Major change coming for the back yard.

 We received notice that the condo corporation will be redoing our fences in September.  Something that should have been done years ago as the posts have been rotting and last year we were concerned that it would fall over during a storm and take out the gas regulators in our yards.  They did a quick fix, but they put wood directly into concrete.  The concrete was also well below grade and covered by soil which isn't good for the longevity of the fence.

It will require us to move all the plants (in containers) and the patio stones at least 5 feet (1.5 meters) away from the current fence line.  With that project it gives me the opportunity to create raised beds.  Permanent plantings with trellises and if I plan it properly the various hooks can be placed to have hanging baskets so that we have a variety of plantings and colours.  We will be visiting the various home centers to look at materials for raised beds along with the associated costs.  

We will still have containers at the front of our place and for the back deck and for the eight poles.

Another bonus is that I will be able to plan a proper layout for the outdoor Christmas lights where I can quickly and easily access.  Also, with permanent raised beds I don't have to move and store the various planters making my fall cleanup much, much easier.  With the raised beds I will have a number of large concrete pavers and I will be using that to raise the two sheds up a few inches.  That will help me in the winter when I clear the snow as no matter how good I clear the yard, ice seems to build up in front of each door making it a chore getting in to take out the garbage, recycling and composting bins every week for pickup.

I will be heading out soon with a tape measure, paper and pencil to lay out the dimensions and placement of the raised beds, a small brick path between the fence and beds and the quantity of materials to create the beds.  Like my back deck project it will be done up on the computer so I have a record of what was done.  My wife is looking forward to this project as she has ideas on plants she would like to see instead of annuals every year.

2024 planning

My wife and myself have been having discussions on what we will be doing this year for the planters and baskets.

For the front, which is south facing we will be going with ornamental grasses, geraniums and drought tolerant plants.  It gets the sun most of the day and the house wall means it gets very hot and dries out quickly even with me watering twice a day.

In the backyard we are doing the impatiens again.  They seem to like the location and if they grow like the last three years they will be well over 50 cm in height giving us a massive corner of green and colour.  The fence between us and our neighbour will have the hanging boxes, but only ivy this time.  Geraniums in the boxes didn't do very well.  For the various hanging planters we will be a light-weight mix with lots of peat moss.  Flowers will be mostly geraniums as they last all season.  The only exception will be a small container with a few herbs.  I use a lot of herbs cooking and fresh herbs are nice.

We will probably cut back on the number of planter boxes though.  They took up a lot of room in a small yard and the wife would like a bit more room for our folding table and chairs so she can sit outside and enjoy the yard unlike last year where it was quite crowded.

One other item is that we are not planting tomatoes and sweet peppers.  Even with the mesh protection, various animals seemed to get in and enjoyed the products before we could harvest them.

Preparation for 2019 gardening season

Now is the time we start looking at what we are going to plant for the season.  My wife and myself start discussing what worked well in prior years, how the backyard was laid out and what supplies we will need for the coming year.  We also start stocking up on some of the supplies we need as the stores are now starting to put out gardening materials.

Last year was a hard one on the plants.  It was so hot that most plants struggled even with watering multiple times of the day.  The planters where we had peat moss mixed in did better as the soil could hold a bit more water than the black earth mixes.

The plantings I had hung on the wall need a mix that is much higher than peat moss and varieties that are heat and drought resistant.

The pots I stacked vertically worked well and that will be repeated.  The clay pots did the best vs the plastic pots.  My wife like them as she got a waterfall of green and colour that she could see from the living room.  She has mobility issues and it is a struggle for her to get out into the back yard so I have been going more vertical with the plantings and picking varieties that grow tall so that the living room window is a window to a wall of colour.

I found that the dollar store trellises worked very well.  I hung it sideways below the top of one fence with hooks and then hung small pots from that.  Part of the plantings died as I didn't use enough peat moss and the plants I chose were for colour only and they were not drought tolerant as the pots dried out quickly.  This year it will be a peat moss mix with plants that can handle the heat and being drier.

What to plant for spring 2018

That is the question my wife is asking me.  We are planning to buy a house this year and we are wanting to limit the number of planters we put in.  It needs to be in light weight containers and can take abuse when we do move them.  That means a soil mix that is mostly peat moss and then plants that like that type of soil.  It is also a good time to go through our old plastic pots and then recycle those that are starting to wear out and then buy new ones when we get a new place.  We also will be planting varieties that can grow in full light, partial light and low light as we won't know which way the yard will face.

Herbs and spices should be OK as I normally put them into smaller and portable pots.  I think geraniums will do well in most conditions and in prior years the planters on the fence line were almost 50% peat moss.  I am hoping the sedums will take the move OK as those planters are quite big and heavy.

It is early (very early), but, I started my initial grass seeding on the west side of the house.  This location is protected on three sides and open to the south.  It gets quite warm there and the grass is already green and growing so it may be safe to start seeding there.  I have been doing this for the last several years and slowly we are getting grass to grow there.  Initially it was a very sandy and rocky soil that had only weeds growing and when my potting soils were exhausted I spread it out there and raked it in.

Summer of 2016 - so far so good

This year is going well for the backyard plantings.  So far the tomato plant is doing well and I don't see any problems with the tomatoes that are on the plant.  It has been a dry year, but, the mix I use has a good bit of peat moss in it to help hold the water.  I have done two cuttings and drying of herbs so this year I will have many bottles to last me for the winter.

My wife is looking forward to the sweet peppers as she didn't get to enjoy the garden much last year due to being in the hospital.

The strawberries were a surprise again.  This is the third year being in the planter and I never expected it to survive the first winter let alone a second one.  I picked about 15 strawberries from the one plant that flowered.

Sweet peppers are liking the weather and if everything matures I should be getting a dozen peppers per plant.  The peat moss mixed in the soil seems to be what is helping as the soil has stayed moderately moist without being overly wet.

Looking forward to the 2016 growing season

Now that Christmas is over and we have snow on the ground I am starting the process of figuring out what we want for the backyard this year. I figure on the following:

• Geraniums on the top of the fence.  Nice colour and greenery.
• Sedums in the boxes.  If they survive winter they make nice green cover and in the autumn nice pinkish coloured flowers.
• Rosemary if it survives the winter here in the house.  Right now it looks a bit stressed due to the dry air, but, I hope it survives.
• Sage, savoury, thyme, basil, oregano.  Basic spices for when I cook.  They are also easy to dry and bottle.
• Sweet peppers.  They did quite well the past season in a 2x2 box as long as they got a good watering every day.  Peat moss mixed in with the standard potting soil helped retain water.
• Snapdragons.  The wife loves the colours and they last fairly long.  This time though I will mix in peat moss as the boxes did trend to dry out as they were in the sun all day long.
• Impatiens for part of the fence line that is shaded most of the day.

Along the fence line on the ground we are looking for shade tolerant plants as they don't get much sun during the day.

For the remaining planters we may put in a tomato plant (hopefully this year they don't rot out).  I have to do research to see if Brussel sprouts, brocolli and cauliflower can be planted in 2x2 boxes.  I would like to see if this is possible as the price of fresh vegetables this year is a bit insane and growing some fresh vegetables would be nice.

The remaining boxes (about six) will be for the wife and I suspect she will want something very colorful and long blooming so she has a nice oasis in the back yard.

One last thing I want to research is a watering system.  I see Lee Valley has some items that will allow me to fill a water container and then drip irrigate my plants.  This may be a real help on the hot sunny days where we can make sure our more important planters don't dry out.

2015 - Another season finished

This year was a bit underwhelming and disappointing for the garden.  The disappointing part is that almost every Roma tomato rotted on the vine.  It appears to have been the year for this as a number of other people in Ottawa commented on the same problem.  The underwhelming part was a bit personal.  A family emergency meant I was at the hospital for 58 days and my wife and myself didn't get to enjoy the yard at the peak.  The Rosemary did well and after I washed it off I brought it in and have it in the living room window (it faces south).

Now that everything has died back it is time to start cleaning and clearing.  Most of the pots I have a peat moss mix and I dumped most of the earth back into a large garbage pail to keep until next season.  A few of the other pots have soil about 2-3 years old and I spread that over the lawn as a quick-and-dirty top dressing for next year.  The pots have perennials will be moved into a pile near the south-east portion of the yard along our living room wall.  I use the empty pots upside down over most of the boxes to protect the plants and then cover it with a large tarp.  During the winter I cover it all with at least a meter of snow and that works well every year.

Start of the 2013 gardening season

It has been too long since I had anything to write here.  The new season has started and I am going with nine geraniums on the fence life for my wife on mother's day.  I don't buy her anything for valentines day and for mother's day I like to buy a lot of plants that will give her a whole year of enjoyment when she is sitting in our back yard.

I am starting only with geraniums as they are fairly hardy and environment Canada is forecasting a low of around 0c this week.  Next week we will be going out to the garden centres and picking up enough plants to fill around two dozen planters.  The theme colour this year will probably be bright red with white.

Hint to all of those guys who are reading this;  rather than buying cut flowers for your significant other why don't you pick up a potted plant and put it into a container for the whole growing season.  My wife loves this and she gets to show off our garden to neighbours  friends and family for the whole year.

The next thing we have to figure out is what other plants we are putting in.  It looks like the dill from last season self-seeded so we will probably keep that.  I am leaning towards cherry tomatoes (red colour again) as they go well in salads along with green onions.  In a few more weeks our rosemary will be moved to the outside after I give it a severe pruning.  The winter savoury did survive the winter, but the oregano and thyme for some reason didn't.  I like those three spices as I cut them fresh and crush them up into a pan with mushrooms, onions and butter on the BBQ when we are grilling.

Dill and bugs again.

This year we decided to try planting dill again.  For a while it looked good, but, one day I noticed that the plant didn't look very healthy. When I had a closer look we could see about 6 green and black caterpillars having a great time chowing down on the plant.  We manually picked them off and then dusted around the plant diatomaceous earth.  That seems to have worked as for a week now we have not seen any more bugs and the plant now looks very healthy and starting to seed.  We like the plant as when it gets a bit wet we can smell dill in our living room.

The cherry tomato plant is doing very well and we have a good number of green tomatoes growing and a larger number of blossoms.  Hopefully in a week or two we will be getting fresh tomatoes every day.  The Savoury and Thyme are also doing very well and I will be doing a harvest of fresh herbs and drying them for the winter.

Dill

Cherry Tomato plan

Garden is smaller this year

As I noted in the prior post we were looking to buy a house so we didn't want to have a large garden.  Well things have changed a bit in that we are holding off for a while on buying a house.  We still have a garden, but, it will be much smaller this year.

So far we have dill plant in the north-east corner (by the living room window), a cherry tomato, basil, savory, oregano and a number of flowers.  Everything this year is easily transportable unless the tomato plant decides to grow to major proportions like prior years so if we do end up buying a house the whole garden can be easily transported.

We changed fertilizers this year.  Prior years we used miracle-gro and mixed it in the watering cans.  This year we bought the granular form and it only needs feeding every several months.  It will be interesting to see how this fertilizer works out, but, if it does this will make our lives a bit easier as I don't have to remember to feed the plants weekly.

This year may be a smaller garden

We are looking to buy a house and move during the summer (hopefully).  With that we are looking at scaling back our gardening so that what we plant can be easily moved from one place to another without fear of losing the plants.  The upside is most (actually all) of our plants are in planters, but, we have to keep in mind that they now must be transportable.  One of the considerations on the new place is that the back yard must be south facing like our current place.  Most of the places we have seen this was true, but, if not we are also looking for a place where we could transplant our garden to a front yard area.

When we do find a place it will be interesting to see how well the plants take the move and grow.

2010 was not a good year

I was not able to publish what I did this year as I was working on a project at work that took most of my time. From June until August I was working seven days a week 12-18 hours a day and that didn't leave me any free time to enjoy the garden.

This year I put in a tomato plant, but, for some reason the fruit started to rot as soon as it ripened and all I got were three tomatoes.  I eventually took out the plant.  Next year I may work with a cherry tomato plant. The other problem plant was the dill.  There was some critter that stripped each and every stalk of the leaves and seed heads.

When I get some spare time I will take a few photos of what did work (Sage and Rosemary had a great year).

Summer 2009 - The summer that wasn't

So far this year the garden has been almost a total bust. For most of the summer it has been cool and wet. The Blue Stocking Beebalm and the Alask Shasta Daisy has been a total disapointment. They grew up fairly spindly and much less overwhelming in their flowers and foliage. I don't know if this is because of the weather or their being in containers, but, we won't be planting them next year. The wild flowers Emily planted along with her carrots are quite nice. She has already had two meals from her carrots and there are enough for at least two more. This is quite suprising as the box is 30x30 cm.

The other major disappointment has been the Basil. I think the combination of the weather and the fact we planted it with the Sage meant that we only got two small harvest from it. Next year we will be planting it in its own container and change the soil mix to one based on peat moss. The rosemary, savoury and thyme are thriving in their own containers and we should get several more cuttings before the autumn frosts. The rosemary will be brought in and placed in the living room beside the south facing window. We have done this for the last several years and the plant survives and thrives there so we won't be changing that.

The sedums are almost ready to blossom and when they do I will be taking photos of what they look like this year. This will probably be the last year in the pot as they are starting to out-grow the pot and will need to be divided next spring into at least two pots.

Just a short note about the photo at the top. You can thank Emily for this one. She borrowed my camera and took this image. The only thing I had to do was resize the image. She is getting very handy with digital cameras, Linux, digicam and the GIMP.

Garden 2009

It has been a while, but, I finally now have a few minutes to talk about this years garden. During this month (May) we had to protect our plants twice because of frost. Don't spend a lot of money doing this as I found that the plastic drop sheets from the dollar store works quite well. We move all of the plants to beside the living room window, stick in a few bamboo stakes on the corners and drap the drop sheet over the plants. It worked quite well and in the morning nothing was damaged.

We are going with the same thing on the south side fence as last year. On the top we are planting red and white geraniums and along the bottom we are planting red and white impatiens. The two go together quite well. We are still working on all of the plantings for this year, but, so far we have put in Rosemary, Sage, Savoury, Basil and Oregano. Emily has planted a bit of carrots and wild flowers (from seed).

The sedum from last year came back and next spring we will need to divide the plant as it has almost out-grown the current pot. My next project is to edit the current photos of the garden and update the layout to show what is planted and where.

Summer End

Today is the last full day of summer and we have started to clean up the plants in the back yard. This year has been a bit of a disappointment, but, some plants did quite well (impatiens, rosemary, sedum, thyme and oregano). The Sedum is now flowering and is adding a nice splash of colour to the back yard.









The honeybees are also in full force. On the sedum alone I counted four bees at one time and the impatiens have two or more at a time collecting the nectar.










The winter savour is now flowering nicely and it will continue until it is covered in snow. Two weeks ago we brough in the rosemary plant and it should survive the winter nicely in the living room at the south side window.

We have started to clear out the various planters of dead growth and saving the potting soil in a container over the winter. Over the next few weeks we will be doing the remaining planters and saving as much of the soil as we can. When the pail is full I will be reusing the soil and top dress the lawn area.

Once all of the planters have been cleared out I will be starting the winterizing of the perenials and like last year we will be raking and saving the leaves in large garbage bags and placing them on the top and sides of the planters as insulation as that worked very well last winter.

Mid March

It is now the 16th of March. The last two snow storms dumped over 83 cm of snow in the backyard. I used part of it to cover our planters to protect them until the weather is warm enough. Over the course of this winter we have had almost 4 metres of snow fall. Outside of the fence we have two piles. The smaller is 150 cm high, 200 cm wide and about 300 cm deep. The largest pile is 150 cm high, 300 cm wide and about 400 cm deep. The nice part is that the grass will get a complete soaking this spring when it melts down and got excellent protection from the cold so I don't expect much winter kill there (for a change).

Why should we cover up the planters with the snow? Well the Ottawa airport it is reporting a temperature of -2c, but, our backyard faces south and has a fence on the three sides. Check out the second photo for the temperature. In the yard it is over 15c. I have a second thermometer in the shade showing a temperature of not much over 10c. If the planters were not covered with snow they would start to grow and the freezes overnight will eventually kill off all of the plants. When the pile gets down too much I will probably go outside of the fence and transfer more snow to cover and protect the planters until early April. With the bags of leaves over the planters and the snow on top the plants should survive the winter. Without the protection we would probably lose every plant in all of the planters. You can go out and buy foam covers and use them, but, why pay for that when you can use what nature provides (leaves & snow) for free?

Winterizing and snow storms

I finished off winterizing my containers just in time. On the weekend they forcasted a fairly major storm for Ottawa. I did a few things differently this year. Last year I piled the leaves on to the containers. That is great, except in the spring it is a royal mess to clean up. This year I put them in two large bags and then placed the bags on top of the containers. This still allows me to use them as an insulation layer, but, should be much easier to clean up in the spring. I then covered everthing with burlap and then used stakes at each corner of the area to sucure the burlap.

On Monday the storm dumped and with drifting I had over 50cm of snow covering the plants. The only plant showing was the sedum tops. I used the shovel and then covered all of the planters with an additional metre of snow so that everything is completely buried. Like prior years the planters are on the north east side of the yard so in the spring it will get the advantage of the sun and thaw out more quickly.

Over the winter we will be doing our planning for next year. The impatiens and geraniums will be coming back. They were a nice complement set along the fence in that the colours were almost an exact match and they bloomed for the whole season. They also were very low maintenance plants in that I only needed to water daily and feed bi-weekly.

This spring I will need to either split the sedum pot into two or thin them out again as the growth completely filled the container this fall. I will not plant tomatoes again. For some reason my tomatoes grow in excess of 2 metres in height and width and take over an area that I would like for a number of other plants. If you grow carrots use a sandy mix with a lot of peat moss. We did that this year and the carrots were large and tender. Two containers gave us over 4 kilograms of carrots.

May Garden

It was too nice to be inside for the past several weeks even with some of the really hot days so I haven't been updating this blog. The garden is completely in and is doing very well so far this season.

The Roma tomatoes from last year self-seeded and there are about 12 more plants growing in the gravel. I gave my in-laws one and it survived and is growing very well. Our neighbors wanted several and we transplanted 8 more that survived. I left about 3 in the ground and reorganized the planters around the area just in case they grow as high as last year.

The savoury and oregano (left hand picture) are growing very well and the oregano was trimmed back once already and the spices dried and bottled. The basil (right hand container in right hand picture) really likes being in a small container. The box is about 30x30cm and gets sun from noon hour until the end of the day. It was over 30cm in height before I trimmed it back and dried the basil.


The planters on the fence contains geraniums and are doing very well. Underneath them in the shadow are impatiens and the colours are the same as the geraniums and the two together are quite nice. When (if) I get time I will take photos so you can see what the combination looks like and what the whole garden area looks like.

2007 Garden Layout

Updated: 2007/03/18

We have started out layout of the garden this year. I am trying to use OpenOffice draw to do the layout and it is quite the learning experience. Once I got the hang of the basics it is quite easy to sketch out the yard and what I want to put where. We know that we want geraniums (1) on the south fence line so I dropped in seven objects on the fence. I drew in the rough sizes and positions of the various objects where we cannot put plants due to doors, gates, window wells etc. in purple. As we revise the plan I will update this blog with the decisions we made for our garden. I exported the document to JPG format, but, if anyone is interested I can make the OpenOffice document available for downloading.


2007/02/18 - We have made a few more decisions on the plants and the location of a few of the planters even though they don't have anything in them yet. I also worked a bit more on the scale and location of items.

Plants:
(1) Geraniums - 50x15 cm planter, quantity of 3 plants per planter.
(2) Rosemary - round planter, 50cm diameter, quantity of three.
(3) Sedum - 60x60 cm planter.
(4) Winter Savoury - 60x60 cm planter.

Fixtures:
(A) Sundial.