Well, as I write this it is 7 degrees Celsius and we had a huge hailstorm this weekend that mushed flat all my garden beds and flowers. Prior to this, with the heat and the no mosquitoes, I was thinking what was wrong with me all these years, Calgary is not so bad, look at this beautiful summer, and well. Well, complaining gets us nowhere AND I have enjoyed my summer and my garden immensely, and seasons change and so do I. Calgary has many great things about it; the weather is not generally one of them.
Sometimes during the summer I wonder what I do with my time when I don’t have the garden to tend to, which is how I feel now with the weather changed and no need to water or work in the garden. What DO I do with my time? Oh yeah, I usually have a job.
Anyway, I love my garden immoderately. I have been working on the flower beds for twenty years – twenty! – and over the last two years I have delved into herb gardening. This year, as you know, I started my first vegetable garden and it has been so satisfying. I mean, it’s not like we are saving lots of money growing our own vegetables, because it was kind of expensive to build the garden beds and fill them, but it’s been so much fun.
Let’s tour around my garden, shall we?
Nicole’s Favourite Things: The “I Love My Garden” Edition
The Perennials
My entire goal with perennials is to have something blooming at all times of the year, so I mix up early and late bloomers, as well as long bloomers, and so there is always something pretty and colourful to look at.
Early spring:
June:
July:
August:
The roses bloom from July until September, as does the yarrow and ornamental sage.
My hostas and creeping Jenny are quite stunted this year, partly because of the hot, dry weather, and partly because Barkley, in his dotage, has decided to walk through them several times a day. If admonished, he stands in them, staring at me in a what are you going to do kind of way, and since there is nothing I am going to do to discipline a 13-year-old dog with cancer, I guess I’ll live with my stunted shade garden.
Speaking of Barkley, every single day when we are walking – every day! – someone will stop me to ask “what’s wrong with your dog?” and it gets very tiresome. While I appreciate the sentiment of concern, I very much dislike the conversation that follows, and I am much too polite not to answer. I prefer the days when people would stop me to tell me how cute he is or to ask about his breed. He’s still cute and I still think Labradoodles are a wonderful breed! Please don’t ask about his giant growth on his side.
The Annuals
Over the years I have used annuals to fill in the blanks in my perennial garden beds, but now there…are no blanks. I use annuals mostly in containers in our very dry and shady front yard, as well as this pretty little one in our very sunny back yard:
The Herbs
I cook every single day but apparently, I don’t use many fresh herbs. The past few years I’ve been buying an assorted ten-pack of herbs from a fundraiser, and while I’ve enjoyed the element of surprise as to which herbs I’ve received, I’m not going to do that again. I only ever use fresh cilantro, basil, and oregano, and the rest I just water and…do nothing with. Well, not nothing. I am in the process of drying all the herbs for winter use – I do use a lot of dried herbs, but I don’t tend to use recipes with dried herbs in the summer.
If you’re interested in drying herbs, I really recommend a dehydrator. Also? Basil is a bitch to dry, with the thick leaves. As an example, parsley takes about two hours to dry in a dehydrator, and basil takes…a lot longer. I have no idea how much longer because I kept checking it over the course of two days, discovering the leaves still weren’t dry, and then restarting the dehydrator, only to forget about it for hours at a time.
Last year I attempted mint extract and it was a complete failure. I am not sure if it was user error or if I had the wrong kind of mint; I have so much mint this year and nothing to do with it. I might try the extract again, but I’m not sure if I want to waste the vodka on it.
The Veggies
This is my first year of veggie gardening; the guys built and filled five garden boxes for me, and I really recommend this kind of gardening. I’m a bendy kind of girl, but having the raised beds is just wonderful. Also, Barkley pees on the side of the garden boxes, and if the beds were in the ground he would be peeing on our vegetables, which seems suboptimal.
This year we grew radishes, carrots, beets, lettuce, kale, peas, potatoes, tomatoes, and zucchini with a lot of success, although I will say that next year I will use seed tape for the smaller seeds as I am terrible at thinning things out. I also tried peppers and cucumbers, which were unsuccessful – unsurprising, perhaps, but if there was any summer they could grow it would have been this one, with the heat.
I think next year I will increase the amount of kale, decrease the carrots, and omit the radishes altogether. I thought I would enjoy growing carrots more than I do; although if I use seed tape it’s sure to be more satisfying than my tiny, unthinned carrots.
Our growing season is so short here; at best, I have another month, but realistically we could get frost any day now, and snow in September is not unusual. I’ve made the best of the growing season, and I will enjoy it for as long as it lasts! Do you garden? Tell me everything. xo
I enjoyed your garden tour. We plant sunflowers and zinnias every summer. If we’re lucky, the zinnias will last into November. We also have bulbs (daffodils, tulips, tiger lilies and resurrection lilies) that come up at various points in the spring and summer, some rosebushes, and a butterfly bush.
My core herbs are basil, chives, cilantro, and parsley. This year I have also dill, mint, oregano, and thyme. I used fresh tarragon in a soup last night and I was thinking if I add an herb next year, it could be tarragon.
Our veggies this year were peas, lettuce, kale, tomatoes, eggplant (a new crop this year), and carrots. The greens (especially the kale) and tomatoes did really well this year and the eggplant, too, though I’ve got no baseline for comparison there.
I have so many chives and I hardly use them fresh BUT they are great dried! What do you do with all your mint? I’m up to my ears in it.
Our mint goes crazy some years, but this year not so much. We have enough, though. I like to make tea with it and just this week I’ve used it in an eggplant-tomato-pita salad and a corn-halloumi salad.
I love chives and ours last until November or December and come back by themselves in February (if I bring the pot inside and put it in a sunny place) or March (if I leave it outside) so we have them almost year round. Sometimes the parsley overwinters. The mint and thyme are perennial or at least biannual, but with shorter seasons.
Wow! You have such a profusion of flowers and vegetables! I am so impressed and so envious! My parents live in a similar climate to you (it has been near freezing each night for about a week now) and they built a greenhouse purely to extend the growing season a bit. My mom grows tomatoes and peppers on her deck and has had to move them into the greenhouse (which they heat) to hopefully encourage them to ripen. As always, I am in awe of your cilantro skills. Whenever I grow cilantro, it is so anemic. I have no idea how to get such abundant cilantro as you manage to coax from your plants!
The tomatoes are right beside my south-facing back door and it’s the hottest part of the garden. It’s also sheltered from hail! I wish I could pass on my cilantro wisdom but I don’t know what I do! Maybe it’s our weather/ dry climate? I have no idea.
Ah, I loved your garden tour! I have been getting more into gardening too. I grew from seed this year and built my own raised bed out of bricks in our yard. I squeezed too much in: a gazillion cherry tomatoes, green beans, zucchini, kale, eggplant, chard… Next year I may not bother with the eggplant because so far I’ve only harvested one!
We love the kale but how do you deal with the caterpillars!? I literally wash, rewash and scrutinize every damned leaf after one ended up *horror* on my son’s dinner plate. Or do you just figure it’s more protein…
My dream is to someday have a big perennial flower bed like yours. I kind of want it to look wild, but it’s a big job so I’ll wait till fall. Kingston has been brutally hot. Seems crazy to complain but I wasn’t designed for intense heat and humidity. Maybe I need to move to Calgary lol!
You should move to Calgary, you’d never have to experience humidity again! And likely not heat. Maybe that’s why I don’t have caterpillars – my veggies didn’t have any bugs at all in them this year, and I don’t know if it’s a fluke or not. My parents have had a garden my whole life and I don’t think they’ve ever had a caterpillar problem. So. The conclusion I am drawing here is that you need to move here and great news, there is a house for sale on my street. SEE YOU SOON, NEIGHBOURINO
I could use a lesson on planting perennials to have things blooming all summer – we have a couple of things that come up early, but could use more late bloomers (ha). I usually freeze basil – drying it sounds hard. I use more dried herbs than fresh too (other than cilantro) but it’s nice to have the ones from my own garden – I hang them upside down from a hook on the end cupboard and that dries them nicely.
Do you freeze the basil as is, or do you freeze it in ice cube trays with olive oil?
What a beautiful garden – pretty amazing for Calgary. Oh my goodness a hail storm!? (as I read this it’s 30 C here but thankfully I’m sitting on my cottage dock). I enjoy looking at gardens but it is not my ‘thing’. 10 minutes into mandatory weeding I’m grumbling to myself how much I hate it. I have a large pot of basil -my fave herb and a gorgeous hibiscus that I received as a Mother’s Day gift. That’s t!
Better hail than snow! I mean, marginally better.
What a beautiful yard/garden you have! This is the first yard where I’ve “inherited” already established plants. Slowly, I have been trying to set it all to rights. The last owners, apparently, didn’t bother to figure out where things needed to be placed. A lot of things that should have been planted in full sun were planted in the shade, etc. They also didn’t seem to understand spacing – so a lot of things are planted too close together or to the house, etc. Someone, at one point, seemed to be following your plan of having something bloom from spring through fall – which is great. Except for the day lilies, I’m pleased with most of it. The day lilies irritate me to no end. I’m about ready to pull them all out except I’m at a loss as to what I could replace them with. So for now they stay – but they will be brutally thinned this fall.
I love daylilies but that’s probably because they grow so well here! I embrace whatever grows in our climate – they can survive frost and hail, I think they would survive nuclear fallout. But in your climate, I’d probably like them less!
Oh they grow well here – I just don’t care for the way they become so bedraggled by then end of the season.
This is impressive. The flowers are so pretty. I wonder if someday I will have time to devote to planting or gardening. When I see other houses with beautiful flowers, I pause and admire. Sigh. Maybe in the future. I can barely handle the needs presented INSIDE my house. Love that you have such a positive outlook on your weather situation. Those chilly temps already? Oh my.
Lol, the things inside the house do tend to get pushed to the backburner in gardening season!
I meant to say too that the fact that Barkley has a growth that people ask about is heartbreaking to me. Poor guy and how irritating for you to constantly be questioned about it. People.
What a lovely garden tour. I think, considering the length of your garden season that you do a tremendous job. I’ve never grown radishes, but I love them.
Barkley is perfect and people are weird.