Update On The Royal Couple

The Tree Swallows have arrived back home here on the Witch’s Island. I love these birds because of their grace and beauty and because of their swift flying style. It doesn’t hurt that they love to eat flying insects, and lots of them! With all the damned black flies and mosquitoes around here they’ll never go hungry. Go you swallows, go!

The chosen palace this year is apparently the White House.

Every year Wills and Kate (Why did I call them that, you say? Well, Just because I can. It’s good to be me.) spend their first few days deciding which of the two available palaces they will spend the summer in. Usually they choose the Duracell house in the back yard but this year, for the first time, they have chosen the White House on the telephone pole in the front yard. I have no idea what would make them choose that one but maybe they just wanted a change or maybe it’s a little more upscale for the royals. Either way I have a great view of both birdhouses so I can watch the progress as they set up house among our scarlet runners and hanging flags.

Wills guarding his family home.

Whichever house they’re in the Grackles still try to steal their nesting material. The Swallows have to stay on constant guard to protect their babies. Lousy, lazy Grackles! Go collect your own nesting stuff! It’s fun to watch the much smaller swallows chase off the bigger birds.

The Ruby-throated Hummingbirds have also returned. Almost as soon as I set out the feeder on the kitchen window the hummers start showing up and then the “Wars” start. One bird will decide that he (or she!) will be in control of the feeder and will spend way more time chasing off the others than actually drinking. It’s funny to watch the little buggars buzzing back and forth all day. We did manage to snap a couple of shots of one female who managed to get a drink or two before Mr. Bully Boy spotted her.

Really, Mrs. Hummer. You should stop posing and get a drink while you can.

The vegetable garden is starting to take shape out in the backyard. The cucumbers that I started on April 22 (way too early again this year, when will I ever learn?) had gotten way too big and needed to be transplanted outside but the weather has been just terrible. Some days were as hot as 22C and then there would be frost the next morning. During May we had rain for 27 straight days. Yup, that’s right, cold and depressing. I hope this doesn’t indicate that our summer is heading in that direction.

I moved the starter plants out to the potting shed a couple of weeks ago to start hardening them off.

Anyway, Hubby has gotten the ground ready, adding some manure and rotilling again. He set the obelisks out for the cumbers and planted the first four with 3 plants each. Of course, the next day there was high wind which twisted off about half of my babies. We lost a couple more to transplant shock. Hopefully there are still enough left in the potting shed to refill the empty spaces. We’re going to need all the cucumbers we can get for pickling this fall.

The onions were already out of the ground in a few days.

Half of the vegetable garden has been planted out.

We have also gotten six rows of seeds planted. There are three double rows of onions, both yellow and red, a row with three varieties of beans, green, yellow and purple, a double row of carrots with radish markers and a double row of beets in three varieties. The onions have shot up and in less than a week they are already about three inches high. The beans have also started to break out of the ground. It might be a good growing year. If you want to know which varieties we are planting you can find out here.

The wild apple trees are out in full blossom.

The apple blossom is actually a very pretty little flower.

The rest of the yard is starting to look lush again. The wild apple trees and the pin cherries are all out in full blossom and look great. I spent hours last weekend working on the front gardens while Hubby was mowing the lawn. I got out all the weeds and added a layer of dark topsoil in around the purple phlox(?) and the daylilies. Hubby cleaned up the front garden and put up our birdbath for the first time since we moved here. Now it has a place of honor. I just have to clean it up and fill it with fresh water and watch the birds enjoy it.

We think that this purple mound is phlox, but whatever it is, it’s beautiful.

The front walkway garden has been all spruced up.

After 5 years of lying in the side line the bird bath has been finally put back up.

Yesterday was again cold and rainy (sigh) so we took a break and went for a tour around some of our favourite public gardens and nurseries for some inspiration. I am always surprised by the new varieties of flowers and plants you can come across in these places. These were a few of the prettiest ones I saw.

I think that these are parrot tulips but whatever they are, I wish they were mine.

I love the frilly edges on these tulips.

More beautiful tulips all set to open.

My Mother sent me a Gnome house as a Christmas gift last year and this spring we put it in place on an outside tree near the end of the driveway. I love it and it makes me smile everyday as I back out or come home from a hard day at work. I just look over and smile, very therapeutic.

Enjoy the pictures and have a great day.

The Gnome House and its Guard Rabbit.

Here’s the Gnome doing a little maintenance on his front walkway.

Its Gardening Time!

It’s gardening time, sort of.



My little tomatoe seeds were planted about 3 weeks too early. What was I thinking? I guess that’s the point, the weather was so nice in April that I went crazy and started planting. Look at my babies, all 5 different varieties of them. There are “Juliet”, “Bobcat”, “Beefsteak”, “Tiny Tim” and “Sweet Millions” in there. I do end up giving away a lot of the extras to our other gardening friends because there’s no way we are planting all these tomatoes! I always start extra and transplant the cream of the crop.



You can also see how thrifty I am by saving my yoghurt containers and salad tubs. These work great for this task because you start your seeds in a small windowsill cultivator and then transplant to the yoghurt containers as the plants grow. This way when you are ready for planting you just push the bottom of the yoghurt container and out comes your plant, roots intact, ready to go into the garden or a bigger pot. Save the containers for next year or a second round of planting.











The salad trays are really cool because they work like mini greenhouses if you close down the lids. That makes for perfect conditions for my babies.

I have also started some pumpkins. In the one picture you can just see them starting to pop up, so I guess the container lid will have to come off. But it really did its job and no worrying about water leaking because there are no holes in the containers that would allow water to leak all over my beautiful hardwood floors.



Next, I’m going to start my cucumbers, bottle gourds, scarlet runner beans, sunflowers and sweet peas. I find that the birds will eat my sunflower seed if I plant it directly in the ground so that is why I start them indoors now. Also as they grow I can space them where we want. The scarlet runners I put in last year were eaten right away by the slugs so I do the same thing and plant them indoors and then place them around our power pole when they have grown to about 4” or so. I always make sure I sprinkle slug bait (we use Safer’s) around the base of the plants to keep the slimy little buggars away.

If you’re going to try growing scarlet runners don’t plant them too early because they grow really fast. They might have even been the bean used in “Jack and the Beanstalk”. Last year the vines climbed all the way up the twenty feet of string we gave them and then started back down again when they couldn’t find any more support. They could easily have grown 40 feet if Hubby could have gotten the guide ropes that far up the pole!



Speaking of Hubby, he did the first grass cutting of the season. There were lots of dandelions to mow down, the lawn was almost more yellow than green.

My Tree Swallows have returned once again and they are debating over which house to rent, the “High Rise” one on the power pole or the “Duracell” one on the clothes line pole. It’s something like the “House Hunters” TV show; only I can’t show you inside shots. They both have hardwood floors and great curb appeal but which one did they choose? I’ll keep you up-dated as to which house they pick.






Anyway, I hope you enjoy the pictures of my happy plants and some of last year’s garden. Oh, and don’t forget to get your hummingbird feeders out and get them ready for these tiny jewels, they should be arriving shortly.