Soggy Canada Day

We've had a lot of rain this week. More flooding down at the creek today, as we got our second inch in as many days, and the ground was already sodden with the 2.25 inches from last Thursday. And to think I was complaining about the lack of rain just before this wet week started.

Which would you rather have: too much rain or drought? I'll take this over the once in 50-year drought we endured in 2007.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Did we ever get rain today!

I had been hoping for rain to give us some relief from a dry couple of weeks, and our current heat wave. Well, it rained, and how!

Creek banks flooding onto our property

Our little bridge across the creek under water

This was the scene following two and a quarter inches of torrential rain (and a bit of hail) that came down during the lunch hour. As always, the creek flooded and the lowest part of our property near the road is under water. By evening, it should be cleared, unless we get another thunderstorm.

The storm brought so much rain in such a short time that a road near us washed out in an area where they had just added a culvert and some gravel, but hadn't yet replaced the black-top paving. No damage here, but the petunias in my containers have been flattened. A small price to pay for much-needed rain, and they will perk up again.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Hamilton and area garden tours this weekend

Ten gardens in Simcoe, Ontario, will be featured this weekend in this year's fundraising event for the Norfolk Historical Society, sponsored by TD Canada Trust.

Tickets can be purchased in advance for $10 at the Eva Brook Donly Museum, 109 Norfolk St. S. in Simcoe or by calling 519-426-1583. Tickets are also available at each garden on the weekend for $12 each. All proceeds go to the operations of the museum archives.

For more information about the Norfolk Historical Society, the museum and the garden tour, visit www.norfolklore.com

---

Hamilton Spectator Open Garden Week, usually a 10-day event, runs an extra day this year, Canada Day. The 17th annual Open Garden week begins Sunday, June 21, and finishes on Wednesday, July 1.

This is a unique free event in which dozens of local gardens are open to visitors at a time that the garden owners choose. All the information is published in a special section in the Thursday, June 18, edition of the Spectator. Here's a link to the gardens participating this year.

Last year, 63 gardens were open in every community of Hamilton as well as through Burlington, Haldimand County, Grimsby, Brantford and Paris.

If you're curious about whether we are participating in the Open Garden Week, we did two years ago, and we might again one day, but not this year. We used to do lots of garden tours and open garden days, but it add a certain level of stress to our busy gardening life. We have one tour this year: Royal Botanical Gardens Auxiliary is visiting on July 13. (The tour is open to members of the Auxiliary only.)

---

More Ontario garden tours can be found here, courtesy of the Empress of Dirt.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

June blooms: we're in fragrance heaven

The most colorful spot in June - John's rock garden

Mmmmm, it really smells sweet here right now, particularly in the evenings. At the side door, the last of Palibin lilacs waft their scent and from behind the house comes the lovely perfume of the black locust trees.

Dame's rocket growing under a stand of sumacs
naturalized area around our silo

Walk to my husband John's rock garden, and there's the spicy fragrance of dianthus, mingled with that of dame's rocket, which grows wild under the sumacs nearby. Then at my four-square garden, it's the peonies, just starting to bloom. I remember well when we first moved here - 11 years ago now - there was no garden, and very little scent - just the black locusts.

A June bouquet from the 4-square garden:
peonies, lady's mantle and Siberian iris

So what else is in bloom for this garden blogger's bloom day? Well, we have rock garden plants (that garden has never looked better) - too many to mention, even if I knew what they all were.

A closer view of a part of the rock garden
with pink creeping baby's breath, dianthus, alpine alyssum

In my flowerbeds, there's beautybush, giant white fleece flower (Persicaria polymorpha), false blue indigo (Baptisia australis), lady's mantle, Siberian iris and Allium christophii, Salvia offincialis, and catmint.

Persicaria polymorpha, beautybush and false blue indigo
in my semi-circular border

Except for the rock garden, June isn't as colorful in most of my garden as July is. That's because my orientation is the prairie style, based on lots of ornamental grasses and masses of mid- to late-season perennials. Still to bloom too is our prairie meadow, which comes into its own next month.

For lots more on June Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, head on over to May Dreams Gardens.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Meet the culprits...the bulb thieves

They look pretty cute, these chipmunks, but they are systematically clearing my garden of all of its crocus and tulip bulbs. I keep finding holes they've dug everywhere around the house.

Our house is on a hill, and our patio is terraced with large rocks. Unfortunately, it's perfect chipmunk habitat, and I guess the thing to do is plant more daffodils, which I'm told they don't touch.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

The importance of just looking

It's no wonder my garden helpers call me eagle eyes. Last week while looking out the kitchen window, I noticed something strange on a crab apple branch in the distance.

When I checked it out, I found a mass of eastern tent caterpillars that were quite big already. Fortunately, they were still inside the webbing that protects the egg mass, so I was able to grab the entire nest (wearing gloves, of course) and stomp on the critters with my garden boots, (which was satisfying).

So I had another look at all my crab apples trees, and sure enough, I found more caterpillars and was able to get rid of them just as easily. In the weeks before, I had already done the rounds of the trees, and removed at least a half dozen tent caterpillar egg masses.

It's a good thing I noticed the problem early - before the caterpillars were all over the tree branches eating up the leaves. By then it would have been too late to do anything about them. For example, Btk (a natural insecticide), is not effective once the caterpillars are longer than an inch. In fact, the caterpillars I found last week were already quite large and ready to leave their nest. Manual control was the quick and easy solution.

The moral of the story: Noticing things while it's still easy to fix them is the key. (When stuff gets out of hand, fixing it gets harder.) Same thing with weeds, there's nothing more depressing for than a weedy takeover of a flower bed. Maybe this is the reason I'm never relaxed in my own garden: I'm always noticing too many things.

Eastern tent caterpillar Photo by Greg Hume, at Wikipedia.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Today's glorious spring moment

This is how one part of the garden looked this afternoon. We had three nights of serious frosts over the holiday weekend, and the Sugar Tyme crab apple tree above was hit, but thankfully the flowers appear to have weathered the cold better than it appeared at first.

The leaves of some hostas were also damaged, as were new leaves on oak and ash trees and the leaves and flowers of the French lilacs. My favorite Korean lilacs are fine because they were still in bud. What can you do? Mother Nature delivers good and bad.

I'm happy to report that my program of setting garden bootcamp days for early in the week and keeping Thursdays and Fridays for other things is going well so far.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

New gardening resolution

For what it's worth, I'm instituting a new rule: gardening gets done Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, weather permitting, and the rest of the week I get to have a non-gardening life. Do you think it will work out?

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

May flowers for bloggers' bloom day

Here's my contribution to Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day. There are many more things in bloom than I have time to list. We have been fortunate to have a relatively cool spring, so the early bulbs and flowering shrubs are lasting a long time. I love it when we get a prolonged spring.

Lily-flowered tulip Claudia (I think) with bleeding-heart

Brunnera with daffodils and epidmedium in the back

White Angel crab apples in the "orchard"

Eastern Redbud in the shrub border
(This was a tiny seedling given to us by my mother a few years ago)

John's rock garden is in its spring glory right now

My Euphorbia polychroma hedge - these were all self-sown plants moved to the edge of a walkway

To see Bloom Day contributions from many more garden bloggers, head on over to May Dreams Gardens.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Toronto gardening and garden writer's site

A couple of months ago Mark Disero, a rose enthusiast and fellow country gardener, who is practically a neighbor, contacted me about a two web sites that he has been developing.

I've had a chance to get to know Mark a little bit since then. He was the mastermind behind the first show to focus exclusively on Canadian roses. Sponsored by the Hamilton & Burlington Rose Society, the All-Canadian Rose Show took two years to organize, and showcased 125 Canadian cultivars at Royal Botanical Gardens in Hamilton/Burlington last June. This show was a tribute to the Canadian rose hybridizers and a celebration of the great Canadian-bred roses.

I'm sure that I disappoint Mark by not growing any roses, but we are inundated by Japanese beetles here (irrigated turf at the neighboring golf course really encourages them), and that's one battle I just don't have the energy to fight.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Mark's new sites are now live. One is gardenwriters.ca:

"I hope that gardeners can use my site to access great horticultural information specific to their climate. The information in the blogs is updated regularly from writers from across the country.

I hope this is an opportunity for garden writers to promote their writing skills, learn from their peers, (not only exchanging horticultural ideas but also ideas about web design and new technology), increase their website traffic, and most importantly sell their books."

Mark's second site is gardentoronto.ca. This one is a website directory for everything gardening within the 416 area code, and includes resources and links of interest to Toronto gardeners.

It's been fun to get to know Mark, and the other day he called with a tempting offer. It was to grab some lunch and then go garden centre hopping. Unfortunately, it was a garden boot camp day, and I had my helpers here, and couldn't leave. But that's exactly what I need once in awhile: a hort buddy to drag me off the farm to get some relief from May's insane do-to list.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener