We’d been looking at the calendar, and here just a few days into May, the summer seems all booked up already – crazy!! The warm months always go by in a whirl.

Soon the traveling will start, but for a few days – calm. Dad is in town visiting/at a conference, we celebrated Mother’s Day at preschool and the girls are busy playing outside and helping us in the garden. We really should have our veggies in already, but we’re a bit slow, thanks to the side-yard mud-patch.

Enjoy the pictures. Click once, then again, to embiggen.

Last year we had this grand scheme for the side yard, which was basically this grassy, weedy pit of a place. The previous owners has some half-baked plans that never came to fruition. We decided to build a shaded play area, with butterfly attracting, soft plants, trees to make shade, and many indigenous plants. Then after we took all the gravel and stuff out last year – oops! off I went to Ethiopia.

But we still had the plans. So this year we’ll see it though. The girls helped us pick rocks last week. there was a considerable amount of dirt to move, and a lot of weeds and grass to take out. Then I staked it out with our plan, and today we bought most of the plants.

Today I started planting, but stopped after an hour. This could take a while! The only ingredigent that we’re missing is the thyme for the middle. We’re not sure if we can get away with white creeping thyme, instead of the thicker stuff we had planned (but don’t have enough of at the store…)

I’ll post more pictures when it sharts to grow in more…

Aside from the random 10 minute hailstorm yesterday, we’ve been having great weather here in the Okanagan. Spring is here in full force – it’s kinda cool:  the “two lips”, as the girls call them, which they planted last fall are up and blooming. I think gardening is a great activity for them to learn about nature and food.

This whole “no pesticides no herbicides” thing has been a big deal for my farmer-raised-in-Saskatchewan husband… but he is getting into it and having some real fun gardening these days.

We’ve found a few aphids on the cherry tree and one of the rose bushes (Jrock’s prized roses!!) and he has been diligently soap-straying them.  But yesterday we found out that a local garden store was carrying lady bugs! So we bought 250 of the little buggers (ha ha) and released them in the cherry tree, the rose bush, and my broccoli/cabbage patch last night.  (Last year the aphids overwhelmed the broccoli, kale and cabbages so we couldn’t even eat them. Whoops.)

You keep the barely-moving ladybugs in the fridge until you are ready for them, but when you set them out in the warm evening air – wow! they just wake up and go on an aphid hunt tout-suite! Today, there isn’t an aphid to be found on the cherry tree. And they are pretty cute, too.

If you want to get some yourself, here is the company our “voracious predators” came from: thebuglady.ca She has lots of other bugs and natural pest control stuff on her website… worth checking out!

Spring is here and it’s a great time to play a guessing game with Mother Nature – so all you gardeners out there… why don’t you give a try?

I’ve posted pictures below of five of our trees’ blossoms… can you guess which is which? The photos were taken two days ago.  Just post a comment with your guesses… and in a couple of days I’ll post the answer.  The winner gets all the gardening glory

Click on the photos to enlarge if you want.

The spring wine festival starts at the end of the month – it’s the biggest event in the year in the Okanagan – aside, of course, from the fall wine festival.  We have noticed that we have been drinking more wie since we moved here… not too much! but we did go through three barrels since the fall. Two were merlot – one was cab franc.  You know we had to mix the CF with the one barrel of merlot (we used the patented two straw approach.)  It’s definitely too harsh on it’s own. 

And what to do with all these leftover barrels?  Luckily, it’s easier to plant tomatoes in them than in a glass magnum. (Now if wine came in plastic bottles – well, I have heard that you can plant tomatoes in them. But not glass.)

So Jrock cracked open the power tools yesterday and cut the three barrels in half.  Didn’t he do a nice job?  Now all we have to do is fill the suckers with dirt and plant some tomatoes.  I haven’t decided what else should go in them. 

Any suggestions? They’re on the east side of the house, but they don’t have any shade until late afternoon, so they’ll get pretty hot. Gardeners?  Ideas?

Oh – and I have to be able to eat it.  No flowers. Ba humbug.

And PS: Happy Earth Day tomorrow!  These barrels, my learning to weed, our increasingly huge garden, the new berry plot, our freshly insulated basement and cellulose-filled ceiling, cooking more lentils and actually making them tasty, etc. are all some steps that we’ve taken to be more sustainable this past year – that I think also really enhance our quality of life. 

What are you going to do this year? 

I bought another apple tree. For the other side of the yard.

Don’t tell Jrock.

__

PS: No, we didn’t drink it all.  A barrel holds 27 CASES of wine, silly. That would be 486 bottles each.

It’s been a while since I last posted about my garden…

My vegetable beds were looking pretty forlorn when they were first planted… Now the veggie beds are full of lushious zucchini and peas and beans and parsnips and lettuce.  And that’s just what we can eat now.  What a treat.  I haven’t had a vegetable garden for years, and It’s wonderful.

The fruit trees are still little but happier looking. Apparently they will produce fruit next year but I’m supposed to cut it off and let the nutrition go to the roots.  In the meanwhile, I’m just frequenting the market gardens and the farmer’s market for my weekly dose of cherries.  Peach season is coming up! yum… then apples and pears…..  yummmmyummmmmyy…..

My mother made a sarcastic remark to me on the phone the other night that I hadn’t put any new posts up on my blog recently… true! it’s been a little slim in the news department.  I promise to try harder, Mom!

Actually, I already promised my mother-in-law that I would put up pictures of our yard and show her all the planting and construction we’ve done.  So let’s take care of two moms with one post! ha ha

Please take into account that it’s a first year yard, so much of it is quite barren.  The roses and the existing shrubs are a nice spot of colour.  Oh! and those window boxes I showed you that I planted a while back – well, they are just lovely now. We also have a couple of planters on the deck, full of lillies, since we can’t have them inside.  (Lillies are toxic to cats, and it gets very expensive when you come home to a black and white feline face with orange lips.  Trust me.  So, even though they are our favorite flower, they have to remain outside of the realm of our munchy cats.)

Click on the pictures below to see the details of the back yard.  In the far left corner I have raspberries, blackberries, boisonberries and blueberries planted, along with a couple of mounds for melons..  The far lefttree is cherry, then comes the pear in the middle (with 5 varieties on it – yum,) then the Gala apple.  In front of the shed is the peach tree, which, if the taggy on it is correct, will grow quite enormous.

So the garden is coming along.  We had a huge truck load of pea gravel dropped off today, so guess what Jrock and I will be doing tonight?  Covering up the sod I removed all along one side of the house, and between the garden beds.  It’ll look really nice and tidy when it is done, though. 

Better get off to swimming, now… just to make you folks in the colder regions jealous, here is a favorite rose picture from this morning just outside the kids’ room window.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KUjY63MQkg]

This was for you, husband of mine!

(He says it has to do with being a farm boy – “spring is for spraying!” he says!  Sofar he’s been out there with his pump and poisons two or three times.  His mission?  Freeing our garden from the scary, nasty plague of … <dandylions.> Every time I object.  But he gets this strangely delighted macabre look on his face and says “I’m goin’ sprayin’.  That’s just the end of it.”

I have all these big landscaping plans, and Jrock has been standing by, scrutinizing my ideas, throwing his hands up at costs, and just being generally grumpy about the whole thing.

So I started myself – riping up sod, buying plants at the Garden Club’s sale, etc.  Finally, seeing big patches of dead sod on our lawns, dust all through the SUV from hauling sod to the dump, and general chaos, he gave up and decided to pitch in.  Which is good! because it’s a heck of a lot easier to do this stuff with a partner.

Yesterday we peeled back some more of the dead sod in the back yard and started on the raised garden beds.  It doesn’t look like much yet, but going out and getting the boards and putting your design in action is half the challenge. The 4 beds will be 24 inches high, so I can sit on the edge of the beds and weed and plant.

One of the other main challenges in the yard is the “toddler dealth trap” – left of where I’m sitting in the garden photo and from closer above.  It’s a pond insert – currently full of a bunch of mud and leaches – eww - but too deep and too precariously situated for safety.  I love ponds – I had a big one in our last yard… but it wasn’t an insert, and a kid could walk out of it over a gradual edge. This one is quite a hole.  So I’m going to haul it out, fill in the dirt, and replace it with some very shallow pool and a water fountain.  I’ll take out the rock plants, move them away to a more useful part of the yard, and plant it with herbs.

I love puttering in the garden! (And I am so happy Jrock is helping me out too )

Back in the fall, once most of the grapes had fallen to the ground or been eaten by the dogs, I decided to harvest the leftovers from the backyard.  I got a couple of cups of white grape juice (see above) and a whole jug of red grape juice.

It was the first time in years that I had grown something to eat – I used to have plots in the community garden when I was an apartment-dweller and really enjoyed mucking about. So this summer we are refocusing our energies on building a garden in the backyard.  We’re planting fruit trees (apple, pear, peach, cherry and plum!) and making some raised beds for vegetables.  My sis is moving to Invermere in the summer, so we’re hoping to spend a few days each summer doing mass bouts of canning (her specialty) and juicing.  My gramma was telling me about how they used to pasteurize apple juice and I think it’s a great way to get organic, healthy food.  PLUS, there won’t be as many emissions going into the air just to get my food to my house. PLUS, a chip off the grocery bill is a good idea.  PLUS, it’s really good for kids to see where their food comes from.

So a toast to self-sufficiency!  A toast to my spring garden!

(By the way, you are probably wondering when I’m going to squeeze all this gardening in between the renovations… good news.  The countertops are installed today, the tile guy comes back this weekend and the plumber should be finishing up next week.  So we’re pretty close to being finished!)