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.