Thursday, September 29, 2011

Gardening in the north!










This year, I was determined to have a beautiful backyard!

This is a hardy rose, called Prairie Joy or Prairie dawn. It was  spectacular this year and is still in bloom, Sept 29th.


My little garden that was planted in late April , was late in germinating  as we had rainy weather not only in June but also most of July.  All my vegetables did sprout but the yield was low.. August was a very hot month and things like my parsley ( grew into an immerse plants with tons of blooms).


My multicoloured swiss chard went quickly into seed as did my spinach!


The sunflowers which are usually a wonderful fall display of colour, grew to over 7 feet, flowered but to my amazement  the squirrels lopped of the sunflower heads!   Only 2 sunflower heads are left standing!



The scarlet runner were thick and tall and did produce many beans.  I did dill pickle one 2 quart size jar  using
this bean!
















My first attempt on growing garlic! Not too sure what to expect!











These lovely royal blue Delphinium grow quickly in the spring and have a wonderful show of  spikes of summer flowers in blue.  However, the plant is prone to rust on the leaves and looks shabby into late summer.. cutting down the spikes results in more new growth and smaller flowery spikes!  This whole area , I have dug out for other plants only to have the delphiniums come back in full force! 








 I was not successful growing poppies until eight years ago mainly because I used to weed out the plant, thinking it was part of the thistle family.  The year my mom passed away, to my surprise, I had one of these poppies  bloom.. I had been too busy with her to focus on gardening.  Now these beautiful blooms in the middle of summer are a wonderful remembrance of my Mom












Yes, more pictures on my lemon tree in splendour..







A begonia that is still full of bloom in Oct!










































Lemon Tree










June 15th, my little potted lemon tree was in bloom.  It had produced one very large fruit last Aug which I used to prepare a lemon filling for a white cake.  The plant had about 16 leaves, yet produce one large fruit although it took a year for the fruit to grow to this large size and turn yellow!  This year, the plant has about four to 6 branches and a lot more leaves.  From June to Aug , it produced flowers on three other branches.

July 19, to my delight there were more blooms. The tree had been moved out to my patio in June.





JUly 31st 








More blooms Aug 4th