Battening down is hard when you're working....

But I get Friday off, and that may help a little. I'm feeling quite behind in what I had hoped to accomplish by now in the garden. However, tomorrow it will rain, so I am going to finish some work in the house so I can get outdoors on Saturday, which, so far at least, promises to be fine.
     We have a plan to import some red osier dogwood from elsewhere to our own personal messy ditch.

It's a strange thing, red osier dogwood grows in many, many places in PEI but not in our little corner of Queens County. I was down to Georgetown yesterday, and came back on the 48 Road, and, even through some pretty heavy showers I couldn't help but notice a LOT of red osier dogwood, looking magenta, leafless and beautiful. I want that! We may go to Tryon for it, or back to the 48 Road. Depends. There's none nearer, for sure.
We are having work done on the house, which is necessitating a lot of clearing out of undisturbed cubby and hidey-holes. We're getting more insulation blown into the attic, and this means that all the stuff we stashed up there (when the house was much smaller and we didn't have a storage room with a DOOR) - kids' books, paintings, our books (mainly textbooks), bits of fabric, school stuff, business papers many years older that 7 - all of this is coming down to the living floor and being gone through. Much is being chucked out. But the process is messy.
   We are having the roof re-shingled as well, but luckily the roofer has to do the cleaning up THERE! But I should put protective pots over my perennials in the flower beds near the house, because I don't think these guys care much about flowers. If it doesn't rain too much, perhaps I can get out there tomorrow and at least do that.
    Then there're the kitchen cupboards. We have cleared out the top shelves on the upper cabinets, discovering a lot of tupperware and the like which hasn't been used in years. I'm making up a bag of the stuff which might be of use to someone, and it will go off to the Diabetes Association when it's filled. I do hope that the new cupboards will have more useable storage space. I'm banking pretty heavily on the pantry unit being a good place to stash a lot of those use-now-and-again things like the slow cooker and the wok. And the china platters and so on.
    One bonus thing in the attic stuff was a box of yarns, mostly teeny bits of mohair which I threw out, but also about 6 balls of Kroy Sock and Sweater yarn in a nice manly dark grey, as well as burgundy (3), blue (1) and white (1). It must be from long ago, because the price tags indicate that they cost under $2 each, and were purchased in Souris at the pharmacy. There's a bit of ribbing knit, and some of the colours are wound onto bobbins....was I thinking of making some hideous intarsia sweater? Thank goodness the 80s are over. I can now use the yarn for socks!
    We put half of the fire wood in on Monday after supper, and as soon as we have a couple of dry days again the rest will follow. It's been chilly, but not enough to justify lighting the furnace just yet. We don't need the steady heat, just a blast of the oil at suppertime and another in the morning. It was 2 degrees this morning!
     Once the roof is re-shingled we are getting a solar hot water panel installed. This will necessitate us replacing our 1993 oil-fired hot water heater with an electric one (for back-up). The Co. has priced a 60-litre heater for us - our present one is 30 litres. We think this is excessive, as we've never run out of hot water with the 30. As I keep doing laundry in cold water, I wonder what difference it will make to have an unlimited supply of hot. Doesn't hot water washing wear out one's clothes faster? Or is that all down to the old-fashioned top-loading washer?
       In my plan to finish Bathroom #3, I want to put in a stacked washer & dryer (front-loaders) and I've been worried that they will take up a lot of room - I'm going to build them a little closet with a regular door, as we have several doors that we haven't needed yet. There are three 30-inch ones, and one 35-inch one. I have been steeling myself to use the big one, as the washers and dryers I've been looking at are all HUGE - over 30 inches wide, and we'll need to be able to get them out of there if (or rather WHEN) they go wrong. (And many of them are grey! What kind of foolish is that? Isn't doing laundry depressing enough, without that?)
     However, in Halifax on the weekend we saw smaller ones - still front-loaders, but 24-inches, not these wash-17-pairs-of-jeans at once behemoths. And of course we don't need huge ones, so this makes me easier in my mind and I can finally go ahead and build the laundry closet, and get on with installing the bathtub, etc. I have hopes that our kitchen-cupboard man might be able to do us a vanity for the bathroom, and then we'll be all set.
     We were unsuccessful in finding any granite tiles for the counter top in Halifax - there were plenty of choices if you wanted black or grey, or a bright Barbie-pink, but nothing DECENT at all. Nothing with the bit of subtle colour that matches what we have - oak floor and cabinets, stained a mission brown, dark green walls and rust-red finish. How difficult can that be?  We really aren't that fussy - we just want to have the counters a lighter colour as the rest of the room is so dark.
     And we almost bought some bamboo flooring, but realized, when we got it on the cart in the store, that there was NO WAY that these four 6.5-foot packages were going to fit in our CAR! There are times when only a truck will do.

Battening Down the Garden

Blooming things have been coming to an end, but it's still a busy time as I collect some seeds, and divide some perennials which are getting overgrown. The Rudbeckia Cherry Brandy has been a star, and I especially like the ones with double petals. None in the accompanying photo, however.

I was lucky enough to find a couple of things I have really wanted at the Island Pride Nursery on the 70-Mile Yard Sale - an astrantia (the white one) and a Helebore. I also got an anemone Hupehensis called September Charm, and a primrose, which had a burgundy bloom when I got it, but which has been blooming white since. I think there are actually three plants in the pot, two white and a burgundy. I want to divide them before putting them in the ground. Or maybe just in a pot to keep close by.

I have planted all but the primrose in extant flower beds, with the hellebore just to the left of the path to the door, as I want to see it close up when it blooms. I spent my last week of freedom re-doing the path, including pulling away the old steps, levering up the patio stones, and digging out the weeds in the sand underneath. Then I filled in and levelled with small gravel, replaced the patio stones (the 4 big ones - 24-inch square), filled in the spaces with the gravel, and then cut and installed the stringers for three shallow steps. We had bought white cedar 2X4X8's for the treads at Arsenault's Mill and we cut them up - deciding that we wanted the steps five feet long, not four, which meant we were 3 2X4's short. We eventually bought more at Home Depot, but they don't match - they are red cedar instead of white, and they are planed, so they are a bit smaller than the Arsenault ones. Ah well. They will last forever at least. And I have quite a few 3-foot bits of 2X4 that I can use to make garden furniture. No more pine for that purpose - they rot in no time!

We had a dreadful week of wind and rain, and then a lovely return to summer for the Thanksgiving weekend. We went down to Little Harbour for cranberries on the Saturday. It was quite wet under foot in spots, but there were cranberries a-plenty.  Some of them weren't very ripe. We are taking care to sort and clean, and maybe ripen, them right away this time. Last year they were put in the room over the garage at Christmas-time, and were forgotten. They ended up freezing and rotting. This year's batch is going into the freezer when they colour up a bit more.

We also dug up some cranberry plants, and on Sunday I planted them into my newly-dug cranberry bog. There were only 10 plants in all, and only a couple of them had any amount of roots attached, so I'm not expecting too much. I had filled the pit with peat moss, and then I covered it with white pine needles. Some sand on the top, to hold the whole thing down, will be the next step. I am tempted to check out the cranberry plants at the back of Reggie's farm - I haven't been back there for years, but there used to be cranberries there in a boggy bit, and they may dig up more easily than the ones growing on the dunes in Little Harbour.
I have planted a pound of our garlic, which is Music, and another type which I had bought at the garlic place in Caledonia - I think it's Carpathia. The pine cones are to keep the cats from digging in the bed and disturbing the cloves, while they are getting their roots established.
Our Yellow Delicious apple tree has an amazing amount of fruit on it - I've made apple-and-ground-cherry crisp three times now, got people out to pick a bag of apples each at Thanksgiving dinner on Monday, and still the tree is covered. I must bring some in to work. I wish tomatoes had been so good, but the blight took them off fairly quickly. Even the 6 plants I kept in the greenhouse have it. They are at least still producing ripe tomatoes, especially cherry ones, but the ones outdoors are well and truly frost-bitten. The ground-cherries have been touched as well, but there are a lot of ripe and unripe cherries left - I will have to cover them as there is a frost warning for tonight.

I have been working on a pair of Selbu Mittens - the Selbu pattern is for a hat, but I thought the mittens would be more useful immediately. I am using some Knitpicks undyed merino-and-silk and a Kroy sock in a nice mott-ley turquoise which will work well with my fall suede jacket. I wore the jacket today for the first time, so I'd better get busy. Mitten weather could strike at any time.

The Lily Season

It's the lily season all right - both hemerocallis and lilium. This picture shows a combination - a lovely big pink one, planted last year, along with my ubiquitous flesh-coloured daylily which has been spread all over the place.
So, time for a progress report. This summer was great for growing peas, but we didn't actually *eat* many of them, so I am thinking that, as far as peas go, their room is more useful than their presence. In fact I've hauled them all out, and plan to fertilize their spot for garlic later in the fall. Carrots have struggled - they needed to be planted and re-planted several times, and they are still not much of a size. The last ones I planted were the tiny round ones, so I hope they make some size at least. I have gathered all of my plastic tubing from making hoop skirts, and plan to use them to make row covers for the more tender plants. To heck! with running out and covering the tomatoes with sheets every night. I'll just cover with fleece and leave them up. Just have to find the fleece, or equivalent, here.

Still haven't put the ends in the greenhouse - it will have to happen fairly soon, but not just yet, as I think I still need the ventilation. It was quite hot in there yesterday, and I didn't get out there until the evening when I found a couple of plants - a strawberry and a tomato - quite wilted. Hope they are looking better this morning.
Things are a bit disorganized in there at the moment, but once I get the strawberry bed dug and them in the ground and out of their pots, I'll be able to organize for winter. The brown leaves in the lower left of the picture were willow branches, which I left in a trug until they sprouted roots - they are now all either potted up or in a bed in the garden. Roll on willow weaving, etc. next year. Hope this will be a good kind of willow to work with - it certainly was easy to root. 

 The ground cherries are doing quite well, large plants and plenty of little "lanterns" on the branches. They are all still quite green, I don't know if they change colour or not, to indicate that they are ripe. I have actually picked some rhubarb from my one tiny bunch - enough for a rhubarb cake. Apparently you are supposed to leave it alone, that first year. The plant seems fine still, though losing some of the lower leaves. No sign of a seed-head yet. I suppose I should leave that alone, should one develop.

Apparently I have been killing hydrangea slips to no good purpose. I haven't gotten even one of them to root.  I am not going to give up, but I think I should adhere to the rules a little more rigidly - use an inert medium, and do it indoors, covered, with bottom heat. We'll see if that helps. If successful, I may try rooting rose cuttings again! But it is heartbreaking to think of the potential, alas, now lost! I still think I stand a better chance of rooting and growing something that's already shown its survival instincts in this climate - than buying something grown elsewhere.

The gladioli Helen gave me are all blooming like good ones! The first to bloom were a deep pink with white, but it looks like some of the other ones - not yet in bloom - will be other colours, including white. Interestingly, I have learned that it's probably not the best thing to plant gladioli at the north end of a flower bed, as they seem to want to face the sun - and therefore have their backs to you as you stand on the lawn looking at them. Next year, I'll find a spot down on the south corner of the bed and they will face the public!! I actually think they will be perfect there, as there's quite a black spot there at the moment, after all the feverfew and geraniums got chopped down. Back to the vegetable plot for a bit, the asparagus are doing really well. They keep growing new shoots, and some are almost of harvest-able size. Of course I know not to, but I am looking forward to a spear or two next year. After I hauled out the peas, I staked up the asparagus, as the fronds had been knocked over by the wind a bit. We are eating green beans, and I have even found a few yellow ones. And I've put up a bag of greens for the freezer. Raspberries were quite a disappointment, very few berries at all, so they are going to get some fertilizer, soon, and I will get busy and cut down the old canes as well. There might be a cup or so left, and I did get 2 batches of jam made...not so prolific as last year at all. They seemed to dry out quite badly despite the almost constant rain. Maybe they need a soaker hose invested in them.

Further Rain

I've been making progress on trying to bring my garden up slightly closer to the "Aiken Standard".

Last week I dropped in to Habitat for Humanity, and they were putting out a little garden wicker set - loveseat, chair and table. They'd been painted, (and two different colours, worse luck) but for $45 they were fine. I'd been prepared to pay more for a grotty modern "bistro" set for the deck and these are so much better! They had no cushions, of course, but I can make cushions! (and in fact I have.) They make a great spot to set out my pelargoniums and also my tiny blooming calla lily. And for sitting out and inhaling the honeysuckle fragrance in the evenings too.

 In other news, I put out a freebie request on Kijiji for used carpet for weed suppression - and got a response! So on Friday we borrowed the truck, and after work Fred and I went and picked it up - it was a wonderfully grotty one, in two pieces, one huge and the other smaller. On Saturday I put the smaller one on top of the former beds at the north end of the vegetable plot. I plan to espalier some fruit trees there - cherries, plums and apples, I think. Then I cut strips of the big one and put them in between the raised beds in the vegetable garden. The left-over pieces I put along the south side of the greenhouse. It's the whole length of the greenhouse (15 feet) plus the space between the greenhouse and the garden, and a bit less wide, maybe 10-11 feet.  I'm thinking fruit there, too, but smaller ones:  cranberries and strawberries. Maybe blueberries too!
The strips between the beds are likely to remain there - even after I get the bed sides put up - but once the fruit beds are planted I'll be able to use those bits of carpet elsewhere. I can't wait for the roadside waste collection in October - I'm scouting for more carpet!! This weed suppression method is GREAT.
In my travels I have been keeping an eye open for hydrangeas and taking sneaky slips when I do. I have three in the greenhouse, and am trying to root them. Fingers crossed. I went to Cool Breeze nursery on Friday, they had plenty of hydrangeas but I didn't sneak any slips of theirs. Didn't buy any either - $40 each! Perhaps there will be an end-of-season sale. I did get a buddleja, with three or four flowering buds on it. Anne says they're a weed in Vancouver, but I'm afraid that here in Zone 5b they'll need winter cover to survive. I always thought that they were shrubs, but Cool Breeze was selling them as perennials - and the cheapest ones, at that.

Hydrangea Paniculata Grandiflora

I saw some bright-ish red hydrangeas in a greenhouse in Winsloe, but the shop wasn't open so I don't know if I could afford one or not. Yet.
I DO have two hydrangeas of my own, an Annabelle from Mum's garden, which is struggling to survive, having moved itself UNDER a fir tree in the west of the house, and a Pee Gee which went in a couple of years ago and is doing quite well, just to the west of the spruce hedge, behind the Ring-around-the-rosey bed. It's putting on blossom like a good 'un. I'll try propagating from them in the spring. I'm prepared to baby along the current slips in the house over the winter, if I'm lucky enough to root them. After all, some people's garden hydrangeas started off as house plants! (I will keep an eye out at Easter-time for house plants too, though I suppose they aren't hardy here.) I scratched away some soil under the fir tree and put in some fertilizer - in FRONT of the Annabelle hydrangea. Maybe she'll pull herself out of there, and into the better soil. And I've limbed up the tree to give her some head-room. Come on, Annabelle.

The Summer of Rain...

Yes, no chance that the garden will dry out while this summer continues. OTOH it's been great for knitting and Brit-TV watching.

Went to visit a fabulous garden on Sunday - open for charity. I have admired this one from afar for quite a while, as it is opposite the place where we used to go to get our lawnmower serviced (the old gas mower. Dave doesn't do electric). On the outside there is a lovely Japanese-inspired fence with a lovely, wide, herbaceous border. It includes a pergola and a door as well.

Inside, it's amazing! There are two sun-houses, a cottage done up like a guest bedroom, several more bits of the nice fencing, a long fenced-in walk, many pergolas and other structures, and innumerable sets of tables and chairs with tea sets and decorative birdhouses, dotted around everywhere.
The theme is "VICTORIAN", and yes, I do mean the all-caps. Much too twee for my taste, all of that, but the plants were amazing. There were lots of beds with roses integrated into the planting - this must be my aim this fall, I'm already making spots where they could go. I mean to take out the less-hardy ones I've had in the front of the rose mound and just let the rugosa-types take it over, and place the others here and there in the beds.

(I have been having propagation fun in the greenhouse. When I cut back my big pink Geranium Macrorrhizum I had several bits with roots on them, from underneath the plant, so I potted them up and now I have about a dozen, growing away in pots. Too bad I like them so little - they make a great leafy plant but not much bloom. The Geranium Sanguineum have been setting seeds, so I potted up some of those yesterday, as well as potting up some cuttings. I think the rainy summer has been good for rooting cuttings. No chance of any of them drying out.)

Anyway, back to the Aiken garden. There were many, many spectacular clematis everywhere, sometimes climbing a post in the middle of a big bed, other times on the structures, either fences or pergolas, etc. I really liked this dark pink one.  A few had finished flowering, but most were full out and gorgeous. If I knew more about clematis I would maybe know what kinds they were.





 There were many hydrangeas as well, most of them the white ones - Annabelle, I think. They had a couple of the big-leafed ones, with the gigantic blue and pink flowers. They were just planted, I think...quite small. Anyway, they obviously make lovely cut flower arrangements as well.

 There seems to be a mainly pink-and-white colour scheme in large areas of the garden, which I liked a lot, as that's what I think goes best around our place here. So, lots of suggestions about what could be used here. There were plenty of yellows and oranges, but in other locations, separate from the pinks and whites. Specifically, there is a series of terraced beds leading down to the brook from the screened porch. There were plenty of daylilies there, as well as hostas and astilbes.




There were a lot of hostas everywhere, of course, as they do a great job of filling in the fronts of borders and so on. (I am still convinced that gardens can be made without them.)

All in all, an amazing garden, full of great plants looking absolutely wonderful, and not so terribly far out of my reach - in a more modified way.
I think I want my structures to be more organic (willow, rough cedar) and my seating to be more in keeping with the arts and crafts esthetic than the Victorian. But I'd take the plants! They must have the greenest of thumbs. The garden was started 20 years ago, and Mrs Aiken says they haven't done much that's new for the last five years, but there is a new DU pond next door that will take some decorating - she says rhododendrons. Spring interest!

Ring-around-the-rosey a Success!

A while ago, I went on at length about my plan to disguise the ugly stump of a Theves poplar in my lawn by ringing it with roses. Exactly two years ago I cleaned up the firespot (we'd tried to burn it out) and planted white and pink shrub roses between the roots, and a rose I've been calling "wild" in the middle, just against the stump. They did well last year, though there wasn't a lot of bloom.

Well, this is it, two years on. The shrub roses aren't getting big very fast (though to be fair, they started out as tiny little offshoots). However, the wild one is loving the position and the encouragement. It's not actually wild. I have been seeing it everywhere in municipal and private plantings, so it must be available commercially. I don't yet know its name, but I am scouring the rose books, looking for it. Up close, the individual flowers are single, with a heart-shaped petal, and they are pink in the bud, with a bit of a pink tinge even when open.  I think it might be "Pleine de Grace" The pink rose underneath is Pink Grootendorst, given to me by my friend Henry last year. It bloomed last year, and it's blooming again. Lovely.

I was in Summerside yesterday, and they have a lot of shrub roses in their municipal plantings, particularly along the seaside boardwalks. They seem to prune them quite successfully to keep them in shape (though their wild ones like mine are showing new growth above the pruning line, like mine above). I'm not sure whether it will bloom again on the old growth, so I am leaving it alone for this year. If it turns out NOT to bloom on old growth then I'll be able to keep it in line by pruning.

The bed beside the Ring-around-the-rosey is looking well at the moment. I put a sucker of the rosa Gallica Tuscan Superb in the middle last year, and this year it's shyly blooming. The liatris is looking likely to bloom soon, and the pink astilbe is blooming away quite happily. The ubiquitous feverfew is all over the place, of course. I thought for a while that I had three kinds, but now I think the daisy-like ones have centres which keep coming out so they get fluffy in the middle. There's a taller astilbe in the next part of the bed, not blooming yet because it's in shade, like the pink one should be!!

The red climbing rose Henry Kelsey on the Celtic trellis is doing quite well, although the Dublin Bay has yet to bloom this year (you can just see a tiny sprig in the bottom of the photo). The foliage is there but no blooms so far. In other rose news Celestial is out, although it has been damaged by bugs and weather, so no blooms which would look good in a photograph so far. The Royal Bonica has two huge buds, so I'm hoping that today's wind and/or tomorrow's rain don't damage them too much. I think I've decided that the mystery rose in the bed along the south is de Montarville. I saw a photo which looked a lot like it, and the name sounds familiar. It is just coming in to bloom now, as it had a bit of a breakage problem after the winter. It seems to cope with being broken down (or gnawed by mice!) so perhaps that's what I should plan to do to it, if ever it isn't devastated some spring.

Summertime tasks abound

persicaria affinis

Much progress has been made since last I wrote. The best thing has been the discovery of The Flower Patch - we've been back for more plants, including some yellow iris for Karen (she babysat the cats while we were in Halifax) and the rest were groundcovers - persicaria affinis "Superba",  saxifraga x arendsii "Purple Robe", a campanula "White Clips"and a couple more. They are in the bed around the south lawn for now - I'm developing the lasagne beds on the west side and they - or their progeny - will go in there later.

East-west bed, on the edge of the south lawn

In Halifax I bought a mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia "Heart of Fire") and a couple of perennials - groundcover again, a variegated bugleweed and another campanula, blue this time, I think. We bought them at the Lakeland Plant World in Dartmouth.What a place. Any plant you could want is there, I think.
Anne and I (mostly Anne) tidied up the beds around the south lawn and planted a lot of the groundcovers in there, after edging the beds and doing some mulching. Looks good. The snowballs and spirea have mostly gone over by now, but they were spectacular while they were on.
Roses are coming along, now that we have been having some sun on a regular basis. The 'wild' rose is starting, with one of the Pink Grootendorst underneath, and Samuel Holland is peeping out. The rugosas on the mound are doing well - Blanc de Coubert, Snow Pavement, Alba, Hansa, and Marie Bugnet. Celestial is looking healthier now - should be a good bloom season.