work and money than I planned on, but I am glad we stuck with it! The next phase is to put grape vines and raspberries in the other half of the field, where it is still that unrepaired from the ploughing.

Here is phase 1 of the project from start to finish:

A lonely little paddock dreams of being a garden.

The farmer ploughs the paddock.

We spend countless hours repairing the soil surface in preparation for building the beds.

We build and place each raised bed as we prepare a spot for it, and I plant my seeds in each as I get the soil prepared.

We place landscape fabric and bark chips on all the paths between the beds.

I start eating lettuce, spinach, radishes (a surprise bonus plant from a “spicy salad mix” of greens), chives, chard and the spicy salad mix of strange and definitely spicy greens.

Some plants go to seed so that I can save the seeds as part of the Seed To Seed Challenge hosted by One Green Generation.

Other plants are not identifiable yet – I don’t know if they are weeds or the seeds I planted! Next year I shall mulch any open spaces without seeds so that it is clear what is something that I have planted and what is something that grew by itself. I did notice that one common weed I could identify was covered in aphids while the veggies have none. I left lots of those weeds in the beds as free integrated pest management!

 I have not watered any of the beds and don’t intend to – I want to see what is tough enough to succeed without coddling so next year I make my life easier and only plant those types.

I noticed that some boxes in general grew better than others and I think this was due to the timing of the seed planting. The very earliest and the very latest beds don’t have much happening at all, which I think was from rotting before they could sprout in the earliest sowings, and from being beat out by the competing weeds before they could really get going in the latest sowings. I will be planting ALL my seeds on the optimum days for that next year based on this year’s research.

All in all, phase 1 is a success! Phase 2 begins soon….

Plant Lady

Weekly Walk July 22 2009

As the puppy dragged me about the farm, I managed to snap a few pictures this week. And do a lot of stumbling….er….jogging too!

I think this is also a type of Vetch, it grows everywhere all over the farm, intertwining with everything around it. The patterns of the leaves and the stems are so elegant when you look up close, but from farther away it is just a tangled blob and has no real impact because the flowers are so small.

 

 

 If you get wounded while lost in the counbtryside, you can cover the wound with a burdock leaf and then use the long stems of the vetch to bind the leaf to you.

 

 

 

 The Joe Pye Weed has formed a big patch, although it is hard to get too close to it and take some photos. Hmm, maybe I need a new lens…

 

       I planted a Clematis Tangutica about 4 or 5 years ago, and for the first time, there are some flowers! I am thrilled, and hoping that next year it might even grow up the side of the little garden shed it is beside.

An Ontario wildflower I am quite fond of is the Queen Anne’s Lace. It fills the roadsides and fields, and can be quite beautiful when viewed up close although in Ontario we seem to take it completely for granted.  It really does remind you of lace!  Sometimes the buds are tinged with a pink blush but they lose this as they open and become snow white. They are generally about 2 inches in diameter, but sometimes they can reach 6 inches across! The one I photographed here was about 4 inches wide, so quite large. Please don’t take my word for it alone, but someone told me you can eat the roots if you are lost in the wilds.

 
At the end of the day of my walk, I saw a bat flitting about in the sky with the moon as a backdrop and couldn’t resist trying to capture his picture.

Plant Lady