January Gardening

January is dreaming and planning time.  Choose a snowy day, curl up on a comfy couch with a cup of cocoa, spread your garden catalogues around you, dream of summer and plan your summer garden. Send orders for seeds at the end of this month.

Inspect your houseplants often for signs if pests.  If spider mites or whiteflies are found, wash your plants at least once a week.  In fact, wash your plants anyway.  Washing with a mild solution of dish soap will fend off any problems and clean house dust from leaves.  Use aluminum foil over the top of the soil in your pots so that you can wash those critters off without washing the soil out. Holding the plant in the pot and the tinfoil in place over the soil, invert the plant and all in the soapy water.  That way you get the undersides of the leaves.

Bring branches of flowering shrubs into the house to force early spring bloom: forsythia, pussy willow, and apple are easy to force.

Inspect your corms, tubers and bulbs.  Discard any showing molds or rots.  Check the growth.  Some may be ready to pot soon – especially begonias.  When begonias are ready, little pink sprouts will show at the top of the tuber. 

Sow pelargoniums under lights this month. 

Brush the snow off your evergreens to prevent injury from heavy loads of snow. Smaller evergreens can be wrapped in burlap.  This reduces the transpiration of water from the tree as well as preventing the branches from bending or breaking under a load of snow.

Get potting/seeding materials and equipment ready.  Check and set up your light system.
Make sure pots are washed. Using a bit of chlorine bleach in the wash water will kill any overwintering baddies.

Be sure to have seed starting medium on hand.  I like the seed starting mix to be a bit finer than normal potting medium.

Enjoy winter plants such as Poinsettia and Amaryllis. I used to keep these plants and try to bring them into bloom the next winter.  It’s possible but it takes a bit of work.  Mostly they take up too much space when I want to sprout seeds as well.  Now I look on them as I would cut flowers – enjoy them while they last and discard as spring approaches.

Buy new African violets to brighten winter days.
Spring is only a wish away!

Pollinator Patches

"Be the change you want to see in the world." When Mahatma Gandhi said that he must have been thinking about Pollinator Patches. You can make a difference in your world this year by creating a Pollinator Patch -- a habitat for butterflies and native bees and other insects.

Set aside a portion of your garden or maybe your boulevard to be devoted to native plants that pollinators will love. Plan your Patch in a sunny spot that will attract bees and other insects.   There is lots of information on the Web about what native plants you may want to choose. 

You might want to go beyond your personal bounds and plant a Patch on public ground.  You’ll need permission to do this but municipalities are conscious of the need for native plants for insects and may be very glad to have you head a native planting group.

Although your planting is designed to be a haven for butterflies and other insects, your focus right now should be on the Monarch Butterfly.  The butterfly has been assessed as endangered by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada.

To attract and save Monarchs, be sure to plant a stand of milkweed in your Pollinator Patch.  Milkweed is critical to the life cycle of Monarch Butterflies. The butterflies will hunt for milkweed and only milkweed for egg laying. They will lay their eggs on the underside of the leaves. Plants of the milkweed family are also the hosts of Monarch larvae. The resulting larvae will eat only milkweed leaves. No milkweed -- no Monarchs.]

If you don't want to plant ordinary milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) in your garden, consider Swamp Milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) instead.

For bees and other butterflies, yellow, red and orange plants of the composite type are especially interesting.  Rudbeckias and asters are the easiest to grow.  Coreopsis is another plant loved by bees and butterflies.  Research on the web for other plants for your Pollinator Patch.

“Be the change you want to see in the world.”  Plant a Pollinator patch this year.

The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us. --- E. O. Wilson

 

Jottings

Jottings contains some articles I wrote for the monthly newsletter of Barrie's Garden Club and other projects. I hope you enjoy them.

 

It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment. Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)

 

Hints & Tricks

This is a collection of neat ideas and crazy tricks that I've collected from various sources. Many are amusing, and most are useful. We gardeners just love to learn neat little ways of doing our gardening jobs more effectively. My most popular talk was just that: "Hints and Tricks."

Most of the hints I've used myself or know someone who will vouch for them. All of them are fun to read and almost as much fun to do.

 

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it's forever. Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)

 

Gardening Info

This is a miscellaneous section of odds and sods of information I've collected and would like to share. I've found most of the information in magazines and on the internet or in the many gardening books I can't resist buying!

You'll also find some of my favourite links on the Gardening Info page.

 

"Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the F.D.A.’s job." ~ Philip Angell, Monsanto's Director of Communications (October 1998)

 

The Blog

I guess the whole site is a sort of blog, isn't it?

But this newer section is a more conventional blog -- a space to put my thoughts and new ideas as I learn them or think them.