Year End Round up

We had a cold spring and a late start which made seeding vegetables a bit dismal this year. Our garlic was the first success, it came up beautifully as soon as the snow melted. We planted some rapini and peas in early April and the rapini did well- the peas not so much. Last year we had squash vines running everywhere so we opted to build a trellis that could support peas in the spring and squash later in the season. Well as every gardener knows plants don’t always do what we hope for- after several seeding attempts the peas finally emerged in June and enjoyed the trellis for most of the summer. The squash seedlings on the other hand all sulked and never grew above 6 inches.

 In April we received news that we were the recipients of an Edible Community Garden Grant from Tree Mobile and Orchard People! Our food hedge (aka fedge) got a big boost with the addition of a Juliet cherry shrub tree, a gooseberry bush, 2 haskaps (1 Borealis, 1 Cinderella for cross pollination), a number of strawberry plants, 10 asparagus crowns, and some sorrel and hyssop. We also received some rhubarb and raspberry canes from a gardening friend and along with our serviceberry, white currant and black raspberry canes, our fedge is starting to fill in!

 

 

Our other big project for this year was the creation of a pollinator garden.This was the main project that we asked for support from the Parkdale and Toronto Horticultural Society. We had a location and design laid out but as we started to dig the bed we heard from the neighbour to the west that he had plans to do some work along the property line that would impact the area we hoped to use. We had concerns that anything we planted would be in danger of being damaged during the construction.So we put that plan on hold until the work was finished. Sadly the work never even started so we were stalled for most of the summer. We went ahead and purchased a yard of soil which we stored in bins and over the season we acquired many pollinator friendly plants. We built small extensions on 2 of the raised beds to accommodate some of them and the rest lived happily in pots for the summer awaiting their permanent home

 Lindsay digging the pollinator bed!

Janis and Nadia had a fantastic time at the Hort Sale in May, chatting with members and getting advice as well as some plants! They came home with some Sweet Cicily, a rubekia and a lily among others

 

Nancy and I went to the High Park Native Plant sale at the end of Aug and brought home a lovely assortment of plants from our wish list, including Cardinal flower, Great blue lobelia, wild bergamot, wild columbine, sky blue aster, and butterfly milkweed. We also picked up a blue flag iris to plant near the makeshift pond we created from the neighbour’s sump pump overflow. A pond was one project that wasn’t in the plans but since our water sources are weather dependent it made sense to capitalize on a relatively constant source of water and use it in a beneficial way.

By September when it was clear that no work was going to be done next door we roughly dug out the rest of the planned pollinator bed and filled it with the soil we had set aside. We wanted to make sure that the plants we lovingly collected all summer had time to get established before the cold hit. Heather attended an In the Zone event and brought home a few more plants.

 

Most of the vegetables we planted did fairly well- we had a bumper crops of both green and yellow bush beans that lasted all summer. We had loads of tomatoes too. Things that didn't fare as well were squash- we got none, zucchini, again none. We seem to be challenged in the cucurbit dept.

But there's always next year!