Garden Rehab

This lovely garden huntress is the Orchard Orb Weaver or Orchard Spider ( Leucauge  venusta ).  Over the summer she spun her web from our deck to the nearby by tree. By the look of her, she was very well fed.   Spiders consume an astonishing number of insects every year. According to  S piders of Toronto: A Guide to their Remarkable World :* Spiders are estimated to eat about 200 kg of insects per hectare per year. In a city the size of Toronto, this amounts to an astonishing 12 million kg of insects per year – equivalent to the body weight of over 150,000 average-sized people every year! Research shows that just two of the spider species living at Highland Creek in Scarborough eat 2 of every 100 insects that develop in the creek. This includes large numbers of mosquitoes. Multiply this estimate by the 40 or so other spider species likely to live around the creek, and suddenly the impact of spiders is clear. Spiders have a similar effect in garden...

Wood-poppy  ( Stylophorum diphyllum ) Butterfly Milkweed ( Asclepias tuberosa ) Spotted Joe-Pye Weed ( Eupatorium maculatum ) Black-eyed Susan ( Rudbeckia hirta ) Virginia Spiderwort ( Tradescantia virginiana ) Cardinal Flower ( Lobelia cardinalis )

Beardtongue ( Penstemon digitalis ) is one of the best native flower species surprises this year. It produced a tall stalk of lovely white flowers. It would look better planted in a mass, and that will definitely be in my plans for next year.  Foxglove Beardtongue ( Penstemon digitalis) When we were in NYC we noted that the city is using Beardtongue in their plantings and it looked fantastic planted in big clumps with other native plant species. Beardtongue - New York City (can you see Lady Liberty?) Great inspiration both for our garden and to encourage the City of Toronto to use more native species in its flower beds. For more on Beardtongue, the Evergreen Native Plant Database  has great information about its ecological role and where it will grow.

After our first attempt to seed the lawn with microclover were less than successful, I decided to switch to standard Dutch White Clover seed. The OSC website states , it is "robust, adaptive, drought resistant and somewhat shade tolerant", so it should have no trouble with the clay in our yard. Dutch White Clover seed is also significantly less expensive than microclover seed. For comparison, Dutch White Clover is $11.00/500 grams which works out to $0.55/25grams. Microclover is $8.95/25 g, about 16 times more.  I also decided to add some Sweet Alyssum to the lawn after reading about Fleur de Lawn , an environmentally friendly flowering lawn mix developed with Oregon State University. Along with a number of other species, they included Sweet Alyssum in their mix. To jump start things, I planted 32 small Alyssum plants along the walkway where the clover was having trouble getting started. July 1, 2017 - Dutch White Clover and Sweet Alyssum. The clover see...

I admit that I bought into the marketing for microclover . It seemed like polite, well-mannered clover.  At first, everything seemed fine. The clover came up, it was adorable. May 30, 2017 - clover sprouts May 30, 2017 - clover shoots Being cute and well behaved will only get you so far in the real world though. After several weeks, and 2 rounds of seeding, the clover lawn was looking sparse and increasingly full of weeds. June 20, 2017 June 20, 2017 In fairness to microclover, another problem was that we were not sure of the seeding rate. The OSC seeding package states that the seeding rate is 25 g/ 52 m2. We spread two packages and this should have been enough for the size of our yard. However, this seeding rate is likely for over-seeding a lawn (mixing clover in with existing grass) rather than starting a clover lawn from scratch. West Coast Seeds' s eeding calculator for microclover  provides a significantly higher seeding rate of 50g for ...

There are a lot of advantages to a cedar mulch path - its inexpensive, easy to maintain and has a lower environmental impact than a paved path. The finished path creates a casual and organic feeling, perfect for afternoon feline saunters. To build this path, we followed the advice of the very helpful folks at the East End Garden Centre . First, we dug down about six inches. This photo of the sod pile does not do it justice - it seemed much bigger in person. Then we layered 4 - 6 sheets of newspaper as the base of the new path. The cedar mulch is approximately 3-4 inches deep. Hopefully, this will be enough to keep the weeds down [ Update: 2 months later, we get the occasional weed coming through on the edges where critters have dug up the paper, but other wise it's holding up well] . Mark makes a fashion statement. Halfway there... We chose the  Stomp Stone  pavers because they are; Lighter than stone or concrete We did not need to ren...