Well, here we are, late February (oops, March)! Are you ready to design the layout of your garden and get your seeds started?
For those who have the space but haven’t planted a garden before, or for those who planning it anew this year, start with a rough plan: what to place where, by how much space and sun it will get. This will give you an idea how many seedlings you should have of each kind of plant.
I don’t always start seeds every year, and when I do, I’m almost always late at it (much later than February). It’s easy to get a little overzealous and end up tending tonnes of seedlings we have give away. Of course, you start by planting many seeds, because some never germinate, or else germinate and start, but then fail. If they succeed, extra seedlings can come in quite handy when you have space to add a few more good planters.
The spring gardening season is upon us with even more speed than it usually arrives, because regardless of what winter does, that’s the way time works: every year accelerates. Thus the Ville’s annual “embellissement” campaign (“embellishment,” or rather “beautification”) is coming again to many boroughs in just a few weekends.
A pepper plant I received from the garden giveaway as a seedling, once it matured and produced two peppers!
This annual event gives residents of Montreal a number of floral, vegetable, and herb seedlings for their gardens and balconies. Past entrants have been impatiens and begonias, echinacea (cone flowers), sage, rosemary, basil, and mint, and peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers. Always included: as much compost and wood chips as you want to take. Bring your own bags, baskets, buckets, and a wagon to cart it all away! Oh, and don’t forget your ID. You have to prove residency in the borough in which the plants are being given.
When? Well, you’ll have to check the Montreal.ca website and consult the calendar or the page for your borough, or other community listings, to find out when the “distribution” of plants is. Typically, it happens on the long weekend in May, and for some, the weekend after that, and lastly, the first weekend in June.
It seems late for getting them in the ground (our last-frost date in the city seems to be happening in April), but frankly, it takes time for the seedlings to grow up and “harden off” (acclimate to the outdoors) before they can be distributed for public planting. Though well-established plants are now as lush as can be, the seedlings I’ve planted are barely even ready for planting; the ones the Ville distributes have been started in greenhouses.
but I didn’t have much more than a social media slug to say about it — it was actually the shortest blog post I’d ever done. So if you still have tomatoes in the garden, they’re going to go to waste, unless you do this:
Pull up the plant in its entirety and hang it upside down in your garage or cold cellar.Continue reading
Pollinating flowers is a serious job. In fact, in places where pollinators have been killed off by environmental toxins, people are employed to do it. (That means a government might see it as an advantage to take a service nature does for free, and turn it into something people have to be paid to do.)
For this reason, the third week of June every year we have Pollinator Week. Its aim is promote and support pollinator abundance and diversity, in the interest of serving them better than we have (see environmental toxin above, but also, habitat loss!) – because Lord knows they serve us!
This is a long-running “lifestyle” blog about the pleasures of living like a farm kid in an urban context. There’s a big focus on ecology and wildlife because this has brought me joy – and this is also the greatest potential we have of restoring some balance to nature where we live.
I write practical content for people to do little projects that basically make things beautiful, but also support climate readiness (energy efficiency, heat reduction, drought tolerance, flood prevention, and more). I’m a relentlless promoter of having a live-and-let-live attitude towards biodiversity.
Comments and questions are welcome! And if you’re anywhere near the Montreal region, you can also use my “Rewilding” service to landscape your property using native plants, convert to a green driveway, and prevent your windows from killing birds.
