HOLA from the grave!

I finally cut the garden in the back. FINALLY. It only took me from April until the end of July to do it but I got it done! Ten bags of soil later, mixed into clay and I was able to finish planting the veggie plants I got free from work (end of season stuff). It has my Jap maples in it but you can't see them so well.

It nearly killed me.

My son is learning to mow the lawn now.

The dog run! We finally built it and YES we know its crooked a little. One of the posts didn't go in very well and we couldn't get it out. Solution? Just build the damn thing and shove an arbor in front of it. Now... I just need to build the Arbor (and put caps on the middle posts because the two I had, I broke). Otherwise, Stain, finished and EFFECTIVE. ha. The dog hates it.

The before picture, just so you can see how it looked.

Buy Local - not box stores

I can't tell you how disheartening it is to find that people buy plants from big box stores. Don't do it! You're not just taking out the family retail businesses but you're also hurting the local farmers/growers. Agriculture as a whole is suffering terribly and most of your plant growers sell at the market over the winter, just to make meat ends. Living off their summer earnings is never enough and most just get by, barely able to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. You may think I'm lying, over embelishing the truth, but I'm not. I see it first hand. In fact, I've stood by last two years and watched three or four major growers go under because locally, no one supported them. And while oh yes, you may think competition is happy about this, they're really not. It's very very upsetting to see your competition go down and hit rock bottom. No one wishes that on someone else, especially in the plant world. With garden centers, there is always something that they do and they do it well. By supporting your box store, it's just adding to their incentive to take up the business, sell at lower prices and give you poor plants, poor service and poor warranties (like they give any at all!).

Let me break it down for you. Often, box stores will go up to a grower and COMPLETELY buy out one product so no one else has it locally but them! Growers put a halt to this by reserving a block of plants for other retail (family) businesses, but some are greedy and allow this to happen. (side note, small businesses do this too but its different when you're competiting with competition that is also a small business of the same type).

Here's the catch. At any given point, any year, maybe the box store doesn't want to sell this type of plant anymore. They pull out of a promise to buy all this product and wham, the grower is stuck with thousands of potential dollars of plants that die because they can't sell them off to the local retailers because the retailers maybe found that plant somewhere else (plants are like clothes, the trend changes from year to year). A lot of that is fault of the plotting with the devil. And don't get me wrong, I may walk into a box store from time to time but I'd rather support the smaller businesses because they're the ones that'll go the extra mile for you in customer service. And while the box stores aren't going anywhere, it does make an impact eventually if a large amount of people stop going. Rumor has it that Walmart is pulling out of the garden center plant buisness. That they're going to replace the greenhouse with a large sports section. Is this a good idea? Possibly. Is this true? I'm not sure, but it's sure as hell floating around up north here. This is something I would like to confirm but it may be something on the table for them right at this point.

By no means do I mean to slander the big box stores. In fact, there is alot of good they do behind closed doors that we don't see (like exercisin their employees through stretches and workouts before work, charties, etc). But in this world, where greenhouses are already so limited in their numbers, its nice to see support when they need it the most. Planting helps your enviroment, trees clean the air, you've heard it all before, I know, but don't you think it's being repeated for a reason? People aren't just going green for the hell of it. Pesticides aren't being banned because of the colour of the label. They are bad for you and the promotion of going green is because they're trying to thin out the growing spike in cancer (amongst other things). Going green means supporting your local small greenhouse so they can support the growers. It all goes back to the foundations and growers are just that, foundations of a very big picture, the base of our mountain. Without them, we crumble and fall.

Remember that next time you're at the grocery store and buying an apple or when you see the city planting a tree or a garden.

Remember that when you pass a flower, pick it because you can't think of the name and bring it to the garden center to identify it.

Remember it. Because our growers, our garden centers are becoming extinct.

Happy Thanksgiving and Home updates!

I've been busy for the last two weeks and I've had no shortage of people, baby, sick baby, holiday fun and exhaustion since we moved in last week. I have to say, it's a pleasure to sit down on the back patio with my laptop and enjoy the stillness of the evening. It's like living at a cottage, only I live here permanently!! Mind you, it's in suburbia but its in a nook in the suburbs of quietness, trees and vacant of traffic sounds. We're on the line of the fly paths for the airport (because we're fifteen minutes away from it) but they don't fly all the time, or we just stopped noticing after living here for sometime (within the area). It's convient to live here because we're two minutes from the grocery store while not being so close that we hear all the crap that goes on there. The neighbors are nice, quiet and there's lots of kids around here so when Ian gets of Age, he'll have friends to play with. I'm very happy, but along with a house comes alot of background work that I didn't realize. Suddenly, we have a yard to clean up and have to get ready for the winter. Laundry is great because there's not so much of it, but I find Im doing it more because of that. The dog is happy, the cats are SO happy and we're happy too. I can't stress how worth it this was, to spend almost ten years through slumlords and come out of it with a house. A house we love. I'll never move from here. Ever.

We're teaching Ian how to go down the stairs on his stomach because he keeps going up to them and going up on the deck. He wants to go down but he's unsure how. So it's been the main thing this weekend. WE can't put a gate to the basement because of the way it goes, so we have to try something because he's very fast and our eyes are not always quick enough to catch him when he approaches stairs. THe same with the patio steps when working in the yard.

Oh and the mudd. He loves the mud! I went out today and repotted all my plants, pruned them and now they're all ready for the great indoors. My Weeping Purple Beech needs to be planted and Im going to put it where it will block out a hydro pole in the back yard. Originally, I wanted to put it in the front yard to make a gothic garden, specifically targeted towards black growing varieties, but it suits the back yard much better. I may end up getting a bloodgood Japanese Maple tree to block out the neighbors on the left but I havnt' quiet figured out what to plant on the right. We have overhanging hydro lines so I can't plant very large trees. They have to be under fifteen feet.

WE cleaned out the shed yesterday and I had a good laugh. We apparently own every chemical to date, owning three tree pruners (but we have no trees!), two hedge trimmers, three weed wackers, two lawn mowers, five brooms in mint condition, ridiculous amounst of rope, a full wheel of rope, pullys, lawn chairs, a tarp, another patio umbrella, shoves galore, an abundance of tools that I have no idea how to use and a crazy amount of extension cords. Dream come true for me. Hell, I could start my own landscaping company.

So to this weekend, I toast you all and have a Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!

New perennials 2009

WHAT a few weeks it has been. it's been hectic. that's what it's been. Sorry for the typos. I've been up for 46 hours with only two hours sleep so im fairy exhausted overall. Someone pulled the firealarm last night and I had just gotten to bed. So naturally, the baby woke up and it was awhile before we got him back to sleep. By then, it was 4:30am..... I was suppose to get up at five....You can imagine how my day went today. Something of dragging my feet with my face in the pavement.

We're in the process of moving from the apartment to our new home! A house! With a garden!!!!! well... actually, there's nothing on it but lawn (it's a forty year old house so Wheee! lots of lawn). There's a small little garden in front and I went in last week and planted all my perennials before they died on my dark and shady balcony.

So I don't have much brain power to get into a big speech about plants today, so I will have to just post a few pictures of the ones I like. We snagged a few new perennials of 2009. oohh!!
Time to OH and AW.

Crocosmia 'Bright Eyes'

Begonia 'Curly fireflush'.

Tricyrtis 'Lasiocarpa'.

More later! They arn't in bloom yet, but let me just say, I bought London Fog Strain. Props if you know what that is.