The planting season has started.

If the weather holds up we will be starting the planting of our garden this weekend. Emily will be doing up several containers with carrots and onions. It is a bit early, but, I have several packages of carrots and onions so I won't be upset if they don't germinate.

We have started to clean up the containers after the long winter and cut back the sedum and savoury and then added more soil to the top of each container. Several containers have soil three years old so I will be going through them and using them to top dress the lawn area and refill with fresh soil (high in peat moss this time).

One of the plants that may be put in this year is dill. I grew it several years ago and it does do well in planters and was over 2 meters in height before I harvested the seed. Jane picked up several packages of snap dragon seeds and we will be putting those along the house wall and outside fence area where there is a bit of soil to cover up the area that is not covered by the concrete pavers.

When I have finished the weekend plantings I will udpate the diagram showing what is planted where.

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.

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.