Is it?

Thursday: I woke up three nights ago in a terrible state, moaning and crying  with a severe pain in my arm. In the dark I established I was probably not dying but what was it? Well, I must have rolled onto a cat who probably also woke up rather squashed and surprised and a bit angry and who must have  proceeded to defend herself by scratching my inside forearm, leaving a 5 inch sore and bleeding mark. Then yesterday I developed a cold sore  as big as a plate in spite of Cold-fx, aycyclovir, and polysporin, and to make number three injury I have just stabbed myself with the sharp end of a pencil as I was organising myself to write some seed labels. Hopefully that is it for the week as far as injuries go.




On the plus side: the temperature has soared above zero for the past few days so the  snow is melting; the WIGs are totally exposed; and the additional excitement is that  the geese have arrived early,  I always get  a cold sore as the seasons change from Winter to Spring and Summer to Autumn so it's a sign and another sign was Suzanna finding a baby pansy growing in the driveway. It's +9 degrees C outside and I have just heard and seen the first honey bee.

The Canada Geese announced their arrival very loudly and we gave them a rousing cheer and a chorus of Welcome Home. I will spare you the photo of the one straggler I managed to photograph as it takes skill and imagination to actually see the bird. It's not characteristic to see just one. They tend to come over in groups of 30-50 flying in what I like to call a "V" but they are far too busy chatting and telling each other the "goss" to keep a perfect flying formation but, they are obviously quite good at the flying thing as I haven't noticed many of them plummeting to the ground after bumping into each other.

Saturday: And now its already two days later and the thaw is continuing......we had breakfast on the deck this morning and we are out for  the first BBQ of the year in an hour or so. The little flower bed (The Eye) above the big flower bed (BFB) is slowly melting revealing shrubs a bit battered and bent by the snow and wind, but full of buds.It would be so nice if the snow just melted away leaving lovely cleanness and fresh green grass and little budlets bursting into the glory of crocuses and daffodils and tulips but alas the melting snow reveals loads of last years oak leaves and plant stems and stuff we didn't get to clear before the frosts and snows came and above all the stuff that has accumulated over the past four months of winter that used to belong to dogs and of course as the snow melts all is revealed, almost as fresh as the day it was deposited. Poopy patrols have to be carried out.


The BBQ was fun but anxiety provoking. Conversation with two proper gardeners revealed they already have started seeds which are spouting and I/we am/are falling way behind and will never catch up, and they will have growing rooms full of wonderful plants to plant out any minute now, and by the time we get going the first frosts will be back. I have planted broad beans (They call them fava beans here)  in egg shell pots. They don't seem to do broad beans much  but I like them so grow a few each year. These are "Broad Windsor" which is about the only variety commonly available here. We use the egg shells as it's a happy way of recycling and a good source of calcium for the beans and for the soil in general and may prevent blossom end rot in our tomatoes and their rellies. (Relatives!)

Sunday: It has been hotter here than in most of the UK. We had 18 deg C for a while and a warm strong wind. Lots more of the snow has gone but there is still a bit of a mountain behind the deck and in the veg patch. We have to keep telling ourselves this probably is a false start to Spring and the forecast for this week is back to about zero temperatures and snow flurries and freezing rain so I would hate to get too excited about the end of winter yet.

By the way.....we turned the sweet potato upside down in the water and there is one rootlet visible.
The flower rocket seems to be stalling but there are a few seeds germinating.
More daffs are on the way.

Monday 8 am and my goodness it's snowing.....................Bah! Spring is probably over.If you look closely the WIGs now have a slightly startled expression as they experience an unexpected sprinkle of the white stuff.

Four Down, Max Two to Go

Hooray! February has disappeared at last after what seemed like an 8 week month and it's March already. Looking forward to 18th/19th March when the first geese will arrive honking away, looking for food and heralding Spring even if it does take another 6-8 weeks to actually arrive.
It's definitely not quite there (Spring that is....) with the temperature still -17deg C with a few less degrees minused on for wind chill but "They" are promising -4 deg C tomorrow and even +4 deg C next week but it may be a ploy to try to cheer us up, and spur us onto, and into the Great Gardening Adventure that will be 2015!








The WIGs look almost the same as last time except that the prairie winds have blown more snow on top of them so only the  tip of one hat is showing. They also had their own adventure this week when the( possibly) 30kg Molly the Dog got excited and was bounding about and sat on top of them They appear to have recovered but who knows what is going on under that lot. They are very brave.

Due to increasingly itchy and frustrated gardening fingers  I used the last of last year's multipurpose compost to plant the Flower Rocket Suzanna found in one of the local shops. The box assures me that there are 1000 seeds on a roll of felted stuff and I will have flowers all Spring, all Summer, and beyond.  I have planted according to instructions and am awaiting results. Nothing has emerged yet. Note I did plant the felty thing in the soil. So far I am very unimpressed but it has only been four days.

As much as I like looking through gorgeous seed catalogues I like going to choose seeds even more, so on Monday I went to Winnipeg (Or Winterpeg, as some like to call it) with an urgent need to buy seeds. There are Garden Centres here, but not as we know them Jim (Alas poor Leonard.....a moment's silence please) . Most Garden Centres shut up and dig in for the Winter by August and re-open at Easter. There are a few exceptions and one very posh one with a coffee shop and clothes and high end things........that's where I found the Borlotti Bean seeds and the tomatoes I wanted and had a nice cup of coffee and a healthy salad (Except for the bacon and the Mayo and the salt therein.)   but for the rest I went to the explosive sounding T&T seeds and had a very happy time wandering around picking up little packets of seeds and shaking them and putting some of them back again.  Driving home the temperature was falling, the snow was blowing across the road and the sun was setting pretty much in my eyes but it was all worth while. I had pastel pansies, zinnias, a candy stripped cosmos, and a whole field of veggies and other goodies on the back seat of the car.



However, one thing lacked of course.  No more multipurpose compost! So today I went and rectified the situation by buying a compressed block of 107litres of the stuff most places round here use for seeds and potting on. Of course not only is it compressed but it is also frozen as it's been outside at the nursery, so it's now in the growing room thawing out before use. Hopefully this will give us time to get everything ready ........music, lights, water, more heating to get everything started in the next few weeks so everything be planted out before the end of May.






I cleaned up the potatoes which have overwintered very well in a container, in the growing room which has been kept at 10-14 deg C with a small oil heater. This contrasts favourably with last year when I lovingly cleaned, and carefully packed, every potato in dry sand in containers so they were in the dark and then the winter came. The temperature in the garage, where they were, dropped to -15 deg in November and they froze and all had to be thrown away and I cried and cried as all my Summer hard work ended up at the local composting dump..........anyway it's a different story this year! We haven't got a lot left and they have been very yummy.




                                                     


 ( yes I know the thing in the middle is a carrot.)

There were three varieties of potato:
Pontiac......Red;
Yukon Gold.......Yellow;
Viking................Red with very white flesh, stores well and was bred here in Morden MB for the climate.

I don't think they do Earlie's, Second Earlies and Maincrops here.......just small and big potatoes but my goodness Manitoba Potatoes are The Best!

Morden has a world famous Research Centre which has bred Roses and Potatoes and other veggies and grains for the prairies and now concentrates mainly on breeding and testing crops like Canola. (I think but I may be wrong)






And talking about potatoes I know its not going to work but I cannot help myself hoping that it will.
I am going to try to grow sweet potatoes again. Last year I managed a lot of leaves but this year will be different . I bought the potato from a local shop, stuck skewers in it and balanced it on a yogurt pot full of water, put it on a heating pad  and now am waiting to see if anything happens.  

Still waiting......................................................................
I think I need to have more of it in the water so off to do that now.............................................                          

The Winter Interest Garden

Before we explore the winter garden I am determined to bring you all up to date with the gardening and related delights experienced at Oakstead during the past 8 days.

The Bad News.

The Oyster mushrooms are a disaster. We ate some (Yummy) but I should have picked them all at once  because the ones that were left were so disconsolate that their big sisters had been taken and eaten they gave up and shrivelled up. I am hoping they will revive and we will get our $12 worth somehow, but it has been fun watching them grow. Please ignore the organised chaos on the potting bench. It's temporary in a permanent sort of way.

The cat grass sown last week is thriving and will be ready to present to the cats any day now. Just as well as the last tray, already a bit decimated, was ultimately doomed to the dustbin after I inadvertently left it and our little orange boy cat Stewart shut in the study, where he eats, for a little too long. Please use imagination. Clue: The word "Tray" is one half of a thing used by indoor cats.

You may well ask why the lovely pots of Tete-a-tete daffodils remain in the growing room and not outside or as a centre-piece in the lounge/ living room. Well it has been a very cold week with temperatures down in the -20 deg C's and with wind chill it was -40 deg C for quite a bit of the weekend and daffs don't like it that cold.  Then on Monday it warmed up so, of course, it snowed and then the wind blew the snow about vigorously all over the place. Now, we are talking about a wind of at least 50km/hour, (31mph) for hours on end, (all day and most of the night) and gusting to at least 70kmph (44mph) and everybody was grumpy and had snow headaches and cabin fever. Maybe the daffs had cabin fever too but they are staying put: a) because of the frigid nature of the weather and; b) the lack of cat grass which means that anything is game to be eaten by the cats, especially Georgie our longer haired orange female. If Stewart is our special needs cat  then Georgie is our little hippie cat who like to chew on all things green and who is, we suspect, being poisoned by, or getting high on, the aloes, the tulips, the daffs, the Valentine roses and anything else she can get her pretty little paws on. So we visit the daffs every day and appreciate them in the growing room.

The wind blew all the snow from the top meadow/lawn/ paddock/yard to the bottom next to the house and Tuesday morning we found all our lovely paths were completely obliterated. Little sticks  (three feet high) poking above the snow showed where the paths had been, except for where the sticks had been covered. These covered sticks will not  be seen until The Momentous Melt which will happen either at the end of the world or in about 8 weeks time, whichever happen first.

p.s. There are no little sticks in this picture so don't worry if you can't see any. Worry if you do.

The Good News.

The 3 Weather Indicator Gnome ( hats)
are almost clearly visible

The WIGs are back in business.  I did think of offering this blog to the UK's Royal Horticultural Society as a cheery addition for their posh magazine but I have it on reliable authority that they are a bit too posh for Garden Gnomes in general so they would probably not be too impressed by my use of WIGs and then there is a whole group of other people who probably feel that I am exploiting the Gnome genera and they will be forming an  Everybody Against Relying on Weather Indicator Gnomes Society which of course will be known as the EARWIG Society. Then the earwig enthusiasts will get upset by the silly name and so it goes on..............................  By the way did you know that the insect order Dermaptera (earwigs) are found everywhere and most are related to each other as there are millions of them and only twelve families.( Some of these facts come from Wikipedia.)


We did dig and snow-blow a new path to the top on Tuesday afternoon and it is still there today. Who knows where it will be tomorrow! It has already changed direction three times since January. The black thing is Molly the Dog
Below is a picture with Little sticks showing the fate of previous paths.

 

We have Ruffled Grouse (Bonasa umbellus)
coming almost every day to feast on something we don't know about, but it's obviously on the ground now the snow has blown away. Perhaps it's acorns. We did have rather a lot of acorns  in Autumn and I certainly  missed quite a few in my clean up operations.  Yes we do clear them: a) because they are like ball bearings and en masse can lead to rapid encounters with the ground and b) because lots of them germinate and we don't want too many more trees in that part of the garden and c) because we might get lots of deer coming in and eating them. The Grouse are rather large (Bigger than a guinea fowl)  and I am amazed they can fly at all. They arrive every morning in a big chatty group of about 30 birds and run around for as long as they don't take fright at something and then they flutter/fly off together looking for more of whatever they eat. Eat or be eaten I suppose. They are a hunted bird here so no wonder they take fright and flight at the least sound or distraction.They do look a bit small in the picture but they are relatively very far away.

We have been dreaming more of Summer and what we are going to grow. Suzanna already has some Zinnia seeds from Vancouver and I am planning to get green manure on the veg beds as soon as I can as well as  seeing  if I can grow some comfrey to make smelly tea which is a wonderful organic fertiliser. I think it's ok to grow comfrey (I checked)  here in Manitoba Canada and I have seeds from a reliable source. Yippee! We are also scouring a most fascinating seed catalogue called the Whole Seed Catalogue from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds from the www.rareseeds.com site in the US. Lovely winter reading and now it's time to order if it's not already too late. Unfortunately they have thousands of  seed items in the book and I want a packet of each!
Please note Wilfred made it from Tesco UK but had an accident.

And now for the Garden in Winter as promised in the title:

The Wild Prairie grass and flower Section 

Oakstead oaks after Monday's storm

Our snow mountain

Not a day for getting the onions in.

Plodding through February.

Plodding is the word. It's a lovely bright shiny day. The sky is blue, the sun is shining, the wind has gone somewhere else for a while, the snow looks pretty and at 7o'clock this morning it was -26 deg C with wind chill taking it down to -40 deg C.(or -40 deg F if you prefer)  At the N pole it was about the same although now it's 10am and it got colder up there....-36 deg C with wind chill taking it to -44 deg C. So, a heavy day in the garden is not planned for today and if I do go out I will be going on snowshoes.

Since last Thursday it snowed a bit as you can tell from the picture of the Weather Indicator Gnomes(WIGs) taken on Sunday.

Then Suzanna got all energetic and started clearing the front path and decided the WIGs couldn't breathe so in a rush of Gnomanitarianism she uncovered them and so this morning they are exposed and able to breathe but no longer performing their WI role.  Shame!

St Valentines Day 2015 and other Festivities.

We don't know much about St. Valentine but he was Roman and so he presumably knew all about pizza so that was enough of an excuse to enjoy home made pizza in his honour last Saturday evening. Home made dough made with fresh yeast, lots of yummy toppings and of course the star was the pizza sauce made last year from our own tomatoes and full of summer sunshine. The frosts came early last year so it was a race to pick all the tomatoes, most of which were still green, but they ripened in our growing room and became pizza sauce, tomato sauce, pasta sauce, roasted tomatoes  stewed tomatoes and we will be eating them until the next harvest. We probably look like tomatoes. I have been forbidden to plant as many this year. Well perhaps 40 tomato bushes yielding an average of at least 4kg each was a bit over the top but we might have lost them all to Blossom End Rot or the dreaded Blight and then how would we have survived the winter? Surely not on onions, butternut squash, potatoes and far too many gem squash plus the odd jar of aubergine pickle and courgette chutney!

We worked up an appetite for the feast by clearing a path to the top meadow/lawn/snowfield. Suzanna womanned the snow blower while I did battle with the shovel and Molly the dog gave directions 

Sunday we had penne and mushroom sauce partially made from our own oyster mushrooms and I planted more cat grass at last! 

Tuesday was Pancake day so Suzanna cooked up a storm of proper English style pancakes with various fillings including Marmite and one of my favourites, grated proper cheddar cheese plus proper seville orange marmalade. (Lots of  cheese here is processed and they sell marmalade made with sweet oranges! Imagine!)  Of course we don't grow seville oranges here on the windswept, snow covered, bitterly cold prairies but Suzanna brought home two huge seville oranges from far away Vancouver last week which have been turned into 5 jars of Peggy's Marvellous Marmalade. Nothing to do our garden, but just mentioned in passing. My number 1 favorite pancake filling is cooked rhubarb and thick whipped cream. We possibly do have rhubarb but it is a bit inaccessible at the moment. We do not have cows producing thick whipped cream.

.........................................and to end with here is the latest picture of the veg patch

p.s. Yes the straw bales should have been dug into the beds but the snow came tumbling down before I had a chance to get going with that and the rhubarb is up near the shed.

        

So it's next year already!

Things got complicated and we ended up having far too much to do in the garden to actually write about it so we are going to give it another go this year.

Helloo! I'm Peggy and Suzanna is my Beautiful Wife (Who set up this blog last year) and Gardening Partner.......she does landscaping and the  pretty flower things and I do veggies. I also do weeding, talking to plants, gazing into space and generally coming to grips with the realities of being totally clueless about this prairie environment we find ourselves in. We know we are gardening on top of an  ancient beach of an ancient lake that formed after the glaciers of the last ice age retreated and dumped all their boulders in our back yard. We know about the beach as under the beautiful clayey loamy stuff and rocks there is sand......so drainage is good; we know about the prairie winds as we didn't get up the day after we moved here three and a half years ago and plant a shelter belt of trees (Bad Mistake!); we are learning about the true meaning of winter which is learning to appreciate and embrace the ice and snow and the wind and the blowing snow because although there's just the trees to watch waving about, the birdies to feed and the dof to walk there is plenty of time to dream about the green grass and the colours, tastes and textures of Summer.

So it's February 12th 2015. The day is bright and sunny with blue skies, pristine, deep and very white snow is covering the veg patch and flower beds and our weather watching gnomes are a bit out of their depths. This afternoon it has warmed up to -12 deg C. with very little wind.

The Veg Patch is inaccessible. It looks just like last year's photo so have a look in the archives. You can just see the Garden Shed way up on the right hand side poking above the swimming pool of snow. The snow fence round the patch gathers snow in winter and stops veggies escaping in summer. (Yes it's too low and too flimsy to keep out deer but having a dog helps. Everything else seems to burrow under it including a truly amazing Manitoba Salamander.........pictures too exciting to publish)

So what's going on while the snow is busy lying around being obstructive? Well away in our little growing room come workshop come veg store we have had created in our garage things are stirring.

We have oyster mushrooms bursting out of their bag.

Then there is the world's smallest garlic farm trying to stay cool but not frozen

The daffs are in for a shock when they get outside but who wants daffs in June?

The thyme has been happy in here all Winter and is still growing strong

And although holly doesn't do well here My Suzanna brought home some berries from Vancouver and yesterday I got them ready for stratifying and now they are in the fridge for the next few months.

Putting them outside in -16 deg C would probably be a bit too much.

The bag asks for " Shhhhhhhh! Quiet, Holly Tree seeds Stratifying." 11/2/2015. Yes the date is written that way round where I come from.

Today I must go off and plant some cat grass seeds. The cats have devastated the last lot.

...and to finish today here is yesterday's sunset featuring Mr Sun with one of  his Sun Dogs and Mrs Moon together with the shelterbelt next door that they very wisely planted before they even moved there!