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Looking for a zero-waste, guilt free way to water your plants? I was. And finally, after having the gear to do it for months, my partner and I installed a drip irrigation system this past weekend. It’s fed straight from one of our rain barrels. If I sound smug it’s really just because I’m relieved. I find it stressful when we’ve gone more than a week without rain. I’ve planted a fairly drought-tolerant garden, but I know that my black-eyed Susans, wild bergamot, coreopsis and other native plants, not to mention the few cute annuals I’ve planted, will be much happier after a good soak.

You’ll need a few things in order to install a rain barrel-fed drip irrigation system.
1. A rain barrel. Duh. I recommend a big one – a few steady hours of rain fills a barrel to the brim. I bought this 190 litre barrel from Canadian Tire (shown above).
2. Some eavestrough elbows so you can redirect water from your downspout to your rain barrel.
3. Some stones or pavers, or some other means of elevating your rain barrel. You need to raise up your barrel in order to create water pressure.
4. Some screening. Your water will be nicer if you can keep stuff – leaves, mosquitoes, pollen – out of it. Put layers of screen over your barrel and under your downspout so you can remove it and clean it periodically.
5. A low-pressure irrigation system! I used this one from Lee Valley. It’s easy to set up.
6. An irrigation plan. Decide where to route your irrigation hose such that the water never needs to run uphill. That should ensure all of your plants get watered.

It took about 45 minutes to set up our system, and within moments of opening the rain barrel spigot my garden was being watered. I like that the slow-drip system will absorb well into the soil instead of flooding the area, washing away soil and nutrients.

Have you tried ways of using rain water or water conservation techniques on your garden?

Last weekend I enjoyed getting out into the warm sunshine. I had a look around my garden to see what was coming up, and I spent some time starting flower and veggie seeds. I was proud to plant some of my own seeds: I’d planted nasturtiums last year, with their beautiful orange edible flowers. I saved a lot of seeds from them, and as I put the tiny, shrivelled pods into the potting soil, I felt a wave of optimism. Hope comes in small packages!

In addition to my favourite spring bulbs, including tulips and hyacinth, I was happy to see native Columbine coming back. Here it is, below.

I’d heard that now is the best time to get ahead of weeds, so I armed myself with spade and trowel. I have a cute but aggressive purple violets that tried to take over part of my garden, and I’m battling them back to a very small area. They aren’t technical invasive, but they seem like it!

And only five days later, my seed-starting efforts were rewarded! Yesterday my first sprout popped up: marigold won the seed-starting race. Here it is:

What’s coming up in your garden?

Looking to create more growing space in your yard this year? Maybe this is the year to let your garden take over some of your lawn.

North Vancouver mayor Darrel Mussatto is encouraging his city’s residents to make the most of their real estate by growing food on it, rather than manicure grass. According to this article in the Vancouver Sun, Citing reasons such as food security and the cost of food, Mussatto says, “We want people to convert the yards of single family homes to gardens and even commercial farms.”
The idea of converting lawn space into produce space may  horrify anyone who has spent loads of time manicuring their lawn into a perfectly groomed green carpet. After all, aren’t lawns already pretty eco? Well, sorry, but no. They’re a monoculture that doesn’t offer native insects and wildlife much in terms of food or protection. Lawns crowd out native plants that do offer these benefits. And people often dump chemicals on them (see study here showing that yes, this is still happening). That cause harm to the aforementioned wildlife, and, surprise surprise, us. So, in my books, lawns aren’t eco friendly.

Companies that use a tuft of green lawn as a symbol of “going green” are clearly disconnected from what makes a healthy planet. To read about how a grass monoculture became a ubiquitous North American concept, click here.

This is the year for me to tackle the lawn problem in my own garden and landscaping design. I have raised beds in my garden, but they only get late-day sun. I have space to grow foods in containers on my little deck, and they can get a fair bit of sun through the course of the day. If I want to enjoy delicious home-grown veggies, I’ll have to take over a lot of my little backyard lawn, which gets sun for most of the day.

Here are five steps to transitioning your lawn from a high-maintenance monoculture into a prodigious, environmentally beneficial garden:

Step 1: Evaluate your needs
How do you use your lawn now?  Will you need to do more than garden in that space? How can you accommodate other activities around your garden?

If your yard is a place for kids to play, perhaps you want to keep a large area of your yard as an open space to run around, so some drought-tolerant grass may be the best thing for you. However there are low-growing groundcovers that can create a mat of verdant beauty that you don’t need to mow. For areas that won’t see too much foot traffic, try Dutch white clover or even thyme.

Do you bring out a table and chairs to dine al fresco? Perhaps you could locate a small patio area within your new garden space, perhaps next to a tree (which can be used to hang lighting from). For instructions on laying a stone patio, click here.

To create a beautiful border to your vegetable garden, consider using lovely wildflowers. They will attract pollinators such as bees to help pollinate your veggies.

Step 2: Take stock of threats

Is your yard a haven for neighbourhood cats? (Mine is.)  You may need a structure around your veggies to prevent them from using the space as a litterbox. Are raccoons often prowling through your yard at night? Again, protect your food plants.  Raccoon contact means potential exposure to raccoon roundworm, which can cause brain damage and loss of eyesight. Front-yard gardens may suffer from road salt damage (see my earlier post about road salt here), so you may need to plant salt-tolerant plants around the border of your garden, such as blueberries.

Step 3: Plan out your space

What can you do with your new-found garden space? Plotting out your plans may help you decide what you want to grow, and where. To draft your plans, first measure the space. You could represent the area on graph paper and sketch in the garden beds, patio stones, furniture and other features on it. Or you could take a photo of the area and draw on it, either via a print out or using a program with built-in stencils such as OmniGraffle.

Step 4: Build your garden beds

Turning a lawn into a garden is best done by building up the space into raised beds. Use stone or wood to create boxes to fill with high-quality soil and compost. Kits for building raised beds with lumber corner pieces make building the beds quick and easy. I love the kit linked here from Lee Valley.

Step 5: Select your plants and start your seeds!
As I wait for spring to arrive, I’m enjoying buying seed packets and researching seed starting. Seed packets note when you can start your seeds and when you can plant them outdoors. Enjoy planning a mix of fruits, veggies and herbs that you love to eat. Try to include some early starters and late bloomers so that you’ll have super-local produce throughout the growing season.

Do you think you could give up a slice of your lawn for a kitchen garden?

I spent most of the day yesterday getting my garden ready for winter (my sore back can attest to the hours spent). Even though the days are still warm and I still have nasturium flowering beautifully, and my herb garden continues to produce fragrant oregano, thyme and mint, I know that the risk of frost is closing in here in Toronto.

I know that my garden has areas with less than ideal soil. (How do I know? Not much will grow in certain pockets, and a few inches below the surface, the soil is more grey and sandy than dark and rich.) This fall I decided to try to improve my garden soil through top dressing, a process of adding layers of high-quality soil and mulch. Hopefully by the 2011 gardening season, my garden soil will offer more nutrients and retain more water for my collection of native perennials (my columbine and black-eyed Susan were superstars this year) and showy annuals (that nasturium, with its bright orange edible flowers, just won’t quit).

I would usually winterize my garden by simply adding a layer of much. This year, after suiting up in my toughest gardening gloves, I took these steps:
- I removed any trace of invasive plants (including gout weed) and also took out a lot of aggressively seeding blue violet (a wildflower known as viola sororia).
- I dug up a few herbs and annual flowers that won’t survive frost and potted them to bring indoors, even if just to extend their lives by a few weeks.
- I scooped up pine needles from the soil surface, since they are acidic and could lower the pH of my soil. The City of Toronto says beech and oak leaves are also acidic. My pine needles went in a yard bag for curb-side pickup.
- I scanned the ground for slugs and snails, tossing them into my compost bin as I worked.
- I shovelled on a thin layer (less than 1 cm) of rich, dark soil containing organic compost. I also added soil from potted annuals. Hey, that rich soil I used in spring didn’t look depleted, and it had to go somewhere!
- I shook out some dried organic hen manure pellets to add a bit more nutrient to the garden.
- I followed with a layer of cedar mulch, also about 1 cm thick.
- I raked the leaves in my yard into a big pile, then distributed them to my flower beds in a thick blanket, particularly around the stems of each of my plants. Why put those leaves in a yard bag to be hauled away when they can help protect my plants all winter?
- I emptied some of my rain barrel, distributing the water over the topdressed garden to keep the leaves in place.
- I distributed good soil over patchy areas of my tiny lawn, and added white clover seeds to those patches. Although this fall seeding was recommended on the seed packet, I saved most of the seeds for spring!

Hopefully, after all this work, come spring my garden will be well fertilized (without any synthetic fertilizer) and terrific at holding moisture — and I’ll have a lot less work to do that I did last spring. I’d love to see my stable of plants grow a little larger this year, particularly the pollinators for the bees and butterflies.

How do you get your garden ready for the cold months?

I thought they were dead. Like crispy-fried dead. The tomatoes that I’d worked so hard bring to fruition (well, at least to fruit) had their leaves curled up, branches saggy, some of them tinged with yellow. Not without a fight, I thought, not without a little more effort to see some juicy red seedy globes in a salad later this summer.

I’d been away for three days, and although I’d watered everything from my rain barrel before I left, it had been blindingly hot and uncomfortably humid, several degrees above seasonal norms (experts say climate change is a likely contributor) . My veggies, particularly my peppers and tomatoes, just couldn’t handle that.

I used rich, black soil when I’d potted my veggies, mixed with some dead leaves and topped with a thick layer of mulch. But now the soil was compacted, likely thanks to heavy rains and then severe heat. Taking the pots into my makeshift plant hospital one by one, I tried to loosen up the soil by flexing the pots, adding more good soil and kelp meal, then adding a lot more mulch on top. I watered each plant thoroughly but lightly from my rain barrel, trying to urge the soil to absorb as much water as possible.

I’ve been trying to conserve water, saving hose waterings for long stretches of dry weather, performed at night when the water would seep into the ground and lose less to evaporation. So far this year I’ve only watered my garden this way twice. I usually just use a watering can and my rain barrel since saving water means protecting watersheds and conserving energy.

I was rewarded for my efforts: this morning my potted veggies didn’t look entirely better, but they were significantly perked up. In 30-degree heat, I think that’s all I can ask for.

Going forward, I think I’m going to keep adding a bit of good soil, some leaves and mulch to my plants, to retain as much moisture as possible. And next time I go away for a couple of days, I’ll put those veggies in partial shade. They may not get all the sun they crave, but at least they won’t be crispy.

Have you brought any plants back from the brink?

As I attempt to convert my garden into a hardy mix of drought-tolerant, butterfly attracting and native plants, I find I’m getting confused about what’s a weed and what’s not.

Well, what’s a weed anyway? The dictionary says, “A wild plant growing where it’s not wanted, and competing with cultivated plants.” Wait a minute! I want to support wild plants (I think that means native) and push back those of the cultivated variety. How about we redefine weeds as: any plant that spreads undesirably or threatens the biodiversity of an ecosystem?

The plants that bother me are those that just won’t stop spreading, mixing in with the space I’d alloted for other plants and taking over in general. That goes beyond our gardens, of course, to invasive species spreading through our forests, grasslands and other natural areas. And there are the plants that are irritants or just plain poisonous. I’d call those weeds too.

I’ve been showing pictures of suspicious plants to friends and family to get their input, asking, “Is this a weed?” I’ve looked for all of these in the Evergreen Native Plants
Database and I can’t find any of them, so I maybe they’re introduced species.

Here’s my wall of shame.

We’ve had some sunny, dry weather in the past few weeks and I’ve had to water our garden a few times, even though I’ve tried to train the plants to deal with dry spells (sorry, stunted tomatoes!) Over the rainy weekend, I found myself a bit obsessed with collecting water. My partner and I installed a rain barrel in our back yard last week, but we hadn’t had much rain to see how well it performs. Well, we got our wish — on Saturday it rained so hard that we could have filled several rain barrels. The overflow valve on the barrel shown here was spewing water for most of the afternoon, even after I filled up juice containers and other vessels I found by mining through our recycling bin.

The rain barrel sits on a wood bench that’s mounted into the edge of our deck, perfect for use with a watering can. We reworked the eavestrough a bit and added a new piece of downspout so it would sit on top of the rain barrel and direct water through the barrel’s screened top. Next time the barrel is empty I’ll have to put some spacers under it so the bench doesn’t rot!

We bought this 190 L barrel from Canadian Tire. I like this one because it has a flat back, so it can sit against a wall. I plan to put another one of these barrels in my front garden, positioned against the house. I bought a gravity-feed watering kit from Lee Valley to connect to that front-garden rain barrel so that when the soil dries out, I can just open the spigot and let gravity do the watering.

How do you water your garden?

This morning I greeted my garden to the sight of an upturned pepper plant, soil spilling out of the pot, sole, hard-won pepper broken off and lying on the grass. I don’t know if it was a raccoon (see my previous post about my standoff with the raccoons), a cat or a strong gust of wind that did it. What I do know is, unless I cheat and buy a more mature plant at a garden centre, I can forget the dream eating home-grown peppers this summer.

Many of the plants in my garden have been doing well, but whenever something withers away, I’m trying to replace it with a hardier alternative – hardy to the weather and soil conditions, and also hardy to me. Last week my mom came for a visit and helped me weed my garden, since I wasn’t sure what belonged (native plant, hardy plant, attractive weed) and what did not (plants that take over, weeds). She did a beautiful job of weeding and mulching, even making room for a few more plants. So we went to a garden centre that promises a selection of native perennials, and picked a few plants that seemed to fit that description. I’m particularly excited about the black-eyed Susan, and looking forward to its big yellow flowers popping up sometime soon. In choosing native plants, the Evergreen native plants database is very helpful.

What’s particularly hardy in your garden?

My partner and I moved into our first home this past November and this is the first time I’ve had my own soil. The place is in Toronto, so I have no illusions about the purity of the soil (especially since we seem to get a lot of cats traipsing through our backyard), but that won’t stop me from trying to grow healthy fruits, veggies and herbs in our garden.

So I consulted a few books on growing herbs and heirloom tomatoes. I’d received a couple of seed catalogues in the mail, but I couldn’t tell which of the plants might be a native species.

I’m bent on this native species thing because there isn’t a whole lot I feel I can do for the wild things we share this earth with, but perhaps I can provide a bit of food and some refuge for a few critters. So I searched the Evergreen native plants database and chose some seeds from cloverroads.com, including Prince William, which I’ve seen in the Thousand Islands, a few varieties of tomatoes – some for sandwiches, some for sauces – and just for the heck of it, acorn squash. (I love to take the top off, drop in a bit of butter and maple syrup, and microwave it for about 10 minutes.) I know the payoff of these labours will be months away, but I can almost taste the first basil and tomato sandwich.

What are you growing in your garden/on your balcony/on your window sill this season?