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.

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.