In small city gardens, it’s often a challenge to find enough space to grow all the ornamental plants you love, let alone veggies and herbs. And if you live in an apartment, it takes a certain dedication not only to find enough space to grow, but to surmount drying winds and scorching temperatures to bring [...]
10. Attend a Garden Show Nothing takes me out of winter and into spring than a trip to Canada Blooms. This year’s show features more than 24 gardens, an expanded marketplace and special speakers, including Jeff Lowenfels from Alaska who’s talking about organic gardening and Cornell University’ Dr. Robert Raguso with a lecture on the relationship [...]
Dragged myself out of bed for day two of the set up of Canada Blooms. Delivered lots of plants, watered containers and checked out the gardens in progress. My favourite so far is by Hobson Landscapes. Entitled Urban Pioneer, it features a contemporary sugar shack which should have been surrounded by sap buckets, but unfortunately, [...]
On day three, everything comes together — somehow. My day started out helping plant daffodils and lay mulch in the Bienenstock Natural Playground where kids can have fun learning about soil. There are stations for making birdseed balls, a tree-painting area and a log full of worms (yes, those yucky, icky but wonderful creatures that [...]
9. Organize your photos. If you’re like me, I snap photos of the garden all season and dump them on my hard drive or on an unlabelled CD where it’s impossible to find them when I need to. Now’s the time to go through the photos and paste them into my gardening journal, organize them into [...]
8. Take the wreath off the door! Okay, so I should have taken down the Christmas wreath well before now, but somehow it takes the first warm spring day to propel me into action. Into the recycling bin it goes! The first of the forced potted bulbs are now appearing at green grocers and I [...]
7. Start sowing seeds. After poring over seed catalogues all winter, the natural next step is to start sowing seeds once orders start arriving in the mail. Last year I picked up a seedling of Oxheart, an heirloom tomato that’s just about the tastiest I’ve tried. It grew high and wide (how was I to know [...]
6. Get thee to a greenhouse! When it’s frosty outside, it’s a tropical paradise inside a greenhouse or conservatory. Here in Toronto there are several indoor gardens, including Allan Gardens in the heart of the city, the Cloud Forest Conservatory to the west of the downtown core and Centennial Park Conservatory in Etobicoke. Outside of [...]
5. Subscribe to E-Newsletters: One of the best ways to keep in touch with the gardening world is by signing up for gardening newsletters. The ones I receive seem to arrive in my inbox just when I need them most — during a wicked snowstorm, when I’m doubting spring will ever come or when I’ve [...]
4. Read a book. There’s nothing nicer than sitting by the fireplace, curled up with a good gardening book while snowflakes drift languidly outside. Bliss. Here’s what’s on my winter reading list:
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