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Over 25 year’s experience designing and
growing
perennial plants & gardens.
Welcome to GARDEN POSSIBILITIES!,
where we're not only passionate about gardens, plants, and gardening,
but also about gardeners. Helping new gardeners
learn more about the fascinating and creative playground in our own backyards. Through consultations, gardening
courses, seminars, and the in-depth articles here, my goal is to inspire
and inform your gardening experiences.
This web site has been
building and growing for over 12 years and there is tons of information
collected here by now.
(I tend to this site myself so I'd love feedback anytime.)
Email for more information on how
we can create a unique garden for you, or help you to create a
successful one yourself. Either way, I hope you'll visit here
often in your quest for a garden that delights your senses and feeds
your
soul.
Evelyn
Wolf
 The
Tradescantia 'Sweet Kate' in the picture to the left, is smaller than it
usually is at this time of year. This is an example of what we can
expect from some of the more moisture loving perennials in this dry
spring - growth that's shorter and tighter than it would normally be.
For some of the tall plants though, this wouldn't be such a bad thing -
shorter growth means less flopping about. Remember last summer?
Lots of water all summer resulted in bigger, taller plants that were too
fleshy to stand tall. Is it too much to ask of Mother Nature to
bring us just the right amount of water - not too much or too little!?
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Outside
My Window
May
1st, 2010
Now that the month of April
2010 has closed, the stats are in. According to yesterday’s Toronto
Star, this has been THE warmest April on record since records first
started to kept in 1938. It’s also the second driest on record, with
just 36 millimeters of rainfall – a full 50% less than average. (The
driest April on record, since rainfall records started to be kept at
Univ. of Toronto in the 1840’s, was in 1881 with just 2.6 millimeters.).
And the rain we did have, fell mostly during the first week. Here now,
at the end of what is supposed to be the wettest month of the year, the
ground is already so dry that some gardens already need watering
attention. We can apparently blame (or credit, depending on your point
of view), a lingering El Nino climate pattern.
Click here for the full stats report article in Friday’s Tor.
Star.).
What
does this mean to our gardens?
We’ve
experienced drought conditions before, but usually during the mid summer
months. The repercussions of a dry spring though is much more
challenging for our garden plants. Any of you who have taken my
gardening class in the past will perhaps remember that I call April and
early May the “Zoom zoom” period in a plant’s annual cycle, when from
one week to the next they rush to put out maximum leaf growth to sustain
them for the season. They need a lot of moisture to do this – more
than at any other time of the season. In response to extremely less
than adequate moisture, most of the larger perennials will likely be
dwarfed this year. They’re unlikely to die just because of inadequate
water, but they’ll hunker down and put out less growth in a survival
adaptation response. Not always a bad thing though - tighter, shorter
plants means less flopping and in some drought loving plants, more
blooms.
Each
gardening season's weather patterns has it's pros and cons.
They're predicting a drier than usual summer, but I'd rather deal with
drought than all the excess rain and cool temperatures we had last year
where plants had too much of a good thing and grew tall and fat with all
the water and just flopped about as a result.
Cheers!
Evelyn
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