Planning for 2007 gardening season.

It has been a while since I last updated the blog. There is really not much to do here in Ottawa during the winter other than reviewing what I did last season and what I want to do this coming season. Jane and I have been discussing what we want to see in the garden for the 2007 season now so that when the plants are in the stores we know what we want and where.

The first decision is to plant only geraniums along the fence line. They have done well in prior years and are tolerant of the heat and drying out there. We are planning six planters on the fence and each planter will contain three geraniums. We are looking at planting white and red alternating. If the savoury survives the winter we will be keeping that too. One thing that we will not be planting this year are tomatoes. It was nice, but, we were too successful and the plant took over too much space that several other planters needed.

One other thing is that we are slowly cutting back on the ornamental plants and are looking at more edible plants and herbs. Emily will be getting several planters for herself and we expect that she will want onions, carrots and beans again this year.

When I get time I will be drawing up the proposed layout for this year and I will scan it in so you can see what we are going to try to do this year.

2006 - November - Winterizing part 2

So far our fall has been warm and nice so I left off the last part of preparing my containers for winter. Even though they are calling for above normal temperatures it is now time to finish the winter preparations.

I moved all of the containers to the east side of the back yard. There are two rows of planters. The back row is for planters that I don't have anything of value in and I don'tmind if they don't come back next year. The front row are the ones I am interested in. Specifically the top layer of planters. The two I am wanting to keep is the winter savoury and the sedum (left hand side of the photos). I placed a cover of burlap over these to help keep various bits of debris off, but, allows water to flow through.

During the winter we keep shoveling snow out of the rest of the yard and cover the planters in this snow. This allows us to protect all of the plants using what nature provided us for free. I try to keep at least 75 cm (2.5 feet) of snow on the top and about 50 cm (1.5 feet) as a border around the outside perimiter. The only problem is when we don't get a lot of snow. I normally go outside the back fence and pull in a few loads of snow to keep the plants covered.

This is what we have been doing in the back yard for the past eight years and it works for us. It is simple and easy to do. The only expense was for the burlap. In the spring I wait until all of the ice has melted before uncovering the planters and set them out along the window well and wall to take advantage of the spring sun and heat.

It is hard to tell, but, on the right hand side of the photos we have a large green garbage pail. For the planters that we didn't want to over-winter we dumped the soil into this pail. The upside is that we let the soil dry out a bit and then put the garbage pail lid back on. In the spring we have a ready source of dry soil that we can then top dress the various planters that over-wintered. For the soil that we didn't keep we did not throw it out. The soil that didn't get saved went to the side of the house to top dress the grass and we put it around the Spirea that is outside the fence. All soil is used and we don't ever throw it out.

2006 - October - winterizing step 1

For the last couple of nights we have had a bit of frost. That is our hint that winter is not far away and we should be starting the clean up and winterizing of our container garden.

The first major task was to remove the tomato plants and harvest what we can. We picked three containers of tomatoes (photo 1). The removal of the tomato plants and cleanup is a semi-dirty job. If you have a pair of work gloves I would recommend that you use them or you will be having fun cleaning the green stain from your hands afterwards. The rootballs were quite small and it took only minimal effort to remove from the planters, it also helped that this year we mixed a lot of peat moss in the soil mix too.




The yard is now starting to look a bit bare with our 'jungle' removed. Next year we will not be putting in tomatoes again. As much as we like them the space they take up can be used for a lot of other plants and/or herbs/spices.


This is the first step we take to prepare our planters for winter. The next step later on is to physically move all of the planters to the east side wall (along the fence in the last two photos) and then cover them up for the winter. A future blog will be written (with photos) to show what we do to protect our plants from the effects of an Ottawa Winter.