Some yard picks

I had a pleasant surprise the other day, I realized that some Colchicum was growing underneath the Asters! I thought that the bulbs had rotted away, they didn't bloom last year.Speaking of Asters, I called Brian Minter's show on 600 AM for the fist time on Saturday! Ha ha! I wanted to know how to make Asters a more compact clump. His advice was to cut it right down to the ground July 1st (the same can be done with mums) and it'll still bloom on time, but in a smaller clump! Good tip, I'll try it next summer!I bought these blueberries in June and they were LADEN with berries at the time. They have never stopped bearing blueberries this whole time, and are still at it, 4 1/2 months later! Not sure if I'll be so lucky next year, but we've sure enjoyed it!

And here is one of my favorite flowers, Elizabeth Bellflower. It also has been blooming non-stop since June. The buds start out twisted and then untwist as they open. The flowers are speckled rose and are almost furry on the inside, they're beautiful!

Brick path

Yay! We did some gardening at the CN triangle today (luckily before the torrential downpour!) and a few of my friends mentioned that they had seen some bricks in the alley, a few blocks away. Within a short time, we picked up the bricks, brought them to the CN triangle, and made interlocking brick paths through the garden! The bricks come with moss on them already, so hopefully that spreads on the path! I'm so excited! The CN makeover has begun. We dug up plants that weren't drought tolerant enough and planted some bulbs.... the garden is showing promise!

End of summer

Well fall's here. So ends the emergency watering season and time to get down to work! The next few months should be full of weeding, transplanting, uprooting, planting, planning and putting beds to rest. Not to mention development of the body overseeing the gardens. If I haven't previously mentioned it, the gardens have expanded to about 10,000 square feet! And some areas are not looking too hot at the moment.

As we move into fall, here are a few flattering photos of the garden from this summer! Hope it serves as inspiration as we roll up our sleeves and get all the gardens up to snuff!

These look like a bouquet together!

Here are some black hollyhocks that I planted a few years ago. I bought the seeds from the UK on Ebay and they finally came up this year!

Rock Garden

For a while my little neighbour Hannah had been asking if she could help in the gardens. So one day in June she and her mom came down and we all planted the rock garden together. She was a great help and it was a fun project!

On a different note, I received some sad news today though: someone is planning to come and take the large boulders and place them in a botanical garden. I'm so sad! What about our Downtown Eastside gardens?? I'll have to import some more boulders from somewhere! I had already been thinking we needed more, not less! We've build the garden plan around the current boulders (there's one here and one halfway up the block), and I'm so disappointed! Oh well, maybe it won't happen. And if it does, we'll roll with the punches.

Here's the rock garden in it's beginning stages.

The hens and chicks bloomed and they were beautiful. I'm really looking forward to seeing the rock garden filled in next year!

extreme garbage makes for some extreme gardening...

This post is not for queasy stomachs...
Not that it's that bad, although I'm not sure what my frame of reference is anymore....?
In the last week garbage in the sun and shade garden included: several used condoms and their packages, a big dead rat, a big poo and a needle. Not your average gardens! Although our experience is similar to other gardens in the DTES and maybe even tamer at that! One day at the Folk Garden on Hastings we were doing the pre-gardening clean-up. I looked at the boot of the man picking up sharps and there must have been 20 of them within a 2 foot radius of his feet.

Anyone know how to get rid of Horsetail???

I have to admit this is a depressing time of year for me when it comes to the gardens. At this time the gardens don't get enough water, the CN triangle looks especially look sparse and I begin to wonder why I'm doing this-it doesn't even look better than before we started! At least spring was pretty. Time to look back in the archives for inspiration! And maybe figure out how to get more water action down there. One rain barrel has been installed with another on the way, so we're getting a start.here's the South Sun Garden 2 weeks after we weeded it all....
this photo doesn't seem to show the lawn of horsetail though!

I have to say that horsetail is ruining my life some days. Anyone got any organic ideas that don't involve too much digging?? We think there is electrical under there. Our friends down the block have been burning through the DDT to get it, but it keeps coming back and besides, that's yucky. But, the West Glen Sun Garden also looks yucky, it's basically a big patch of horsetail and other weeds with the occasional dying plant. *Sigh!*

Hopefully we'll get some good helpers on board and tackle these problems with gusto and next summer things will look much better!

Daisies on the tracks

My friend was on a mission to have something planted on the tracks. Last year we tried seeds but to no avail. Mistakenly, I had formerly transplanted some wild daisies into the sun garden, transplants from the side of the highway. They WERE free afterall! But in one year they took over!! They were a solid mass-a ground cover-for at least a few square meters! Once we had dug them up, we decided to try and put them down by the tracks. At first I was reluctant because I don't want them invading the CN garden too. But Emily tells me that'll be her responsibility if the time comes. So with that reassurance, we've planted them along the tracks. They've survived hot trains singeing them, growing in nothing but gravel, transplanting, sun... you can't kill these things!!
Here's the back side of the CN triangle, you can see daises we've scattered along! Hopefully it'll turn out to be a nice blend of wildflowers. There is definitely no shortage of Yarrow there!!
If you keep looking down the tracks, you can see they cross Cordova. On the other side of Cordova is another lot that has been offered to us for gardening, just before that school bus down there. I'm hoping that this fall we might be able to do something....
P.S.-if you look closely in the first picture, you can see the rock wall of the periwinkle garden. (That dumpster gets parked there periodically for pick up but it's not a permanent fixture.) Also, in that photo, you can see that the tracks go under a bridge (Hastings). It's fairly crowded in the summer with people sleeping under it. Last night I saw a big Port City rat scurrying around there, I bet it's not the only one.

Watering in style!

Well we planted the linepainter's property a few weeks ago and it's looking great! Amazingly not a plant has been stolen! While we were planting, Ron brought us out some water..... now that's service!! Seriously though, water is definitely on the immediately to do list. We have just qualified for a water collection barrel from the City, which is wonderful! We will definitely need to come up with some more watering solutions ASAP though. Here's a photo of us getting started on the garden

More tulips!

I forgot to mention that I took another trip and got some more discarded bulbs, this time about 2-300 tulips! All orange I believe! There's going to be a whole lot of orange in the gardens next spring!

My kids helped me pick them up... we had about 10 min to do it so we just threw a couple of wheelbarrows-full into the van. I decided to let them die off at my house and spare the neighbourhood the sight. I filled up a wheelbarrow and the sandbox with soil and let the tulips live there till they faded. The ones that had already faded by the time I got them have been planted already, but now the other few hundred are ready to go down so the kids can play in the sand box!

(you can see the sandbox full of tulips on the left side of the picture)

I could've gone again to get a few more tulips, at least of a different colour, but I was out of energy and besides, my wheelbarrow and sandbox were already full! Hopefully next year we'll get some variety added to our spring bulbs. And hopefully there will be enough established plants to hide all those tulips when they're dying off!!

The Shade Garden

Suiting the theme of the gardens, the shade garden is also full of things that were planted and forgotten/given-up-on. Here these johnny jump-ups were from seed and now they're filling in all the gaps!

The shade garden is pretty overgrown at the moment and the trailing roses are hidden in the back, but it's full of pretty things (the bleeding heart is huge!) and at least it's not it's former garbage dump!

Here's a pretty columbine before it got cut off, the bergenia got cut off as well, but they were all pretty when they were blooming...!

Here you can see the periwinkle that someone added to the garden and there are some forget me nots tucked away in there as well.

It's catching

Well speaking from personal experience, creating new gardens is addicting.... it's almost like a disease and you can't stop seeing weedy boring land and thinking it'd make a great garden. And apparently it's catchy! The vision is spreading around the neighbourhood! The linepainters jumped on board with their great boulevard and our neighbours up the street have planted some lillies and have taken to watering their section. Now the business across the street from the CN triangle has built some planters! Can't wait to see who's next!!

(You can see the CN triangle in the background accross the street)

Sun Garden

Here are some recent pictures of the sun garden. It's getting to just the right age where most plants are too rooted to steal and the plants are big and have filled in nicely! It's a bit of a hodge-podge: depending what was on sale or donated at different times. Also, we've planted a few things that didn't come up and then lo and behold they appeared 2 years later. The beautiful foxglove above came from my Grandpa's wife. She shared her seeds with me a few years ago and now here it is! There's another pretty pink one, I'll have to get a picture of that too.This year the red hot poker has finally bloomed-I'm so excited! It's one of my favorite plants. Here it is with a rock rose!

Here's an idea...

I just saw a lot today that struck me as a great garden make-over lot. In an area where there's lots of prostituted women, maybe it could be developed into some kind of drop-in or social enterprise.... $500,000.... dreaming big!

Guerrilla gardening in the Guerrilla gardening...

Well someone's been guerrilla gardening in one of our latest guerrilla efforts! It's great! Last week a ceramic horse and hardy geranium showed up and this week there is chard and broccoli! I have been hoping to incorporate some more food into the gardens. I have 2 baby trees to espalier along the fence (is that a verb?) and planted a row of pole beans... just need to put thought into the food because there are lots of types of pollution in the neighbourhood. BUT... we ALL need more fruit and veggies, and our gardens might even count for the 2010 new food gardens in Vancouver by 2010 motion passed by city council...

Bulbs!

I had just been wishing for hyacinths for the gardens (since they smell so nice) when I got a message about bulbs being discarded from a local garden! Unfortunately they were planted right before a heat wave in Vancouver so some of them might be fried, but a few hundred of them should make it at least! I would love to see loads of spring bulbs lighten up the area next spring. Here's a picture of the van-load of bulbs, those green bags are full of bulbs too!

Mother's Day at UBC Botanical Garden!

After a lovely breakfast in bed and some sushi for lunch, we headed out to UBC for the Botanical Garden's annual perennial plant sale. As a Mother's day present I had money to blow at the sale and quickly filled up the van! Then we walked around the gardens and I took photos to log all kinds of interesting plants. My favorite is this huge peony (paeonia veitchii from China).The trained apple trees were all beautiful and there were still some interesting tulips blooming, including a few black ones!

The overnight expansion

There is so much to be thankful for! 11 cubic meters of soil were delivered at noon on Wednesday and by 8 pm it was spread out across almost 1 1/2 blocks! I can imagine the surprise of people in the area when these huge gardens popped up overnight! There was amazing help from volunteers and the good folks at Scottish Line Painting who are putting their boulevard into the garden scheme as well! Of course I'm left wanting MORE soil, but what's new!! Meanwhile, offers of plant donations are coming from many directions and I have so much hope for the future! The vision is coming to life! Now how to organize it all??!! Here are some photos of the progression!

one of the piles of compost

we put a layer of cardboard under the compost to act as a weed barrier
the soil distributed

the sun garden now extends right to Hastings

I'm really excited about the new rock garden!

A gardening day like this is a treat in the DTES, normally one needs to keep on guard for used needles and condoms buried in the soil or other waste and garbage lying about. The soil is so fluffy and easy to work with at this stage because it hasn't compacted yet. This does also mean that plants are more easily stolen, but we'll hope for the best! I have to say that plant disappearances have slowed down a great deal, in part because lots of locals have been warding people off! I love that they are taking some ownership of the gardens, because it's for them as well. I'd love to find a way to integrate more locals into the gardening projects.

Next guerrilla mission: starting a sunflower field beyond the barbed-wire fence....

Here comes the dirt!

Well we got what we asked for.... a truck is dumping 11 square meters of soil at our place on Wed!! Time to get busy!!!

As you can see, I have NOT been busy blogging. We have been out there in the dirt though! Lots to tell you about but I'd better get my beauty-sleep for this shoveling extravaganza! Here's some photos though to tide you over!

early spring at the CN triangle

the baby forsythia's blooming!

next site we're expanding to!

a van-load of flowers

It's been obvious to me for a while that the potential of the gardens have grown beyond my capabilities/resources and that it's time to take them to a new level. This includes gathering and organizing volunteers, getting soil from the city and soliciting plant donations. Many friends, neighbours and garden-club members have generously shared their plants with me but I've been putting off asking for donations from businesses, that kind of thing is outside of my comfort zone and I prefer to be self-sufficient! Finally one day my 2 year old and I went into Home Hardware and find out if they had anything they could send our way. At first the manager didn't think there was much there but as he looked, he kept finding more plants to give me: dormant lilies, cana lilies and hostas, flats of pansies... and so much more! I was overwhelmed!! I drove away with a full-size van FULL of plants, and my 2 year old impressed that he was packed into the middle of a jungle. A very encouraging start, I'm so grateful and excited to see what they'll look like in the gardens next year!!! Thank you Home Hardware!!