A noun. A verb. A blog.
It can be tempting to get out there on the first fine spring day and do some tidying. Resist the urge! You have very little to lose and much to gain from waiting. That blanket of dead foliage and tree leaves is protecting emerging plants from cold snaps – like the one we expect this […]
Today’s cold snap reminds us. Winter is coming! The first frost for Toronto statistically falls around October 29th. But when overnight temps dip into the low single digits, like now, we know that anything could happen. So today, in honour of Cathy’s In a Vase on Monday (IAVOM) over on Rambling in the Garden, I took pity on some […]
If you think of deadheading as a garden chore, it’s because you’re doing it too late! Doing it after the flowers fade gives you all the work and none of the benefits. In many cases, cutting flowers to enjoy indoors is actually a form of deadheading. Yes! And it often gives you exactly the benefit you want from […]
At last! Sunday gave us a day that was springy enough to let us work outside. An afternoon of liberating my pent-up gardener accomplished a lot. But. No matter how eager I was, here are three things I didn’t do to clean up the garden. I didn’t get carried away April 2 in Toronto is a touch early for any drastic garden task […]
Mulch is a must to keep soil cool and moist. [EDITED July 1ST 2015: Sadly, the company we wrote about below only takes orders from U.S. Addresses, even though their website clearly asks for “postal codes”. We’ve written them to ask about extending their reach to Canada and will update when we hear anything. In […]
The race is on, to beat the frost. It’s always a last ditch rescue mission for me, this late in November, when I’m madly trying to bring in every last plant from the cold. Most of my container plants have been hauled indoors, but I still have a few things growing in actual soil that […]
The Bloor Street Transformation Project included granite planters and about 130 London plane trees Overspilling with colour, the new granite planters on chi-chi Bloor Street are hard to miss. But did you also notice the trees? These pix from September were meant for a post I’d wanted to call a Bloor Street Garden Tour (it […]
Broken rose arbor: Before Our rose arbor suffered a collapse this summer due to old age and some of 2012’s big winds. (It’s one of the memories emerging as I sort through thousands of retrieved images after a major data loss.) What would we do? All our energies and budget were being sucked up by […]
It’s another heat wave. So we thought it worthwhile to repeat these tips for water-wise gardening from May 2009 – still useful, even as we enter July: Okay, the picture exaggerates. But today we’ll get a taste of it, and tomorrow’s forecast is 30˚C and full sunshine. On hot days like tomorrow, it’s smart to […]
Poor cultural practices – the things you do when you garden – can be a hazard to your trees. People kill trees all the time, quite innocently, simply by saying: Honey, let’s put a cute little raised bed around the tree. All the active tissue in a tree trunk exists very near the surface under […]
This little seedling of the Norway maple (Acer platanoides) is one of the small forest that germinates in my garden each spring. The maples are a constant reminder of the old chestnut (as in: saying) in the title. Why would you get seven years of weeds from one year of seeds? One reason is that […]
What a simple idea for preventing your monkshood from toppling: large open baskets composed of twigs and string. Rather than the unsightly stake, or the rigid rings, create something organic that almost disappears in the foliage. This one works, regardless of your continent or zone. It’s a keeper.