It is time to wrap up my Major project for #eci831. My garden has grown, and I have grown in my gardening knowledge and in the way I can navigate the internet, apps and a variety of platforms to learn new things.

Before and After photos sum up the work that has been done. The part that I am most proud of is the vegetable garden. It was planted with thought, research and intention. The plants have been paired with others that will encourage growth, the proper seeding directions were followed and the placement of the plants was carefully considered according to my research. I can’t wait to see what the final product is! Regardless, I love watching the garden grow as there are noticeable changes every week.

My favourite sources for this assignment have been: Feedly, TikTok, Youtube and Twitter.

Thanks for following along!

This week took a turn for my family. My mother-in-law passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. We needed to drop everything and head to Ontario to be with family. Fortunately, my in-laws were recently in Saskatchewan to visit during May long weekend. At that time, we shopped for our plants together, had a crazy chat about manure and discussed how our gardens are similar but also very different as I don’t have to worry about the deer eating my garden!

Last week, I was able to connect further with my father-in-law while helping him with the garden. Letting him know what plants were growing and how he could care for them going forward.

In my previous posts, I mentioned No Mow May and other suggestions that I have found about maintaining the lawn and attracting pollinators. When I was walking around my in-laws’ yard I couldn’t help but notice how special their yard looks with wildflowers as parts of the lawn are cut less regularly.

After a week away from my yard, I am thankful for underground sprinklers which watered the lawn as well as the perennial beds. My brother and his family kindly kept my vegetable garden watered every other day which only left me weeding and grass mowing after two weeks of growth.

My research this week concentrated on pruning, identifying plants and planting cucumbers.

Pruning

Poppies– Once the flowers have bloomed you are to cut off the stem, deadhead, so that new blooms can possibly come. It also looks much neater. I missed many of my poppies blooming this week however, there are still a few buds that I hope will open this week.

Lambs Ear– Similar to the poppy, when the purple flowers in the middle have finished blooming you will cut that stem off right at the bottom and you will be left with the fuzzy leaves.

Tomatoes- I cut the leaves off the plant that are touching the ground and a few inches up. This is to help the energy go to the main stem to produce larger fruit. It also helps with the airflow. The next stage of pruning is to remove the suckers. My plants aren’t large enough for this yet. @perkyplantparent on TikTok

Plant Identification

I went back to Facebook’s Saskatchewan Gardeners page to identify the last mystery plant in the front perennial bed. I was not disappointed as they came through again. It is a Veronica and Saliva.

Cucumbers– The almanac suggested that the window for planting cucumber seedlings in my area started Thursday, June 15th. I got mine in the ground today. I purchased three plants a few weeks ago but hadn’t put them in yet. They didn’t get proper care this last week so I purchased three more today just to be sure but planted all six. I had been searching Tiktok for information on planting cucumbers. Many videos were saying to plant the cucumbers with a vertical trellis to encourage the plant to climb. I decided to plant them following the advice of @notjustgreenfingers, the video below. I also found lots of helpful information on Youtube.

To end off the weekend, I picked the rhubarb from our back garden bed. I brought this plant with us when we moved one year ago this weekend. It produced 4 cups of chopped rhubarb, exactly what I needed to make a special rhubarb crisp for our Father’s Day dessert.

Finally, here is this week in pictures.

See you back here next week for the final wrap-up and before and after comparisons. The neighbourhood cat must be up to something else as I haven’t seen him in my garden for a few weeks.

According to the 2023 Planting Calendar: when to plant your vegetables for my area, the window to plant tomatoes started this week. So, Wednesday evening once it cooled down, into the garden they went. See the video below to find out how I planted my tomatoes.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yo1ccixAtVs – Tomato planting!

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3nKD3ge3MTk– The tomatoes are planted!

This week’s learning is from:

• An article I found from Feedly– Grow Stronger Tomatoes.

• TikTok- Now that I am connected, I am going to stick to TikTok for everything Tomato. Here are a few accounts that I have really liked for Tomato content.
  

Update:

The grass clippings, orange peels and egg shells seem to be keeping the cat out of the garden!

Finally, here are some updated pictures of what is happening in the yard this week.

Next week, is cucumber week!

Take a tour with me to see how the garden is growing!

The work in the garden this week was mostly maintenance including weeding and cleaning out last year’s growth from the side flowerbeds.

My main learning focus this week was proper care of peonies, lawn care and how to keep cats out of my vegetable garden bed.

Peonies

Tips and Tricks for Peonies. This short Youtube video answered all my questions and even identified the kind of peony I have. Our home is 40 years old. We moved in last June and all of the gardens are already mature. I have no idea how long some of the plants have been there but I do know that the peony plant is well established. From the video, it appears that I have a double-bloom garden peony. They like the sun and can grow 3- 4 feet wide and tall. To grow bigger blooms, I can pinch off small side buds, which is similar to how to grow better tomatoes. Finally, established peonies don’t require much care in the spring and I should cut them back to 3 inches in the fall which I didn’t do last fall but did pull it all out this week.

I found another helpful article on Almenac.com: Caring for Peonies: 10 Tips and Tricks. I always see ants on the peony buds. The ants don’t harm or help the buds they just love the taste of the nectar, who knew!?! Also, because the flowers are so big, they can be very heavy so staking the plant can help, even using a tomato cage. I have a little fence and a rope holding mine. I will see how that holds up this year.

Lawn care

Lawn care seems to be the ongoing “issue” in my yard. We are keeping the grass longer so it doesn’t get burnt and watering it daily in the early morning. The No Mow May article I previously mentioned, suggested cutting the grass every two weeks. Since I made the above video, we decided to cut the grass this evening. I found another article called Slow Mow Summer suggested that it’s not the time between mowings but the length that should determine when to cut and never cut more than a third of the length. This is how we decided to cut the grass today. With all the recent rain the grass is growing like crazy!

Stop the Cat

Finally, someone or something is digging in my vegetable garden….The size of the prints leads me to believe it is the friendly neighbour cat that I often see crossing through the yard. I want to safely deter the cat from stopping in the garden. I found an article on the David Suzuki FDNs Twitter page which gave many ideas I am trying this week. I have added orange peels as citrus is supposed to deter the cat as well as egg shells and pine cones to make it uncomfortable to walk on. Finally, I added grass clippings so the nice soft dirt is hidden.

Best resources this week came from Youtube, Feedly and Twitter.

Stop by next week for an update on the project Stop the Cat as well as tomato planting. I have found lots of great information I am looking forward to sharing and also planting my tomatoes this week.

No time for wasting. This week, I jumped into my online research as I knew I would soon have to get my garden in the ground.

First, I joined the Saskatchewan Gardeners Facebook page. I made a post to determine if one of my plants was a flower or a weed. Very quickly, I had 50 comments about my plant…not a weed!  It is a poppy! One of the commenters was able to identify one of the other plants in the picture. I used the Plant look-up tool on my iPhone in my pictures which confirmed what the comment said, it is a Lamb’s Ear.

Next, I used Feedly to start gathering articles related to my topic. I really like this site. I have to check only one place every few days and read the new articles. I have also found that some of the article sources are better than others and can look on those pages for other articles of interest. Here are a few articles that I found helpful this week:

Lawn care: From this article, I learned that I should mow the lawn every two weeks and keep the lawn length to 3.5 inches. It also talks about not cutting the grass in May. We had already cut the grass this month so I was too late to take that advice. The reason for that is to help with pollination. Other ideas for pollination that were given are to put a Hummingbird feeder, bird bath, bee house and a variety of coloured flowers to attract pollinators. So far, we have added a Hummingbird feeder and bird bath to our front garden bed. Below are not my pictures, I hope to have a few of my own pictures with birds soon.

Growing Vegetables– I took the advice from this article to prepare my vegetable garden for planting. I added cow manure to the soil and mixed it up together to raise the nutrient level in the soil. They also suggested adding fertilizer to the soil before planting, which we did. The greenhouse had cow manure and sheep manure. In reading both packages they seemed to do the same thing so of course I asked my toddler if he would rather have cow poop or sheep poop in the garden. His choice was cow so cow manure it is.

This article is specifically about tomatoes. They prefer full sun in the garden, which helped decide on garden placement. We purchased Beefsteak seedlings as they have the potential to grow larger tomatoes. Stay tuned for more about tomatoes in a later post.

When to Plant?: This site has lots of great information for beginner gardeners such as the easiest veggies to grow, how to decide what to plant, and guidelines for arranging the vegetables in the garden. This article led me to the planting calendar. This is a very cool web page. You input your postal code and it tells you when is the best time to plant seeds and seedlings based on the last frost in that area. I learned that I am late planting my carrot, green bean and pea seeds. They should have been in the ground by May 11^th and I got them in the ground May 21^st. I will plant my tomato plants and cucumber plants between June 15^th and 29^th as the almanac suggests.

Companion planting: The article shows which vegetables should be planted together and which you should avoid for the best growth. I used this article to decide the best placement for the vegetables and which vegetables to plant.

I also watched this video to help me decide on plant placement in the garden. The video and article are about square-foot garden designs. Look back at the garden picture and notice black tape. This is where I measured out each foot to help space the garden properly.

The last thing for this week is Aeration. My brother called me and said he was renting an aeration machine for an evening, would I like my lawn done as well? How perfect, I thought. This will fit in so well with my project, that he is unaware of.  Of course, I told him to come on over. I did the research after the aeration was done. It will allow to the water to get in deep to the roots and help with the compression of the lawn.

I hope you will come back next week to see how the garden is growing, learn about spring perennial care and find out what other mystery plants are growing in my flower beds. I would love any tips, tricks or gardening advice you have to share!