Last week was the Victoria Day weekend, which is the traditional time for Canadians to start gardening. Our neighbours gave us some more backyard space so we're getting a little more ambitious with our planting. They're trying to grow a few things as well.
We live in the basement and have upstairs neighbours, so our first summer we felt it was still too early for us to ask for some space, although by the summer we felt comfortable enough to ask if we could plant some flower bulbs in the front yard. Both households walk by the front yard, so it felt more shared, compared to the backyard which their apartment opens into but ours doesn't.
Last year, we asked for a bit of space to grow a sunflower patch. I planted 60 seeds and wound up with three flowers with five blossoms total. We also got some pots and tried growing some other stuff in those, but they didn't have any holes in the bottom so we wound up drowning the seeds.
We haven't really taken any more land, but we pounded holes in our pots and got three more planters. So we have three pots, three planters, and a patch of land for sunflowers. We're trying to grow cucumbers, tomatoes, peas, radishes, lettuce, and sunflowers. We've become ambitious enough that if we have a little success, I think we can call what we have a garden.
I dug out last year's sunflower patch. I'd tried to pull out the gravel and I mixed the dirt with potting soil. This year I fully dug it out and replaced the dirt with potting soil, so hopefully that helps.
Our upstairs neighbour told us that he learned from someone else in the neighbourhood, that the reason the backyard is so gravelly is because the previous owner of the house had a dog. I don't really see the sense in that though. Would it be to discourage the dog from digging? Did they actually mix gravel into the soil? Seems like that would be a lot of work.
Unfortunately, the day after we'd planted the sunflowers, we found holes in our patch and seeds had been pulled up and shelled. It was very difficult to determine how much damage had been done, so we just replanted in full. We asked Lee-Anne's mom for tips and she said to put cayenne pepper on the ground, because apparently squirrels avoid it.
It felt funny seasoning the ground. Lee-Anne brought red pepper flakes as well and it felt like I was cooking for the squirrels. We also put a mesh that I got from the dollar store over them, and so far it seems like they haven't been disturbed again.
I don't know if raccoons eat seeds as well, but it might be that instead. I've sighted a raccoon twice this year, but I've failed to get a picture. Now I know why people have so much trouble taking pictures of Bigfoot. In lieu of a raccoon pic, please accept this picture of a heron that I managed to get this year.
Lee-Anne finds it funny how excited I get about seeing the raccoon. She's from Brampton, and apparently they're really common there. My memory may not be totally comprehensive, but off the top of my head, the only times I've seen raccoons were when I was at Camp Impeesa for the EaF Summer Program and I saw a family of them in the dumpster, and in Brampton at her parents place where I saw one on the roof. So in the past week I've doubled my raccoon sightings, and in a much more concentrated period of time.
I've also seen a dead one on the sidewalk near where we live. Pretty sure I've seen roadkill too. I think I've seen more dead raccoons than living.
First raccoon sighting this year, we were gardening and I saw it tiptoe along our neighbours fence. Second sighting, it was morning before work and our cat Kieran got really agitated by something outside. I went to look and a big fat raccoon was slowly and seemingly aimlessly sauntering around the backyard. I was so excited that I woke up Lee-Anne to look at it, but she declined.
Anyway yeah, maybe the raccoon is messing with the seeds instead of the squirrels.
Another tip Lee-Anne's mom gave was to soak the peas overnight before planting them. I found this curious, as I've had some success growing them in the past and I've never done this.
We're growing the sunflowers, radishes, lettuce, and peas from seed, and we bought partially grown plants for the cucumbers and tomatoes. I've had some success with each of these plants in the past, except for lettuce which was a pick by Lee-Anne. I would have gotten zuchinis instead of cucumbers, but the place we went to had sad looking zuchinis, whereas the cucumbers looked more resilient and the two plants have a pretty similar growth pattern.
I've had bad luck with tomatoes developing late in the season, leaving me to make a lot of fried green tomatoes. This year we're growing Early Girls, which supposedly produce fast, and now I know that I'm supposed to "pull off the suckers", which I hadn't been doing. I hate that phrase for some reason.
I don't have a ton of faith in the potted stuff, except for maybe the radishes, but we'll see what happens. It looks like the pots are draining properly at least.
Growing stuff in pots and planters reminds me of when I was desperately trying to get into gardening as a kid, but we lived in an apartment so I had to grow everything on the balcony.
Here are some photos of what we've done this year:
.jpg)
Sunflowers
No comments:
Post a Comment