Thinking Ahead

The 2016 gardening season is not yet done. I've had a second round of red poppies, my calendula is looking better than it did all summer, I'm still letting my kale sweeten up, and the tatsoi seeds I planted in the greenhouse just popped their wee noses out of the ground.

However, planning has begun for 2016!

The eradication of the cursed ivy, periwinkle and wisteria will continue, but it's time to plan the spring vegetable garden and plan some new beds.

Cardiff Castle Park, Cardiff, Wales. 

Where to start?

This garden is pretty much a blank slate, and it can be difficult to know what to do when it seems the choices are endless. I have some rules I've worked out over the past few years.

Work with what you've got. If you have full sun, plant sun-loving plants. If you've got a lot of shade, be honest with yourself. Shade is okay, and there's a lot of plants which will be happy there, and I don't mean just hostas.

Plant what wants to grow. I kill delphiniums. I don't know why. So I stopped planting them. I'm a better person for that.

Choose perennial plants with a long lifespan. This is just because I'm cheap. I only break this rule for lavender.

Select disease-resistant plants when possible. And avoid heartbreak. That's important.

Buy plants which spread responsibly and don't mind being divided. Especially if you have a large garden and a small pocketbook.

Avoid plants which deer love to eat. I have nothing against deer, I just don't like their appreciation of my hemerocalis spp. collection.

 Look for inspiration from other gardens.

These can be your neighbours, your local botanical garden, a local park, books, the internet. Find something that moves you. Copy it shamelessly. You might not be able to do the scale of Sissinghurst's White Garden, but you could certainly bring a small piece of it into your own.
 

Powys Castle, Welshpool. These poles would get me my climbing roses without covering the house!

 

ERADICATE!

Notes on invasive species' of plants:

DON'T PLANT THEM.

If you go to your garden centre, and the helpful staff member says that the plant you're looking for for your garden is invasive, ask for an alternative. Plant that instead.

O sure, they LOOK all sweet and innocent in their pots. They may even have a wee pretty flower that is just begging you to admire it from your back deck.

Don't do it.

Be strong.

Think of me.

When we moved into our new place in the fall, I identified three plants right away that were going to be trouble: ivy, grape vine and virginia creeper. Not wanting to use herbicides, I decided the best way to deal with the little suckers was smothering them under landscape fabric and lots and lots of mulch. And, actually, it's manageable. The little suckers are buried, and anything brave enough to stick a nose out gets chopped off post haste.

There was a fourth plant, however, which was particularly sneaky. It had gone dormant by the time we arrived here, so all I saw was large trunks running along the fence line. Okay. Trunks. I can deal with that. I have a chainsaw.

Then spring came.

The stuff was EVERYWHERE!

GREAT movie. Just sayin'

This stuff is insane. It popped up all over the yard. Small dogs and children ran for their lives, and no matter how much I hacked, dug, pulled, buried, it KEEPS COMING UP. You want to know what it is? WISTERIA.

If it looked like this, well, sure.

A tempting beauty, hmmmm? But also on the invasive species list and, guess what? It responds WELL TO PRUNING. Guess what else? I have 50x100 feet of it. Plus.

Something like this. Meander Mountain

Have a heart, Gardeners. Take those invasive species lists seriously. Don't plant them!

Ontario Invasive Species Index
Invasive Species Centre

Do these feathers make my wings look big?

Day 9

The ladies graduated to a bigger Rubbermaid container on day 6. I added a cardboard box so anyone needing to get away would have somewhere to go. On top of the box I added a roost, although the chicks have yet to show any desire to roost. I remember from the last flock that it wasn't until the birds were a month or so old that they began fighting for roosting space.

Amy and River, the white chicks, are growing the most quickly. They have been the first to show flight feathers and the first to show tail feathers. Poor River needed have a bath as her bottom was caked with poop. It was probably more traumatic for me than it was for her. Mind you, a wet chick is the most pathetic sight I've ever seen. I had to segregate her from the others until she dried out as her sisters were laughing at her (pecking was an issue, actually).

My husband is knocking together a bigger box for them today. It will do until they can be moved outside when the weather warms up. Also, we can use it as a 'bad box' for any chickens who misbehave during the flock integration process.

Combs have begun to grow, the favourite toy in the brooder is a parrot toy I got at the pet food store, and the bell on the bottom of the budgie mirror. Rose likes to sit on the small wicker ball that's in with them, and Martha, though the smallest, is certainly the one most interested in what's going on in the kitchen.

I have been able to drop the temperature in the brooder a few degrees, but I keep an eye on them as when the weather is warm the kitchen gets very warm, too. Last night it went down to 2 degrees outside and the chicks looked cold so I dropped the heat lamp down a few centimeters and draped a towel over one side of the brooder. They settled down at last and looked cozy. My kids want to try giving them some meal worms for a treat (the big girls love them) but I want to wait a bit longer. As usual, it is more likely my issue than the chicks'.

Heh, I've just read this over and it's obvious to me how tired I am! Working at a garden centre in May is exhausting. However, I will still be heading out today, my day off, to do some digging in the garden. I bonsai'd two over-grown junipers and have revealed a whole new patch of dirt requiring planting up. More later.

I didn't mean to poop on your head.

The Culprit: Donna

The sweetest thing about the chicks was that my husband got up at 3am to check on them. Come to think on it, he was always the one who got up during the night for our human children, as well.

Day 2 saw a lot of napping, and the pecking that was the norm yesterday seems to have stopped (for now). I had applied peck stop to a couple of the chicks as soon as we got them into the brooder because they were a bit agitated. I didn't reapply it today... I forgot, but thankfully they have been so busy looking up they forgot to peck.

There's been a lot of preening today. Feathers are coming in, the flight feathers on the tips of the wings are first and I saw two rows well on their way in when I got home from work tonight.

They have a small mirror in the brooder and it's a favourite. They also like the dust bath I put in, but I have yet to see them playing with the ball....

What amazes me about chicks at this age is that, like human babies, they fall asleep whenever they're tired, wherever they are. This can make drinking water a dangerous thing, if you're a very small bird and thirsty.

I'd  like to be able to say I see more coordination today, but that would be a bald-faced lie.

For those of you wondering, I have not yet broken the news to Dalwhinne and Tulip, our 3 year old chickens, that company's coming. 

They wouldn't understand.

There's a Bin of Cute on my Kitchen Table!

The arrival of our new chicks has been cause for celebration, not least because they were born on Star Wars Day.

These are our second flock. For some reason, I only managed to do two journal entries with the first flock, so this time I promised myself I would keep on top of it. as I currently have no garden to speak of (more on that later) there's nothing stopping me from obsessing about the Companions.

The Companions: Day 1

We were amazed last time at how quickly they grew. This brooder won't last more than a few days. They still have their egg teeth (a small 'horn' on the tip of their beaks) that helps the new chick get out of its egg. These are sex-link chickens, so should all be female, but one of the white chicks has a black spot on its head, and I worry that means we have a rooster. We'll know soon enough.

And why the 'Companions'? We've named this lot after Dr. Who companions: Rose, Martha, Donna, Amy, Clara and River.

Don't Panic: Step Two. You Planted WHAT??

Let's discuss the elephant in the garden: INVASIVE SPECIES.

In my last post, I discussed doing an evaluation of your property to get an idea of the scope of the job.

In my evaluation, I discovered I had a problem with invasive species. There are probably more, but seeing the ivy, periwinkle, grape vine and... something else (shudders) is enough for now.

Let's have a frank discussion, shall we?

I work at a garden centre. Every spring and summer, customers ask me for ivy, for periwinkle (AKA myrtle, vinca and some other names). These customers have a problem area they'd like to hide, a fence they want covered, a shady slope that needs some green. And to each one I say the same thing: are you aware that these are invasive?

In the garden, I define an invasive species as one that is not native and which has a negative impact on the environment. Invasive plants threaten biodiversity and habitat in a garden, and, later, once they've inevitably escaped, in the greater community.

In fairness, most of my customers are not aware that the plants they are asking for are invasive. I have some first-hand experience with these little devils, so let me share.

They seem innocuous enough.

But then they start to climb.

And eventually choke the tree.

I have tried to save as many trees on our property as I can. I have cut ivy tendrils that are fifteen centimeters in diameter! I hope cutting the stalk will kill the plant, but there's so many rootlets gripping the trees that it may be too late.

This poor tree, leaning drunkenly over our house, had to come down. The vines had strangled it.

Encased in ivy.

 It goes without saying, I hope, that a job like this needs to be done by a professional. It's not cheap, but it's cheaper (and less stressful) than having the tree crash onto the house. There are lots of good tree people out there. Ask your neighbours if they know someone, or seek out someone local. Ask how they plan to do the job. If it's close to a building, you want someone who will be climbing the tree and taking it down one chunk at a time. If there is an invasive species in the tree, like in ours, don't keep the mulch. It will just introduce more of those little devils onto your yard.

That's just a single illustration of what one invasive species can do, but the question is: HOW to get rid of them? I have a feeling this will be a long term undertaking.

I have been removing everything above ground as best I can. The ivy is being torn out by hand and we're cutting out everything that is climbing the trees and winding through the fences. I don't want to spray, and even if I did, I would still need to remove the dead material.

Once the surface is cleared, I am going to put down the heaviest landscape fabric I can buy, and then cover that in a thick layer of mulch. I wondered about using old carpeting, but was worried about chemicals that might leach into the soil. And plastic would destroy all the good hummus I want to encourage in my garden.

I've been doing some reading. In about two years, I should have success. In the meantime, every scrap of vine that dares make an appearance will be yanked out and glared at sternly. In the meantime, I will be learning more about container gardening.

So back to the customer who wants ivy for their garden. I suggest alternatives, like climbing hydrangea, honeysuckle, hyacinth bean, or clematis. Replace periwinkle with bugleweed, for example.

For more information on invasive species in Ontario, check out http://www.invadingspecies.com/ . If you're not in Ontario, a quick online search will point you to a site for your area.

Up next: Don't Panic: Step Three. Prioritise.