One morning at the office window, two of the cats were glued to the window.. even though it was -25C outside and the windows was very cold.
This is what they were looking at.. a small rabbit digging around in the flower bed out front.
Typically this rabbit hangs around the bird feeder, picking up seeds off the ground, but also has been getting into the brown grasses and flowers in the bed.
Last night (Wednesday January 15th, 2014) the Lennox and Addington Horticultural Society (Napanee’s Garden Club) held its first Regular Meeting of 2014.
27 people were present to hear the guest speakers, Peter and Jane Good from Avenstone Garden. It was a great hour long presentation followed by an hour of snacks & treats provided by Florence and general discussion.
You can learn more about Peter and Jane Good’s garden at their website http://www.gardeningandgiving.ca.
The garden is located just northeast of Camden East Ontario.
Last night (Wednesday December 4th, 2013) the Lennox and Addington Horticultural Society held its annual Christmas Pot Luck Dinner and Annual General Meeting.
Smart planning scheduled the pot luck meal first at 18:00, then the Annual General Meeting and then, at the end, the door prizes. 🙂
28 people attended, with visitors from District3 as well.
Annual General Meeting general events:
welcome
introduction of District 3 officials
2012 agm minutes read and accepted
2013 year activity report
financial report read and accepted
Bylaws passed unanimously
Election results: all acclaimed, no election.
Congratulations to
President: Mary Lockhart
Vice President: Tom Bridge
Treasurer: vacant
Secretary: Florence Bell
Directors: Larry Davy, Maggie Marlow, Gail Knowles, Judy Bullock, Cindy Weatherhead
The AGM adjourned, the door prizes went out to all with 1 or 2 left over, and the event was over around 20:40
Spacing this year was aided with the construction of a “dibbler”, a 2″x3″ piece of wood with 1″ dowels (pointed) on the underside and a handle on top. Last year we planted cloves too close together at abour 4 or 5″. This year is a clear 6″ spacing in a row of 6 cloves. Spacing between rows was increased from 6″ to 8″ We hope to get larger bulbs from this.
Soil prep was 7 bags of Canadian Tire cow manure (all out of sheep, our preferred), 15kg at 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, tilled in with the addition of another 7 wheelbarrels of triple mix garden dirt.
A lot of weeding beforehand again and all is looking like the best prep and soil ever.
The complete list looks like this:
Alberta Hardy
Argentine4
Artichoke Formidable
Baba’s Chesnock
Carpathian
Chesnok Red
Chiloe
Czech Broadleaf
Duganskij
French
Genki
Georgia Crystal
Georgian Fire
German Red
German White
Inchellium
Italian Lorenz
Japanese
Japanese Sikura
Kettled River Giant
Korean Purple
Lucian Sicilian
Magnificent
Mennonite
Metechi
Musical
Northern Quebec
Northern Siberian
Polish Jenn
Purple Glazer
Russian Red
Purple Stripe Sicilian
Shouldice
Siberian Marble
Silverskin 40
Slovak
Solent Wight
Spanish Roja
Spicy Korean Red
Ted1/Fishlake1
Ted3
Ted40
Tibetan
TT5V
US Polish
US Republican
US Romanian
Wild
Wyld
Last night (Wednesday October 16th, 2013) the Lennox and Addington Horticultural Society held its regular monthly.
The turnout was 21 people and we enjoyed presentations from
the guest speaker:
Nicolette McGraw
speaking on “Photographing your Garden”
Many notices were mentioned and gone over and at the end of the meeting, volunteer provided snacks went over well.
The next meeting is Wednesday November 20th at 7pm at the Napanee Firehall community room (parking and room entrance at the back). The guest will be:
“Smart Florist will help you with Christmas Decorating Suggestions”
This last week has been unusual and warm weather in Eastern Ontario. Sunny and warm that is. We took the opportunity to modify and beef up our “vineyard” supports.
The grape vines did much better this year (year 1 they got eaten by deer, year 2 they did much better), and we had looked at our support system and found it lacking.
There were two beds with a couple of 4×4 posts 14′ apart with some wire strung between them. So we added some 6′ 4×4 posts with a 2×4 support across the top and will run some clothesline between them, building a very well supported structure in both tension and compression, and give the grapes a solid heavy wire to grow on, especially grow higher. They’ve already topped out at the 4′ level and next year we are expecting even better.
I’ve been asked for more numbers about frost in our area… so he is the big picture overview
The dates of the first light frost (-1 C) over the last 11 years:
2002 Oct 21
2003 Oct 23
2004 Oct 11
2005 Oct 20
2006 no data
2007 Oct 12
2008 Oct 06
2009 Sep 19
2010 Oct 10
2011 Sep 17
2012 Oct 08
2013 Sep 16
The dates of the last light frost (-1 C) over the last 11 years:
2003 Apr 30
2004 May 08
2005 May 17
2006 no data
2007 May 18
2008 May 05
2009 May 13
2010 Jun 13
2011 Apr 22
2012 Apr 30
2013 May 14
The number of growing days between light frosts:
2003 176
2004 156
2005 156
2006 no data
2007 147
2008 154
2009 129
2010 119
2011 149
2012 162
2013 125
Year #days (#weeks)
min 119 (17)
average 147 (21)
max 176 (25)
stddev 17 (2)
Notes on the light frost Monday night Sept 16th. It was a long period of below zero temperatures, starting around midnight and runing until sunrise around 7am. All of the tomato plants were killed off. Had it bee na shorter period of time (say maybe an hour), they might have survived.. or at least some of them.
Heavy frost we define as -3C and it does kill off most everything else that is not frost tolerant.
Last night (Wednesday September 18th, 2013) the Lennox and Addington Horticultural Society held its first regular meeting after the summer break.
The turnout was 15 people and we enjoyed presentations from Larry (a hands on show and tell about things he brought out of his garden) and a slide show of images of hort related activities from Kim & Kevin at Starlight Cascade Gardens over the summer.
This included images from visits to the Maitland Garden of Hope (photo above), the Stone Mills Avenstone Gardens, the HSGeo 2013 Bean project and more.
Many notices were mentioned and gone over and at the end of the meeting, volunteer provided snacks went over well.
The next meeting is Wednesday October 16th at 7pm at the Napanee Firehall community room (parking and room entrance at the back).
The guest speaker is:
Nicolette McGraw
speaking on
“Photographing your Garden”
The 1st fall frost of the season occurred overnight Monday night/Tuesday morning.
It went down to -1.6 C in the vegetable patch.
This was close to our shortest growing season ever in the last 10 years, last frost to first frost was only 125 days (May 14th to September 16, 2013).
Our 10 year average is 147 days. Last year was 162 days.
We pulled the last of the tomatos off Monday night, and tried to cover a few other veg that we did not want to give up on. Haven’t had a chance to see them in the daylight yet to see what survived what we classify as a “light frost”.
It is in fact that time of year. Harvest Time.
The tomato plants have been dying off for a few days now and all of the tomatos are being harvested.
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The garlic is well dried and seed selection will be starting soon along with bed preparation as the garlic will be seeded in a little over a month.
The potatos have long since died off but we’ve been storing them … in the ground!
It is time for them to come up as well.
The rain barrels have been disconnected and bypassed as we will not be needing them anymore. Soon the water hoses will have to be pulled up, drained and put away.
The wine grapes are much better than last year and are in their final stages of ripening.
The Heirloom Seed Growers of eastern ontario group had a “grow-out-all-of-the-beans” project this summer (2013).
There were some initial images of the planting way back in May.. Here are some updated image galleries from the last few weeks:
Last Wednesday August 21st, 2013 we hosted the Lennox and Addington Horticultural Society to a BBQ at our home. 22 people were there, and that was a good turnout. Not too many that things were crowded and more than enough to make all the work worthwhile.
The work was mainly weeding the flower beds and getting the 5 yards of mulch in the day before 🙂 Kim did a great job but was hurting a little afterward. The gardens looked great!
The vegetable beds were pretty much in shape as we tend to spend a lot of time in them during the summer weeding and taking care of them, mainly by picking various bugs off the plants. We had a heavier than normal year for Colorado potato bugs on the potatos and some tomatos, a heavy year for some kind of icky worm in the parsnip, and a very light year for tomato hornworms.. only 4 to date.
Leak moth larvae in the garlic is still indeterminate. We need to take down the 4 weeks dried garlic from the racks, clean them up and prepare for choosing seed for planting this fall and for storage.
All in all that was 10 yards of natural cedar mulch in the last two years and there should be enough of a base that next year the weeds should be heavily suppressed and be a lot less work.
On Saturday August 10th, 2013 we visited the Maitland Gardens of Hope, just east of Brockville. We joined with the Cornwall Horitcultural Society group tour and had a very good time roaming the private gardens.
The gardens are complex with a lot of artistic design elements and a huge variety.
Nice ponds with dozens of frogs, stone and benches to rest on.
Areas cut out of the lawn with gravels and some nice artwork in various places:
Among many other items were beehives (she’s a beekeeper), a Zen garden, a Monarch Butterfly Way Station and much much more.
Another garden we have been wanting to visit for year is Avenstone, just between Camden East and Newburgh. We finally made it there a couple of Sundays ago.
What I brought away from their gardens were that we could and should dense plant flowers a lot more as they were bringing in the butterflies in large numbers.
The number of bees and butterflies were amazing and even on teh ground you would see a lot of tree frogs wandering around.
This butterfly was cooperative and let us take its photo:
This one looks like a White Admiral Butterfly
Two of these wonderful little beasties (tomato hornworms) were found on the tomato plants on August 5th, 2013. Last year they made an appearance on July 18th, and the year before in 2010, on August 4th.
Not the most reliable but we have been looking for them for a couple of weeks now.
Found another in a seperate bed on Aug 6th, with evidence of at least two others, but they were hiding too well.
