Non-Toxic Solutions: Copper Kitchen Scrubbers

Here's Hugh, unravelling a common copper kitchen scrubber, and cutting it into loops for a non-toxic slug-deterrent. Slugs won't cross copper--the copper reacts with slugslime and delivers a little slug-sized shock. You don't want to use commercial edible slug baits, which also attract four-legged friends like Dora here.

While I'm off getting acquainted with the perennials in this new-to-me garden, Hugh is busy constructing his extraordinary Squash-Mobilization System:

First, he constructed a pile of sod, compost, and manure and covered it with black plastic to retain heat and accelerate the composting process.

Then he cut holes in the top and planted squash starters, fitting them with their "slug-collars." By the time the leaves span the collars, the plants will be robust enough to survive slug attacks. Squash love warm growing conditions, so the heat generated by the pile and the black plastic in hot sun will amplify our North Shore summer.

In the meantime, take a moment to consider this rose...

There goes Nelly Moser...

Ain't she sweet?

A little loaded, Nelly's hangin' on the fence again.

Celebrating this year's bucket of blooms. Have we seen the like? Some plants started growing in February, so they think it's July. The hydrangeas are budding!! This clematis (in Dan and Deb's garden) isn't off-schedule, but it certainly is going nuts in a good way.

I predict a double-blooming year. Feed your plants well with compost and manure, fish fertilizer and seaweed spray... They're delirious and must be sustained.

Garden Swale

Bog-gardening, and related wetland enhancement seems to be my theme of the week (or two). A swale is technically a "low-lying stretch of land" or a "marshy heavily vegetated depression." Swale gardens are becoming a bit of a trend--in my world anyways!

The City of North Van has started recreating or enhancing swales in parks around town, where groundwater naturally surfaces and defies our attempts to grow green lawns everywhere.

This swale on Grand Boulevard was enhanced a few years ago. Crews laid stone, starting here in a catchment pond, and following the bottom of the swale to facilitate water flow and drainage. The banks were planted with indigenous plants, which have filled out very well. Up close, wild roses and rushes, oceanspray and snowberry are naturally beautiful and a sanctuary for wildlife.

Local Homo sapien friends, Liz n' Len, decided they needed a Garden Swale in their back garden when their former lawn turned into a bog every spring. Here's Len (below), with one foot in the swale and one on the bank, to show how deep it is. Very well demonstrated, Len. They basically dug a trench and lined it with drainage material to contain and direct the water that otherwise drooled randomly around the garden. (Same concept as the Boulevard swale, right.)








Then Liz n' Len planted the banks with a selection of indigenous and garden plants, including moisture-loving blueberries. The enormous plant to Len's right is the native Goat'sbeard (Aruncus dioicus) which also obviously likes wet feet.

And they built a little bridge, which is a little bit like having a theme park in your back yard. Too much fun. Thanks for participating Len. Now get back to work.

So this brings me to Sheena and Terry's garden, where a Garden Swale is just waiting to happen.
Here is Phase One--two new garden beds installed last year, in a boggy corner formerly inhabited by a crop of horsetail (Equisetum):






Years ago, Sheena and Terry discovered that a sub-surface creek runs across this section of their property--just close enough to the surface to make a lawn impossible. At the time, a black plastic liner and gravel was the solution--we will forgive them for this, because a lot of things like that happened in the 1970s...

I can't tell you how happy I am that we have, in recent years, begun to reclaim what I call the "gravel pit." When we installed these two beds, the soil soaked up water like a sponge--perfect for the clumps of yellow flag iris, white Japanese iris, indigenous rushes (collected onsite) and various other grasses planted so far. The beds were also perfect for the horsetail, which promptly abandoned all gravel surfaces and came up only in the nice new soil. (Horsetail is intelligent flora--a sometimes frightening thing to witness.)

But, since you can't get rid of horsetail (it's been around since the days of the dinosaurs) my original thought was to work it into the design [insane laughter]--and the fact that it decided to relocate itself to the beds made it look more...intentional. I figure, the rest of the plants in the design just have to be taller than the horsetail, and we could learn to appreciate its soft verdant green as a groundcover.

Here's a picture of another garden's boggy area, where horsetail is allowed to grow (because no one goes there anyways).



One day, the Gunnera, which looks like a rhubarb at the moment, will be huge. Same concept: the horsetail could be considered a feathery green groundcover. Why not?

Nevertheless, Terry has an ongoing (primordial) and personal vendetta against horsetail and insists on weeding it from the beds, even though I'm insisting that it is integral to the design. Even though it re-emerges two hours later. Terry isn't here to defend himself, so this is really fun.

Meanwhile, the corridor between the two new beds still holds standing water so we are planning to dig a shallow trench, just deep enough to direct the water along its way...









...and fill the trench with a stream-like assemblage of river-rock, similar to the picture below...





I built this faux-stream-bed elsewhere about nine years ago (!) with three sizes of river rock, laying the largest stones first, then the medium stones, and finally packing small stones in the "eddies." (One must think like water, sensei.) This is fussy, because the creek bed is a garden feature. If you are just throwing rubble in a trench for drainage, so be it. But I have seen "dry creek beds" that look, unfortunately, like someone threw rubble in a trench.

So, for the next phases of Sheena and Terry's Garden Swale, we will be creating both a garden feature and a functioning swale that helps collect and drain groundwater. It will follow the water's path that-away across the gravel pit, connecting the space with other garden beds we've created along the way. The plants seem to really like the combination of the moisture and the retained heat in the gravel. So even I can learn to like gravel...in moderation.


















Learning to love it. Equisetum.
"Equisetum species have an affinity for gold in solution, and they concentrate it more than most plants, so they have been used in bioassays for the metal." Pojar and MacKinnon, Plants of Coastal British Columbia

The Moss

There is something perfect about this scene...

...and the moss has something to do with it.

(Another lovely moment brought to you by Pierre and Patti's Japanese maple.)

Lost: One Fabulous Gardening Hat

Ironically, sadly, mere days after the photo-shoot for Weed & Fertilizer Magazine, I lost my hat. I was riding my bicycle that day in fact--I tucked it in my side pannier and it must have flown off... (Because of course I wear a helmet on The Scoot.)

A Good Hat is hard to come by, so I spent a day hatless and paid for it with a mild case of sunstroke today. You know you have sunstroke when you see sunshine and want to crawl into a dark cave--which I did, after a half-day creeping around in the shade like a vampire, pretending I was fine.

This is a great pain at this time of year, when 25 people are waiting for you to come and garden. So if you see someone wearing my hat, tell them to leave it at Beans on Marine Dr. West Van and there'll be no questions asked. Meantime, I think I have a baseball cap somewhere (horrors).

The strange green object secured behind The Scoot is a bendy-bucket--my new favourite gardening tool, which doubles as a on-the-spot watering can and is much easier to maneuver through garden beds than large bins/canvas bags. Now that I've mentioned it, I hope it doesn't pop off and disappear on my way home.

Further to popping off scooters, I'm trying to resolve my dilemma of What To Wear on the scoot during the heat of summer. Despite reports that Italians everywhere are known to wear dresses and high heels on scooters (the women only, presumably) I am appalled at the thought. High heels are great for aerating lawns, but dresses get caught when you have to climb trees to prune. Anyways, the bare leg thing doesn't fly.

I'm not sure why. Maybe because scooting past outdoor cafes on cobblestone streets is a very different thing from jostling in double-lanes with SUVs. Maybe because I've witnessed road-rash, and I don't do well around blood. I truly envy the Italians their carpe diem fashion-flare, but...what is it? Are Canadians waaaay too safety-obsessed?

"Carpe Diem!"

--an Italian gnomette

Wavin' Away in Margaritaville

Here's a plant combo I'm currently in love with: Mexican Hair Grass (Stipa tenuissima) and tulips in a dee-luxe planter...on a dee-luxe patio where I keep forgetting I'm the hired help and keep finding myself on a lounge chair, calling for a margarita.

No one ever comes. Can't get good help these days.




If you scroll up and down really fast, you can simulate the Mexican Hair Grass waving in the breeze. You could even go make yourself a margarita for the full effect, if it's after noon.

I love this effect because it looks like someone dragged a paintbrush through the tulips...or maybe it looks like fibre optics...

Grasses provide a gentle sense of movement in a garden, which is especially effective in a setting surrounded by heavy planters, solid hedges, large mansions, etc.

Bog or Pond? Similarities with Stanley Park

The Vancouver Sun newspaper's cover story byline today was:

A report to be released Monday says pollution, invasive species and climate change are harming the aquatic environment of Vancouver's largest park. It calls for urgent action to address problems.

Hmm. I bought the paper.

When I'm not revelling in the beauty of the grotto (see previous post) in Roswitha's garden, I'm wondering how the heck to "fix" the pond.



Notice how brown the water is in the photo. I'd just finished wading around, weeding grass and invasive species out of the islands of water lilies. The water lilies themselves have become invasive. They are growing in islands of primordial muck--it reaches the surface in the centre of the clumps. Who knew. When you first "plant" water lilies, you anchor their roots in a weighted mesh-type pot in the bottom of your pond, and delight when a few waxy blooms quake open on the surface, so fragile...

If you think I'm wading around in my knickers, you're wrong. I'm fully hip-wadered, after new life forms emerged last year...ick. Up until last year, I happily rolled up the pantlegs, and drifted about with the pond skimmer, like one of those dryads in a Waterhouse painting (ya, right). It was refreshing. Then one day, I emerged...with little brown leeches all over my legs.

This was a new development. Other new developments were:

• a never-ending flush of green string-algae (rather than just one mid-summer algae bloom)
• the remarkable increase in size of the fresh-water crustaceans skittering around the bottom

Ick. Double Ick.

Being a Sherlock type, I figured the pond balance was askew. The ratio of water-to-muck was turning the pond into something resembling a...bog. Three factors came to mind:

• the water lily muck-islands
• the accumulated bottom debris
• the nitrogen-rich soluble fertilizer run-off from the flower benches above the pond

So I absconded the said hip waders and attempted a bottom clearing of the pond, scooping out heaps of blackened organic debris with a re-purposed leaf rake. It became clear (my conclusions, not the pond water) that scooping bottom debris was not going to solve the problem.

Somehow, the water lilies have to be wrestled out of the pond. Water lily wrestling--now that will destroy all romanticized views of floating lotuses.

Back to Stanley Park. Sometime last summer, the park ponds experienced a bizarre and unexplained bright turquoise algae bloom. Studies ensued. According to today's article:

...pollution and invasive species--such as the water lilies that are choking Beaver Lake--are major contributors to the aquatic ecosystems' demise...Beaver Lake shrank to 3.9 hectares in 1997 from 6.7 hectares in 1938 because of sedimentation, increased plant growth and a depletion of oxygen in the water...[According to Patricia Thompson, executive director of the Stanley Park Ecological Society,] the report highlights the need to protect the lake, which is on course to becoming a bog.

Elsewhere in the article, local ducks are also accused of compounding the problem with their duck-doo.

Hmm. (Roswitha just emailed me to announce her resident duck-pair have quackily arrived.)

So the factors are clear, if nothing else. Nevertheless, I take exception to the phrase "protect the lake from becoming a bog."

I understand that a backyard swamp-garden lacks some aesthetic and olfactory appeal. But aren't we missing something? Don't pools naturally fill in over time, due to accumulating sedimentation and accelerated plant growth, thus becoming bogs...peat moss...and, in twenty thousand years or so (no idea)...oil? It's pre-history in the making folks.

The Grotto Transforms....

Beauty. Just sit.

Sometimes, when people see a garden in the off-season, they don't understand the devotion of the strange breed of humans known as gardeners...

During the off-season (photo below from December '09) we're working on faith.

Strong enough to walk on water, apparently.

And yes, every year, this happens.

And every year, it's breath-taking. And breath-giving.

The top-down view.

Gold-leaf Bleeding Heart

An end-of-the-day gnome's-eye-view of a golden bleeding heart in Jim and Rojeanne's garden.

The blue line behind is a combination of the forget-me-not-like flowers of Brunnera macrophylla 'Jack Frost' and the rampant loved-or-hated English bluebell. Brunnera is a great perennial--especially this variety, with the icy white leaves, that will grow in shady shade.

I'm usually vaguely annoyed by gold-leaved cultivars because they always seem less vigorous and more fussy than their green-leaved cousins. But this bleeding heart (Dicentra spectabilis 'Gold Heart') has been a highlight in shade gardens recently, and the fact that it stays smaller than the regular dicentra is actually an advantage. It doesn't flop around or require staking or dominate the scene as much, so when it goes dormant in summer you don't face a gaping gap.

Befores n' Afters...

I've taken so many pictures lately, I have to catch up with some quick & easy posts!

Here's a spring-time "after" shot of Sandra and Don's new front planting. The original "before" photo (below) was the result of a lot of hard slogging, removing 20+ year-old junipers (not by me!) and re-stacking the second-tier rock wall (by my gracious comrades).


Lookin' sparkly now, in between April showers!

We have plans to transplant a collection of lupines into the spaces where the daffodils are currently blooming. The white candytuft and a generous smattering of dianthus were also scavenged. Scavenging is gardening at its best.