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Index of Things Planted on This Site
| Garden Ramblings: | a brief (and sometimes not) commentary on what has been happening in my garden and that of my friends and neighbours. |
| Newsgroups: | a list of gardening newsgroups. |
| Canadian Plant Hardiness Zone Maps: |
clickable maps of gardening zones in Canada; taken from the zone map issued by Agriculture Canada. |
| Photo Gallery: | a clickable gallery of photographs taken around my garden and those of my friends and neighbours. |
| Canadian Plant and Seed Suppliers: |
a list, organized by province, of Canadian sources for plants, seeds and garden supplies. Some offer mail order service, some are on line and some are personal shopping only. I have provided active links where I could. |
| Books: | I have started compiling a list of books that I have found useful and/or interesting. I expect this list to keep growing as I discover new books. Some of the books aren't particularly valuable for their horticultural information but have very good pictures. |
| Links: | a variety of links of interest to gardeners. |
| Garden Chats: | a listing of chats with various aspects of gardening as their main focus. Links to websites have been provided where available. |
| Guestbook: | Please sign my guestbook. |
| Language of Flowers: | a collection of lists showing this old-fashioned way of communicating. |
| Spring 2000: | Another gardening season is getting underweigh here. It isn't too late to put in an order to your favourite seed/plant catalogue. They may be sold out of some of the varieties but usually have a reasonable selection left. The weather in Alberta was variable last year with some areas getting more rain than they needed and some suffering from lack of moisture. I have heard predictions that we are going to have a warm and wet summer. Oh well, we will see what happens; as I've said before, a gardener is nothing if not optimistic. I am already discussing our spring nursery tour with my neighbour. To reiterate, this is a great deal of fun and well worth trying if you can manage it. I suggest you go with one or two gardening friends - no more than that unless you can take a large vehicle or more than one vehicle as you will probably stuff it to the gills with your great plant "finds". To arrange an outing of this nature go through the telephone books and yellow pages pertaining to the area you wish to explore; read the gardening sections and ads in the local newspapers and get some good road maps. County maps showing ranges and townships are great if you can get them. Pack plastic bags, newspapers, soft tying material such as strips of old hosiery, sunscreen, mosquito repellant, notebooks and pencils (you always forget names), camera and film is a nice addition to pictorially identify unknown plants or plants with no name tags that are labelled on the table only, one or two good plant identification books, water or softdrinks and possibly even a light lunch - this is thirsty work even on a cool day. Wear sturdy shoes and clothes you don't mind getting dirty or mud splattered - you aren't going out to Sunday brunch after all, you are going gardening; take jackets, hats, sunglasses, reading glasses (at my age you need these), boots if it has been at all rainy or wet, and gloves. You are going to be wandering around rose bushes, display ponds for pond plants, narrow aisles between benches full of plants, ducking under hanging baskets and picking your way across sometimes very muddy parking lots. This is all great fun, you will meet interesting people and maybe discover some unusual plants. |
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 By request I have kept the section about tabletop gardening in this edition: I have been talking to a few people who complained about a lack of space in which to garden - people who have to share space in a yard and people who only have balcony space. As a result, I conducted a little experiment with some of my plants that were grown in containers. I have a round picnic table that is about 4 feet in diameter. On it I placed a 5-gallon pot with a Sweet 100 tomato plant in full fruit, a 5-gallon pot with a full-sized tomatillo also bearing fruit, two slightly smaller pots - one with mints, the other with a variety of herbs including sage, thyme & trailing rosemary and two small pots filled with basils. I also added several pots with flowers such as Osteospermum, marigolds, Purple Wave petunia, begonia, mimulus etc. It made a rather striking display and I was quite amazed at how many plants would fit into such a small space. I have scanned a photograph of it which you can see if you look at the Tabletop Garden. One Sweet 100 tomato plant will provide quite a lot of nice fresh eating cherry-type tomatoes. Tomatillos are also very prolific. If you want vegetables more than flowers you could plant some lettuce, a small variety of cucumber, possibly some climbing beans or even some green bush beans if you just want a few. You can grow quite a few herbs in a small space. Some people even grow potatoes and carrots in tubs although I have never tried it. Of course, it would be nice to tuck a couple of pansies or violas in here and there, and a nasturtium or geranium (maybe even a scented leaf geranium), just to add a little more colour. One thing to avoid is overcrowding to the point where you can't reach the pots to water or harvest the plants. Too much overcrowding could also result in some nasty fungal or bacterial problems, but if you use a reasonable amount of common sense these should be relatively easy to avoid.To add to this idea I want to mention that while on a trip to British Columbia this spring I went to Granville Island in Vancouver. There I saw, for the first time in my life, floating houses. These were actual houses, mostly with two storeys, that were moored to the dock. The most exciting thing to me was the fact that nearly every single one of them had plants growing all over the place. They were in containers, of course. There were trees, vines, flowers of all sorts and I'm sure I saw a few containers with vegetables and herbs. I couldn't quite work up the nerve to go and knock on any doors but I would have loved to have talked to some of the resident gardeners to see what they had to say about their soil mixes etc. Ah well, maybe next time I will be braver. However, it does go to show that if people want to garden they will usually find a way to do it and in my opinion that is just great. |
