May Long Weekend--Here we go again!

Happy Victoria Day Long Weekend!
Lazy Gnome checking in to wish all you gardeners the best as you battle crowds at garden centres to score that red geranium you want for your front planter...LG is taking (most of) the weekend off. (She and family members are heading to Jasper where LG is anticipating much cooler weather than here in the city—not that it has been HOT or anything!!

LG’s internal clock is off kilter: in some ways it seems way too early to get excited about planting annuals, and she is perplexed to see people combing over the racks of lobelia at Home Depot. On the other hand, because of the past 10 days’ activities, she rather feels she had DONE gardening this year.

So, update on the yard. Leaves are bursting out all over and the tulips are almost all blooming--LG is very happy she shoved those babies in the ground late last year as they add a wee bit of perkiness now....and if the landscaper had not yet returned, she can't imagine how bleak the yard would be by now--and covered in weeds!!

Last weekend LG transplanted about 20 shrubs and perennials from her neighbour’s garden where they wintered to their new homes scattered about the yard. LG was stunned at how dry that earth was over there--LG hadn't even thought about watering there yet this year and realizes she may have just saved some of the shrubs in time as there was virtually no dirt clinging to the roots of several, including the amur maple and the weeping crab. But, they all seem to be thriving from her watering routine! None of them went back to where they came from....things are very different in the yard now. Anyway, this was a good work out. But, as usual, there was a certain angst based on an inability to identify what some of these shrubs were: potentilla (which, honestly, LG is not fond of)? Spirea? Ninebark? So, placement was a bit of Russian roulette. The potentilla is a bit of an issue—somehow, of the three, it ended up where LG will see it as she works inthe kitchen, whereas the other three are around the side of the house.

Part of LG’s angst was about placement because even though she had the landscape design in her hand, things on the ground didn’t work out as the designer planned. For instance, the path along the south side of the house ended up a lot closer to the house, meaning the beds on either side are not the same depth. (And, in all honesty, the plan looks way off the actual space there.) And LG didn’t want to mess up the themes or patterns of the designer’s concepts, so this “found” area ended up with several of these shrubs which also aren’t on the plan, at all, but LG refuses to sacrifice. Except that she is not a fan of Potentilla, partly because she has never had luck with them....somehow, these bushes thrive in Wal-Mart parking lots, but LG can’t grow one to save her life...perhaps attitude adjustment is in order, but, well, it may be too late.

Anyway, LG has been mostly pre-occupied with watering the sod: all waking hours that she has been at the house for the past 10 days have seen sprinklers trying to spread the liquid of life for the sod. Nine of those days have been incredibly windy and likely hindered the success. The front lawn looks not bad from a distance, but the back is rather patchy. Sigh...she kinda hopes for RAIN!

Cheers for now, and happy Garden Hunting!

Presto--a yard!

So, twelve hours earlier Lazy Gnome was bracing herself on this very blog-thing for hours of sweat and tears over the next week to slop around with mulch, yet as she approached the house, the three fabulous Landscape Gentlemen were finishing off the sod and had done 75% or more of the mulch! There was a bit of guilt; enough for LG to get into her scrubs and help spread around the rest of it, but she's happy--even if they charge her more, she is a happy camper!

The bigger picture: yes, there is still a lot of work for LG--planting ALL those shrubs the landscaper will eventually deliver, and moving those that wintered next door. However, she now feels, finally, that she has a yard, that the eyes of the neighbours and those dog walkers or cyclists happening past won't be looking quite as critically at her place. She has returned this lot--well, once the sod takes root, literally--to a more upstanding member of the neighbourhood.

Now LG simply has to, well, pay for all this...and try not to think about all the moola she has sunk into this house and property over the past 22 months...there is more to come. Tomorrow, for instance, the Floor Guy will be installing laminate in the basement room and the maybe Window Guy will stop by to develop a quote to replace the original wood-framed windows in the basement...and LG started on a WHIM to paint the bathroom--that will be a five-week project if she doesn't get going...and then there's the hot water tank that has been sitting in its box in the basement since Thanksgiving...it just never ends!! Oh--then the basement room will need to be trimmed and the electrical finished...when all she really wants to do is remove the awning above the north living room window and sit outside and read on the front steps...

Well, she's rambling and sadly not very elequent. She's also not as relieved as she thought she would be to have arrived at this stage...oh, that's right: there's the wee conflict with the Garage Guy, including the fact that something he has left may be severely dangerous...sigh.

Anyway, now perhaps LG can dedicate more of this space to discussing the virtues of actual plants....

Here's book for a paranoid gardener on a rainy day: Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln's Mother and other Botanical Atrocities by Amy Stewart. LG picked this up in the midst of that wicked winter we just survived, and read in horror about all the nasty plants we all probably have in our gardens. Despite the arctic-temperatures and the soothing ride home on the bus from Whyte that Saturday afternoon, a chill went down LG's spine to read that azaleas (so gorgeous!), foxglove (an LG fav since finding them wild across Ireland), and lobelia (that reassuringly successful annual for pots), and the hydrangea (which LG has ordered to be added to this new yard!!) each have tendencies to be nasty!! Yikes!!

Cheers for now, as a giddy LG bids you a good night....

"The coward's weapon, poison"~~Phineas Fletcher, 1614

The excitement builds....

Blooming tulips!

Trees in the ground!

Rolled sod!

The landscaper has been busy! And tonight when Lazy Gnome gets home, she will probably be busy herself spreading the mulch. The landscaper is going to dump it all over the area of the yard where the sod is currently rolled up--because by then it will be all laid out!!--and LG will be pilling mulch into her wee wheel barrel and trucking it carefully on the paving stones only--NOT across the fresh lawn--and setting it out over the beds...

This is not true Lazy Gnome activity, but at some point Lazy Gnome has to take more care over the costs and turn into Cheap-o Gnome. She has been doing some serious training to get her body into shape--lots of crazy Ashtanga Yoga which might just kill her...the entire right side of her body feels like it might just fall off!!

Anyway, the yard is really starting to take shape now....plus, the landscaper re-set paving stones where the settling of the area around the foundation was causing them to split between the rows, and the back door area where the ground beneath the stones had simple eroded due to all the moisture, combined with the apparently poor backfilling after the foundation work. LG wasn't around to see if they had tampered it back in, but luckily the landscaper was able to fix it. This particular landscaper guy, Chris, is really good to deal with. Very calm, asks lots of questions, explains things, takes the time to go over things, and has really done a fantastic job with the paving stones....wow. (The guy here with him yesterday was part of the tear-down crew last summer...he remembers the rain reallly well! And apparently because of the old deck, they had lots and lots of flat tires from old nails....oops.)

Anyway, looking forward to that hard labour after work!

LG

"The labour we delight in physics pain." ~~ William Shakespeare, Macbeth

"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." ~~ Oscar Wilde

They're baaack!!

This is very exciting—but it is so hard to welcome spring back without burbling over with clichés!

So, Lazy Gnome will focus on two events in the garden this past week...

First, the tulips are up and budding!! LG hastily tucked them into the earth some time in the fall, worried that as they had been untimely ripped from the yard last spring and banished to the basement (there being at the time, no garage!), they may not be appropriately primed to last the winter and put on their show...well, LG is happy to report that there are patches of them on three sides of the house! Characteristically, LG neglected to notate where she put what and as a result, each wee green or purple pointy, curled leaf that has come up has been a joyous surprise! And if some aren’t coming up...well, no one knows! Triumph of nature, those wondrous bulbs!

(As a somewhat depressing side note, if you, dear reader, were to trace back to LG’s posts from early May 2010, you would see that the tulips were up, had bloomed and then were unceremoniously trounced with snow by this time last year...)

Now, perhaps even more interestingly, the landscapers are back, too! In fact, they installed a whole new section of paving stone and outlined the edging for the beds on Friday. This is major progress! Tomorrow they promise to fix that section of paving stones that collapsed at the back door, and there should be sod when LG returns from work...sod! glorious, green grass!! This will require daily watering until it sets, and then an eventual high cut, but still, it will start to look like a yard!!

Now, the sad-ish part of this: in negotiating the work with the landscaper last summer, apparently in a fit of frugality, Lazy Gnome indicated she herself would lay the mulch. Ahem. Lazy Gnome loves mulch—it allows her to be extremely good at the lazy part...AFTER it is in place. Not that it is heavy, mind you, but she has been told she cannot roll it over the new sod. So, there will be several evenings this week and possibly all of next weekend during which LG will be steering the wheel barrel along the new paving stone to dump the mulch and then try to rake it into place...egads. Perhaps she can recruit / draft the 3-year old across the street who is enthralled with the "diggers"...
There will be a very high need for G&T’s by Saturday!!

PS: Happy Mother's Day!

"May is a pious fraud of the almanac." ~~~James Russell Lowell, 1869

"Who would have thought my shrivelled heart

Could have recovered greenness?"~~~George Herbert, The Flower, 1633

Psst....it's a secret...

...shh, we must be quiet, careful not to scare it away, but there might just be a sign of Spring--so shy this year, so afraid to shed her white cloak...but, I think, maybe, there must might be wee buds on the apple tree next door...!! Oops--there, it's out of the bag! Of course, there is too much snow for Lazy Gnome to do a proper investigation, but from the window there are wee little knobby things at the end of the branches....ooh, it is soooo exciting!!

Do you remember what spring looks like? What is your favourite first sign of Spring?

Also today there were swarms of Bohemian waxwings aloft in 6 elms out front, taking turns pecking at cones in the huge spruce next door--odd that the little birds look so much larger from a distance than relatively close up, leaving their red dropping-calling cards! And they were all chattering, hundreds of birds versus one squirrel chippering away! Suddenly, the chattering stopped, and with one soft "whoosh" of their wings, they all soared south, then north again, to reconvene at the peaks of another ever green down the street. But, they are hardly a sign of spring: LG saw swarms of them when she was out raking the snow off the roof in mid-January!

Until next time, LG signing off, off sign hunting! LG

How cold is it where you live?

Lazy Gnome is still alive and kicking even after all this snow and the see-saw weather...hope all you are alright, too!?

LG managed to accidentally buy a magazine that was NOT meant for Zone 3. She noticed the authors were from Western Canada so she thought, hey! that's good news! Well, she should have looked more carefully...

The cover main story is "7 Ways to Creat a Zen Retreat"; other blurbs that caught her attention on the cover included "cold-hardy conifers" and "7 design tricks for a gorgeous edible small-spaced garden". Well, LG's garden is not exatly small spaced, but any area dedicated to edibles probably will be small as LG assumes edible=lotsa work.

Unfortunately, the pieces have few outdoor applications this side of the Rockies, but some of the photos of work lucky Okanagan and Fraser Valley gardeners have undertaken are beautiful...sigh. Perhaps this magazine is part of a subliminal campaign to ensure it is every Albertan's aspiration to retire in BC...

However, there is one gem of a piece of information. It's a table that goes with last post's climate zone map. It explains that "[i]n general, the climate zone determines what will grow in your area. A simple definition is by minimum temperature." It goes on to show the "minimum" temperature for zones 0 to 9. LG understands that what they are taking about is actually the coldest general temperature in the year, and that plant life that survives in a given zone has to be able to live through these cold temperatures. LG is unsure if in some cases it means a given type of plant or shrub actually requires such cold temperatures to survive--similar to the concept that some plants' seeds require the heat of fire to germinate.

The magazine thoughtfully provides this in both Centigrade and Fahrenheit, which in LG's mind just confuses things. She also assumes this does not include the windchill factor--something we Edmontonians are VERY familiar with over the past three months....

Here is part of the chart--Centigrade only:
Zone 0: below -45C [yikes!]
Zone 1: - 45C
Zone 2: -45C to -40C
Zone 3: -40C to -35C....this is us.
Zone 4: -35C to -29C
Zone 5: -29C to -23C
Zone 6: -23C to -18C
Zone 7: -18C to -12C
Zone 8: -12C to -7C
Zone 9: -7 to -1C

LG has been particularly attentive to temperatures due to the necessity of walking to the busstop and the potential of waiting there for what might be an indeterminate period of time. She is well aware that the windchill factor has gone far below -30, but the actual "base" temperature she believes has maybe once or twice this winter dipped below that...when your face is freezing it makes no difference what makes it so cold. But who knows what requirements Mother Nature has for plants insulated by a snow pack the Rockies would envy.

Anyway, as LG writes, she is happy to see that she and her fellow citizens have survived yet another week of topsy-turvy weather, and wonders what the next five days have in store!

Hang in there, fellow travellers....we will arrive at Spring, um, sometime before Fall!?

Lazy Gnome was originally hoping to provide a forum for local gardeners to share information on gardening—besides reading about LG’s complaints. Why? Because LG is convinced that other than the local gardening centres, there is actually a dearth of information for Zone 3, which is disappointing in Canadian publications. The Lazy Gnome blog-thing gives you a chance to share what you find, be it helpful information or to warn others off false, misleading or just annoying stuff. So, feel free to add to the tidbits offered here, to challenge anything you read, and ask questions...someone might actually try to answer them!

Edmonton is in Zone 3 (specifically 3a) which is better than Zone 2 as far as options are concerned, but the big markets in Canada are more like Zone 4a to 5b (Southern Ontario) and those lucky so and so’s in Victoria(Zone 8a). For the full map, see the link in the previous post.

Recently, Gnome finally got up off the couch and bought a couple of gardening magazines published north of the 49th. She would like to share with you her thoughts on Canadian Gardening’s Great Garden Guide (Annual, 2011, on display until April 30). The cover shows a serene, Zen-inspired scene with a water feature, lots of green and what looks like the Cranesbill geranium in the foreground. Inside there are several features, and a few that LG recommends for others looking for short tidbits of information, and a special treat.

The issue seems to built around the theme of “tens”—several articles presenting “The 10 best...”. An eye-catching piece is about the 10 best woody plants (trees and shrubs) for four season interest. The “interest” is in colour or texture of bark, or the colour and shape of evergreens. Happily, of the 10, while only 1 is labelled as zone 3 (“Candicans” white fir—never heard of it but probably LG’s community is filled with them) and THREE species that are labelled Zone 2: a gold-coloured cedar (“Sunkist”, a blue spruce (“Hoopsii”), and a dogwood “Cardinal Redosier”). Now, LG doesn’t speak Latin and so can’t remember those names well. She is occasionally willing to risk planting a Zone 2 shrub in a Zone 3 area such as Edmonton, on the ill-formed assumptions that since Zone 2 is colder than Zone 3, a Zone 2 should consider itself quite happily on vacation in Edmonton. But, LG advised that if the shrub doesn’t do well, it must really want more cold, and is therefore NOT a shrub of LG’s interest as she ain’t looking for more cold.

Meanwhile, LG also suspects that we can try some Zone 4 shrubs—you know, if you have that ability to create a “microclimate” in a warm corner with lots of sun and heat leaking from your basement, and you baby the crap out of a shrub labelled Zone 4, you might have luck. So, with that in mind, you might like to see that four of the rest of the list are Zone 4: a winterberry, a birch, a hemlock and something called a “Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick”. Someday I might look them up; I am certain there are some species of hemlock and that walking stick in the Lois Hole book on trees and shrubs. The photo in the magazine of the walking stick does provide lots of winter interest as the branches are all twisted and curvy. Cool.

The article on the 10 best Hostas claims they are all hardy to at least Zone 3. Now that is exciting! However, LG doesn’t recall seeing any directly attached photo and she can’t name hostas, although she can recognize some. Still, it’s promising.

The major feature in the magazine, however, is a 28-page series of articles and photos of ONE garden. Actually, it is a 10-acre private property, which incorporates different types of gardens: ornamental, formal, wildflower meadow and water garden. The photos do show all four seasons from the same spot, and sometimes you cannot tell without serious study that it is the same garden. Fascinating and educational. Let’s face it: real landscapers always tell us to consider what our gardens will look like all year when planning them or making decisions about what to put where. However, because this time of year we cannot do that—either the view is obscured by a snow storm, by darkness (because for three months we spend daylight at work and commute in the dark), or by glare when the sun reflects off the snow. Also, because while we have the four seasons, but they change gradually, we simply forget—like we repress that pain of -28C when it is +22. So, LG found these pictures quite interesting—and easier than taking her own photos.
LG actually pitied these poor people—how they must suffer with extreme green thumb-itis.

Ten acres is not a garden; it’s a park...LG nearly broke out in hives thinking about how much work must be involved...imagine the sweat, the heaving lifting, the mosquitoes...yikes! But, all those worries about that poor gardener receded when LG read the quote that they hire help: professionals to help with spring clean up, and part time help through the growing season...ahh, LG can ignore her inferiority complex for now. Hiring help? Well, not for LG. First, she’d feel compelled to share her Mojitos and that ain’t gonna happen. And please, dear friends, if Lazy Gnome starts to make noises about acquiring a freaking 10-acre garden, please, please get her help....yikes! That kind of effort and ambition can be admired, but is not for the truly lazy amongst us...

The verdict: this issue of Canadian Gardening Great Garden Guide is worth a look. It has more Zone 3-related information than LG was expecting, and that makes her happy!!