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.

Winter is almost here

It is still 'summer', at least for temperatures here in Ottawa. The garden has been cleaned out (early) and is almost ready for the winter. We had to do this as the backyard fence was being repainted and we needed to remove the tomatoes and other plants for the painters. In November i will be setting up the planters for their winter covering with burlap until next spring.

This year in a word... Disappointing

This year has been less than a great year for our garden. The tomatoes didn't produce anywhere near what we had last year. I was lucky on one plant to get three small containers of cherry tomatoes and the Roma has produced about that much so far this year too. Last year one plant produced a small container a day.

The flowers themselves are not doing too bad and the herbs are producing a nice crop, just not as much as prior years.


The geraniums and impatiens are doing quite well and look great. The sedum is starting to flower and should be specatular in a few more weeks.

In a few more weeks I will be starting my fall clean up and preparing my containers for winter again.