The great destruction of our trees

With winter comes snow and with snow, came freezing rain and layers upon layers of ice. It was dangerous just to walk outside your door. There was no where you could buy salt and power was lost all around Toronto and the area surrounding it. A quarter of a million people lost power, including us. It came to a point where the ice was so heavy on the trees that you couldnt' stand outside without hearing the fall of a tree somewhere in the surrounding area. Powerlines fell, century old trees fell and with it, our wildlife starving due to the inability to access food because ice covered most of it. Trees covered the roads, power lines did to (live ones!) and basically those who had power housed those who didn't. So we took pictures. Our willows are dead, broken, cherry trees are dead too. Most of our surrounding trees are broken like a hurricane hit and left just the trunks. It's been a few days but clean up will go well into February, you can be sure of that. My own trees survived it but they were really weighted down by the ice. My next door neighbor's tree seemed to have just survived it but I can't say the same for the ones across the street, trees that collapsed and broken under the weight and taking the powerlines with them.

  

At some point

It's been awhile right? Right.

So let's just talk bulbs, since I'm on this fun filled blog of mine that I never quite came back to. Everyone's got a hobby right? Mine is writing and gardening. Though over at my writing blog, I try not to put too much down. I'm always afraid someone will rip off my ideas and write it before I can get to it. Here is my writer's blog. It's where I spend some of my time but not tons of it. I manage through my twitter and my daily account, roll through my tumblr when I'm looking for ideas. I don't spend piles of time on any of my one account, mostly because I spend all my time writing and off in another world creatively. I can't help the ideas that flow into me nor can I stop them when they become so distracting that I can't get what I wanted to do, done. These places are where I am when I'm not writing. That is really to say, all this media is very distracting so I spend as little time on it as I can.

I'm reading "Awaken the Giant within" and I find that the book is very fascinating. It talks about spreading yourself too thin and if I could recommend a book that will give you focus and a good direction to gain that focus, this would be the book for you. I'm always too aware of how much I spread myself out, my media outlets should be proof of that. But how to narrow it all down to one thing? I don't have an answer for you, except close things. Close them and focus. Delete them if you have to and focus. Master your energy into one thing and greatness will come.

But back to my original focus; bulbs. My sister showed up the other day and brought me over a hundred bulbs of Queen of Night, which is my absolute favorite. If there is anything to know me, I'm a black gardener. That means (before your mind jumps to some racial misunderstandings) that I love black flowers, black leaves, black trees. I have a very healthy black weeping Beech in the back of my house. It's my favorite tree and it's also taking over my back yard. I have black bugal weed (Ajuga) in the back yard, a black iris, which I think has died. Ive even had black roses (which also have died). I've done black pansies, black heuchera, and black upon black of everything. I try my hardest to find true blacks and not variations of purple in my yard. I've even gone to have the beautiful black Mondo grass, which seems to do better in acidic gardens than my overly nutritious garden all together. Could be all that shade though, even though they like a half day. But I'm far from winning the black title for gothic gardener. But I have my bulbs, coupled with Red which is morbid and some purple with another colour, I didn't spare my garden anything short of a mix up.

I dug the holes, dumped them in and covered them up. About a foot deep. Bulbs will come up on their own, even at a foot deep. I feel that soemtimes if you put them any less than that, like most people hit the 6 inches or 4 inches into the ground, one at a time, you're going to have that awful squirrel dig up all your hard work. I like to just dig around the plants, making the hole as big as possible. Much like burying a body (boy I'm on a morbid track here). Don't just dig a hole, dig a kidney shaped hole, dig a circle around the tree, or dig at the edge of your garden, around a bend. Make it interesting. Make it scattered. And make your neighbors laugh this year, jealous the next when everything comes up. I know I have a jealous neighbor. I just have to look over into her garden to see that she's gone out and bought the exact same plants that I have in mine.  I know they also watch me digging in muck, mid December and wonder what the hell I'm doing. Actually, I think most of my neighbors think that because I spend very little time fussing over my garden. I usually just have a shovel, a plant and jam it in. That's about the extent of my garden time. Or I'm turning over soil. My planter is a big collection of birch sticks. Seriously, I'm the epitome of greenhouse gardeners, meaning we don't spend a lot of time making immaculate things. We do it in one shot, we're no fuss but I enjoy later what I stow.

I cut a new garden at the front. It's about 6 feet away from the curb, which still makes it city grounds, but I still did it even with the fear that the city will come along one day and dig it all up. I've seen them do it. I made it roughly ten feet in diameter, give or take and eight feet wide. Its kidney shaped, wraps around the front but I used a garden hose to work out how I wanted it to look. What was the best angle from the street where everyone would see it. What is the best angle from the house, where I would have to live with what I cut? I wrapped it around my growing Japanese bloodgood, with grasses on either end. I love my grasses but I don't have enough yet to go under my window and I'll probably splurge and buy twelve once I'm ready to do that. But for now, I chopped up everything that I had in my garden; that's three years of perennial growth that I let go wild until I was ready to make a statement. All my hostas were split three times, grasses were moved to bigger spots and I basically cultivated all of my garden to make this moment a big one for me next year when everything comes to flower. It'll either be beautiful or it'll be a mess, but I do know one thing; I've got too many hostas for my own garden. If it's not a specialty hosta, I don't really care for it. Except Francee. I have a special annoying place in my heart for that landscapish type of hosta. Must be all the dark green on white edges.

Needless to say, it took me two days to cut the garden. That's cutting into the ground, turning it over on top and churning it once into the clay. In our area, we're made up of clay, so if things get wet, they generally stay wet. Now I added no soil to my garden. I didn't need to. I had the grass that I turned over. It's the best kind of nutrition and no, I don't have a grass problem because I'd just go out there in phases and turn it over again and again. This helps break down the grass into soil. It's a poor man's garden, with a little hard work and a lot of patience. You have to wait for it to break down but once it does, you have a good loose soiled garden to play around with. Well, that's if you tossed out those rocks you dug up to the side. They still sit next to the hedge.

Ohhh and they say, what doesn't kill ya makes you stronger. And it just about did; kill me that is. 

I fixed that small dent in the left later on. So it's not there now. But this is what I call a good shape and i'll have to edge it a hundred times for the edge to stay where I need it. Edging is what cleans up the garden, keeps it all in so you can run over the edge with a weed whacker or a lawn mower and won't lose any plants in the process. but see how much soil I had. The darker (second) picture is when we finished it. I had help with my husband, my niece and my bestfriend, who all took turns doing it over the course of two days. The First picture (above/sunny) is after a few weeks, edging it again and turning over the soil so that nothing grows from the grass. No soil was added from anywhere else. What you see is what was turned over and that's that. 

I don't like space in my garden because the more room between plants you have, the more you're inviting weeds to grow in-between. You can see in the background of the darker foggier picture that my garden is over grown there by the door. eventually these gardens are going to connect, with a few more trees and a couple of other things too. but for now, they're separate. Because more garden means more work. And more work means having more time for it. Which I don't. Getting there but not there yet.