Pollenatrix

I had a nice visit

I had a nice visit from Gayla tonight, she took a number of photographs of my deck and grow room as potential material for a book she's writing on gardening (which is very flattering), and we had a great chat about all things gardening. Time just flew by. After she left I brought my two monster plants in from the deck: the cyperus alternifolus (Umbrella Plant), which is about six feet high, and my hibiscus moscheutos, which, judging from the brown cast to the blooms, is feeling the chill of the autumn nights lately. The interesting thing about this plant is that the flowers of the first blooming were a pink blush with a deep red center. This second blooming has pure white flowers with a red center. Anyway, they sure do take up a lot of room -- my 1000watt grow light doesn't cover enough territory to keep them happy across the room all winter. I've arranged to buy a light mover from Happy Girl Hydroponics in Kensington Market, but I realize now it would have been much smarter to install it before I brought all the plants indoors. I'm going to have to pull everything apart to get at it, and I'm afraid my Queen of the Night buds will show their displeasure at the repeated disruptions by blasting all five buds. NOT looking forward to that job.

Speaking of my cyperus alternifolus, I saw a beautiful speciman of it's close relative, cyperus papyrus (here's an example), at the Montreal Botanical Garden yesterday. It was similar in size to the alternifolus, but it had a hairy head on it, kind of like one of the Beatles in the 60's.

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Now THAT'S a truckload of

Now THAT'S a truckload of harvest....

Yahoo! News - World Photos - Reuters

Garden Reads...

Quiet evenings in hotel rooms are perfect opportunities for doing some reading, and I took advantage of it. Lately, I've been interested in garden history, and I picked up biographies of two of the great names in garden-lore: Reginald Farrer, and the Veitch family dynasty while I was in Montreal. The first, "A Rage for Rock Gardening" by Nicola Shulman, is a small book and a  quick and entertaining read on the short life of Farrer. Farrer was an eccentric and impossibly egotistical Edwardian fellow, who would have been right at home in a scene from Brideshead Revisited. In spite of eccentricities, disabilities, and exasperated parents, he was a great adventurer and made several stunning discoveries on his world travels. The second, which I'm still reading, is "Seeds of Fortune" by Sue Shephard. It's an epic story about five generations of the great Veitch family of England. The Veitch name lives on in the botanical names of countless of their plant discoveries, and they were key figures in the early years of the Royal Horticultural Society and the renowned Chelsea Flower Show. The book starts in 1768 with a young and ambitious Scotsman, and takes us through to the family's fate and the downfall of their nursery dynasty in the 20th century. It takes us back to the days of England's great gardens, and to a time when plant-collecting in unexplored foreign realms was dangerous work that claimed many lives and great fortunes.

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I picked up Fine Gardening

I picked up Fine Gardening Magazine for the airplane, and came across a picture of an Aloe that I would love to have: The Spiral Aloe (Aloe polyphylla). It has a bold growth habit that is a real eye-catcher. From what I've read, it's tough to grow, and probably tougher to find! I love a challenge, though, so it's on my wish list anyway.

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Montreal Botanical Garden

We just got back from a weekend in Montreal, and the highlight for me was a visit to the Montréal Botanical Garden [Jardin botanique de Montréal].  There were 10 different connected greenhouses, all with their own climates, to suit the vegetation on display. We walked from hot, steamy tropical rainforests into cool and dry desertscapes, and from a mediterranean hacienda to a wonderful Chinese garden full of fantastic bonsai trees. It really was a great experience. During my visit I was delighted to finally identify an unusual mystery plant that my friend Atilla gave me last winter. I'd never seen one like it, and my attempts at research went nowhere. The plant has done extremely well for me, and I now know what it is: Crassula muscosa, or "Moss Crassula", from South Africa. It also seems to be commonly known as "Watch Chain". We also wandered through the Insectarium, and the Biodome.  The Biodome especially is worth a visit. It is is made up of 4 distinct ecosystems -- the Laurentian/Canadian Shield, the St. Lawrence River, the Antartic, and a tropical rainforest, with representatives of some of the flora and fauna (including some cute river otters, a very anxious and pacing Canada Lynx, some penguins, bats, and Capybaras). I walked through the whole place with my mouth open, fascinated, oblivious to poor Laird who was excruciatingly bored and in pain from his broken toe. I guess it's a place recommended only for nature lovers!

An urban hunter-gatherer

This fella decided to live "off the land" in suburban Isla Vista, California for 2 1/2 months. Granted, it's a different kind of suburb when you can make this claim: "I got my protein from spear fishing in the sea for surfperch, halibut, sheephead, opaleye, and octopus. Once in a while I grabbed scallops, sea urchins, and lobster. " And I had to laugh at his description of his growing panic as "winter" approached, and fruit on trees got scarcer -- even though he writes in utter seriousness and without a smidgen of humour: "In my hasty visits to my food sources, I was accidentally snapping tree branches and trampling vegetable gardens, and I even knocked over somebody's cactus plant as I stole its prickly pears from over a chain-link fence....I feel as though a climactic disaster is imminent in my life if I don't leave here soon. Neighbors, I believe, are on to me." Check it out, all you smug urban farmers!  Going Wild in Urban America

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Green days

The entire weekend has been a green kind of weekend. In the midst of my labours today, I did find some time to read the paper at Alternative Grounds, browse through my favourite shop, Renaissant (especially the garden doodads!), and pick up a bouquet of daisies for the apartment. I bought two; I carried one and Jake carried the other. I'm trying to teach him to carry bags and small things for me when I do my shopping, because I'm usually pretty loaded down by the time I make it home. He did a pretty good job, carrying the plastic sack that the flowers were wrapped in. Once or twice he dropped it, and picked it up upside down, so the blooms were dragging on the sidewalk. With a little encouragement from passersby, and a lot from me, he managed to get his teeth on the middle of the bag so that the flowers were balanced nicely in his mouth. The sidewalks were crowded because of the Harvest Festival, so the sight of a border collie with a bouquet in his mouth caused quite a stir. Lots of smiles and pointing fingers and "awww, isn't he cute". That's my dog! Yesterday I went to visit a fellow parishioner of St. Stephen-in-the-Fields, an elderly lady whose husband is in the hospital. They're both avid gardeners and have a fantastic yard just north of Harbord, but for obvious reasons the garden chores have gotten away from them a bit. I took my tools and my gloves and my dog, and put myself to work straightening borders and pruning and weeding and digging. I guess I must have seemed like a hero to my friend, but honestly it was so much fun for me I think I was getting the better end of the deal. After that, I stopped at Happy Girl Hydroponics in Kensington Market. I had a nice chat with the owner, and have arranged for him to order me some supplies, including a light mover for my 1000w grow light. Some of the locals hanging out in the store seemed mighty impressed that a straight-laced looking middle-aged lady like me was a "grower". I had to smile, this combined with my morning labours was giving my image quite a big, though fraudulent, boost. I didn't tell them that I only grow flowers -- none of them much good for smoking. I have no problem with the stuff they had in mind, but it's not my area of expertise  ;-) After that I parcelled Jake in the car and headed to Metro Hound, a schwanky do-it-yourself dogwash in the Beach. Jake's getting old, and old dogs get smelly. There were no openings for another hour, so I put my name on the list and headed to Cloud's Orchids, since it was kinda in the neighbourhood. The woman running the store was a dog lover, a raccoon fan, and best of all a very knowledgeable (orchid) grower, and an hour passed quickly with a very lively chat. I somehow left there with a new orchid as well as a few supplies. After I got Jake all scrubbed up, I drove home along Queen Street and had a bit of car trouble. Fancy that, the car stalled almost in front of Gardenscape. Heck, it must have been a sign!! So I popped in for a few minutes, chatted with my friend who works there, drooled over many things (especially the leaf patterned concrete stepping stones and bowls -- I have a weakness for concrete things), and came out with a couple of new tools. The car started immediately....

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Bringing the outdoors in

I'm ready for winter -- bring it on. I spent the entire day, from 9 in the morning until 11:30 tonight, putting my grow room together. I covered the walls and floor with heavy-duty plastic (to help keep the humidity up and the water out of the apartment downstairs). This was no simple job; I had to pull everything out, then work around the mess with huge sheets of plastic and a staple gun. I ran out of plastic twice and had to make extra trips to the hardware store. I put up racks for mounted orchids and my big staghorn fern to hang from, and re-hung the hanging plants. Then I brought 90% of my plants indoors, arranged them, purged them of bugs, repotted some, and watered all. The humidity was up nicely at 60% to 70%. If I can keep that going all winter, I'll have lots of flowers and new growth on my orchids this year. I did eat -- Laird lured me out for a late lunch at an Irish pub on Bloor Street. On the way out, we waded through the Harvest Festival crowds one last time, and had a close encounter with an east Asian Elvis impersonator who was crooning ballads on a portable karaoke machine almost outside our front door. Back home, I realized that moving things indoors meant everything on the deck needed to be re-arranged. So I put myself back to work and swung the corn broom around for a while. Though a bit less "dense", the deck still looks nice -- it's just a little more roomy. I figure there's at least another month to six-weeks of deck weather to enjoy. I even paid "some" attention to my african violets tonight. I watered the droopy things, and spritzed them with Neem oil and insecticidal soap. They're looking distinctly better.... maybe I won't throw them away after all. Yeah right.

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The time of harvest

It's disconcerting to live in a Toronto neighbourhood -- though I live a spit away from downtown, Roncesvalles, like many other neighbourhoods in this city, is very much a small village. So much so, today the entire street was closed off for our "Harvest Festival". It's an odd twist to a country fair, for though it boasts the same small midway rides, and the same games of skill and chance, the traditional harvest produce is replaced with end-of-season merchandise -- endless rows of tables, burdened with deeply discounted and slightly dusty wares (no tax all weekend!), on display outside each and every store. Crowds gather around to watch and laugh at the antics of various buskers, and police officers sporting yellow windbreakers, perched on mountain bikes, stand watch over the beer garden set up right in front of the big Roman Catholic church. The vestiges of Roncesvalles' once-predominant Polish population stream out of the church tonight after Saturday night mass, right into the large marquis tent out in the middle of the road where cold beer and the oompah stylings of a live band playing polkas await them.  Neighbours meet and greet, just like any small village. I pass a local drunk standing half-way up a driveway, marvelling at the length of time it was taking him to finish a very public pee against a hedge. It's cool tonight -- the first time all summer that I've needed a sweater to stay warm. I'm glad I brought most of my houseplants back indoors a few days ago, for though the hurricane was a dud, it's too cold for them now anyway. Still, I'm enjoying my own continuing harvest of herbs, tomatoes, peppers, and soon, my one lonely and undersized eggplant -- the fruits of my own modest and pot-bound agriculture labours this summer.

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The remnants of Hurricane Isabel

The remnants of Hurricane Isabel is tearing through Toronto right now, with high winds and heavy rains. For the last two nights I've been bringing some of the more vulnerable plants indoors (it's time anyway). I have a problem -- a nice problem - most of the plants have doubled in size, and very few of them fit on the shelves in the back porch, under my grow light. I'm definitely going to have to get rid of some of them. I've had my share of trials getting these plants inside. Last night, I put up a bracket for hanging plants over the sliding door, and it promptly fell when I loaded it up with two very long, trailing epiphyllums. I could hardly bring myself to look at the damage on the floor, but happily they're tough plants, and though they lost a couple of pieces they're ok. I stuck the pieces back in the soil so they could root. The night before last I was choked when my epi parkinsonianum fell and part of the flower spike I've been nursing all summer broke off. That one hurt.

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