Welcome to Canada, where you get wind, rain, sun, and snow – sometimes all in the same day.
It appears that we skipped over spring and went right from late winter to early summer. One day we were still getting frost warnings, the next we were running around without our coats on. The grass is green and the trees are leafing up nicely. And the first round of flowers – tulips, daffodils, and crocus – are already fading to make room for others.
Since my last post I’ve actually had the deck door open a few times. Haven’t quite got to the barefoot stage yet, but then my feet get cold easily.
I haven’t been able to take the granddaughter to play at the beach after preschool lately, not because of the rain, but because there isn’t any beach. I guess maybe it's because of the rain after all. Once again the water level of Lake Ontario is so high that it’s right up to the board walk at the local waterfront. It had started to recede a bit the morning I went down to see for myself, but I’m sure it won’t take much to flood it again.
The granddaughter and I were able to get all of our seedlings in the ground on Friday, and then Saturday they were pretty much flattened by a heavy rain. Fortunately they had some sun yesterday so they weren’t looking quite as bedraggled. But they only have today to make their comeback because it’s supposed to rain the rest of the week.
It's a learning experience, that's for sure. While I agree that some plants, like tomatoes, benefit from being started indoors, there are many that don't need the head start. Beans, for instance. They sprouted in just a couple of days and were about a foot high before we got them into the garden. I would have been better to plant the seeds directly to start with. And carrots - there's gotta be a trick to planting carrot seeds. The seeds I planted inside were just barely sprouting and fell apart when I tried to put them in the garden, so I ended up planting more seeds but they did not end up in even rows like I recall from my mother's garden.
For those of you who are interested, the seedlings that we planted were green beans, purple beans, peas, broccoli, cabbage, peppers, regular carrots, purple carrots, and dill. We also planted pumpkin seeds which didn’t sprout but I planted the pods anyway just in case. And my neighbour gave us about eight brandywine tomato seedlings, some sweet millions (which I think are cherry tomatoes), and some more pepper plants.
Even with all of that my garden looks a little sparse, but it’s just getting started. It’ll be interesting to see what it looks like in another couple of weeks.
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