August

August is the time of lush and luxuriant growth, the time of reaping what you have sown.  I tend to become a lazy gardener in August and let things have their way. 

The pollinator garden is a wonderful success.  It looks messy, I admit, but bees and bee relatives are everywhere.  The star of the show this year is Helenium (Sneezeweed).  My solitary bees just love the blooms. 

The tomatoes aren’t ripe yet.  I’m going to reduce the foliage a bit to let the sun into the interior of the plant and those lovely clusters of tomatoes.  A bit of sun will colour them.

This was a super year for funguses.  I wasn’t watchful of my roses and have “naked ladies” already.  Last week I applied a weak solution of Hydrogen Peroxide to see what affect that has on fungus. 

The garden needs a bit of a tidy at this time.  Weeds in the flagstones and at the edges of gardens call me. 

One weed problem that I’m not sure of how to attack is the mass of Yellow Wood Sorrel in my Opuntia.  Sorrel doesn’t pull easily and is best dug out but I can’t come within attacking range without touching the dreaded barbs on the Opuntia.  Vinegar would attack the Opuntia as well as the Sorrel.  What I need are two trowels with long handles to dig out the Sorrel while staying well away from the Opuntia.

This year again, I put a handful of packaged Chicken Manure pellets into each pot this spring.  What a show!  That stuff really works and it’s organic – no synthetic fertilizers in my garden.

Ah, August – a time of hot days and gingerale while watching the garden do its thing.

Roadsides and the Blog

The Ontario Horticultural Association and particularly the Conservation & Environment Committee of which I am a member is promoting the creation of habitats for native pollinators -- Pollinator Patches. To help you create your own pollinator patch, see our Roadsides Guide.

Roadsides Guide To Creating Pollinator Patches

As part of the project, we created our own pollinator patch in Barrie, Ontario. See the progress in my blog and also visit the gallery to see pictures of the making of the patch.

Roadsides Blog

Jottings

Jottings contains some articles I've written for the monthly newsletter of Barrie's Garden Club and other projects. I did the newsletter for 6 years and have quite a collection of "fillers." I also write just for me. What better place to share them than on my own site. I hope you enjoy them.

When we tug at a single thing in nature, we find it attached to the rest of the world.
- John Muir

Hints & Tricks

This is a collection of neat ideas and crazy tricks that I've collected from various sources. Many are amusing, and most are useful. We gardeners just love to learn neat little ways of doing our gardening jobs more effectively. My most popular talk is just that: "Hints and Tricks."

Most of the hints I've used myself or know someone who will vouch for them. All of them are fun to read and almost as much fun to do.

A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule. -- Michael Pollan

Gardening Info

This is a miscellaneous section of all the odds and sods of information I've collected and would like to share. I've found most of the information in magazines and on the internet or in the many gardening books I can't resist buying!

You'll also find some of my favourite links on the Gardening Info page.

"We share the earth not only with our fellow human beings, but with all the other creatures."
- The Dalai Lama"

My Garden

This section includes pictures of my small urban garden along with photos of the plants in that garden. This is a show-off section. Remember --gardeners don't take pictures of their gardens unless they look good! My garden is lovely, but I admit that it's not always as good as it looks in the pictures I choose to display!

I'm really more of a plant collector than a gardener and love the new or the unusual. Because the garden is small, I change plants often. Over the years, I've had quite a collection of the good, the bad and the ugly of garden plants.

The garden and digital cameras complement each other. Between my husband, my son-in-law and me, we've taken hundreds of pictures -- too many for a web page. But I've put up some that I like and hope that you enjoy them, too.