Darwin called these creatures the "ploughs of the earth". Without worms we simply wouldn't have soil. Or food.

The Wormy Truth:

1. Every acre of soil can contain a million worms. You’re lucky if you have this many.
2. Nightcrawlers—the burrowing worms—pull leaves downward into the soil as they eat them, aerating soil and leaving fertile castings—the worm poo we love.
3. Red Wigglers—the surface living worms—live on partially decomposed organics; they’re the ones used in home worm composters (vermicompost, if you want to get fancy). They can eat half their body weight in food every day. I bought a vermicomposter last year during the garbage strike, and all my tea bags and banana peels go there, instead of my city bin. Why should the city get all the good stuff?
4. Humus creation—the most important natural chemical in soil—is one of the best upsides of worms. Humus lets plants absorb existing soil nutrients and helps them withstand drought. You can pour gallons fertilizer onto soil—not that I’m recommending that!—but if there’s no humus, nothing will happen.

Best way to add more worms to your garden is to mulch with anything organic, leaves, compost, grass clippings, even cardboard. Make sure no bare soil is showing. It’s all food for the worms, who do the garden work for you while you sleep.

Country in town: Ashbridges Bay, Toronto. Chicory, Queen Anne's Lace and sweet clover in bloom.

Before green apples blush,
Before green nuts embrown,
Why one day in the country
Is worth a month in town.

I agree completely with poet Christina Rossetti on this one. But while there isn’t any way to get “city” in the country—unless you count high speed internet—luckily there are plenty of places to get “country” in the city. You just have to find it. Back alleys, vacant lots, and untamed parkland are now full of wild flowers, like Queen Anne’s Lace, intensely blue chicory, and—the smell of summer, for me—sweet clover. I’m thrilled to have these wild green spaces in the city, like Evergreen Brickworks, and Ashbridges Bay by the lake. One thing, however, I’m sure I won’t see in the city is a group of wild turkeys crossing the road like those I saw this weekend in the country.

Why did the wild turkeys cross the road? Peer pressure, perhaps?

If you feel like Christina Rossetti and me, let us know  your city / country strategy. Fave places to go? Share in the comments!

Choices are truly mind boggling. There was a pink flamingo too, but it flew away.

Where do you stand on garden decorations? From the classic cherub to the lady in the polka dot dress bending over, to sacred images, there’s lots you can plunk down in your garden space these days. It’s not just gnomes anymore. Of course you can still find gnomes around too, in various levels of grotesque vs cute.

I happen to like my sister’s small collection of classic looking concrete rabbits. I know one gardener who decorates her funky, edgy garden with bowling balls and plastic animals. I found a streamlined black cat at a thrift store last year that met my particular garden art standards: a little bit fun, a little bit classic.

Or maybe you are a purist and wouldn’t be caught dead with a gnome under your shrubbery. Weigh in on the comments.

Bunny & Head images ~ Helen Battersby

Vegetable garden, started the Easy Way and thriving in backyard garden in mid July

The Hard Way

1. Get shovel or spade and dig up clumps of grass. Scrape off only turf, by slicing your spade under sod or simply dig straight down. Knock turf clod  to loosen the soil. Grass clumps go in compost, grass side down. If soil is too sandy or clay, add triple mix, compost and/or rotted manure. (This step works for all) Start planting.

2. If mid July, sweat profusely, and enjoy muscles speaking to you about it the next day.

The Slow Way

1. Collect huge stack of newspapers and cardboard. Hoarders rejoice! Put thick layers (newspaper at least 10 sheets thick) on grass. If you can find an old carpet, even better. Use rocks or bricks to hold down. Lack of water and light kills grass. If newspaper offends eyes, add thick layer of coarse mulch on top.

2. Wait at least a year. Read books, file nails, catch up on Mad Men. No sweat involved. Peel off or dig through the newspapers. Remove carpet completely. Start planting.

The Easy Way to Get Your Vegetable Garden Started - Garden Planted End of May

The Easy Way

1. Use pre-bagged organic soil. Buy as many as you need to cover the garden space. Put bag flat side down, cut slashes in bottom and open up top by cutting with knife, as in picture above.

2. Lay bags side by side, with no space between. Plant your tomatoes or whatever you want right in the bag. Roots will fill bag and then go down into the soil underneath.

3. Bags will kill grass underneath. Next year, or even at the end of the season, remove the plastic that the bags came in and dispose.

Picture at top shows same garden in mid summer.

Photos and Garden by Patrick Lowney

These succulents are planted into hollowed out mushroom table funghi.

Gardeners get to be good at finding objects to plant into. You don’t always have the perfect pot at hand when a plant needs a home. You might be planning a garden on a shoestring, so you make do with what’s lying around the house. Gardeners have been known to repurpose any hollow object we might discover.

My first roof garden many years ago was made in part with milk crates lined with plastic. Red plastic milk crates are not particularly attractive on their own, but I disguised the outside with bamboo curtain blinds. Good thing about crates is they hold a lot of soil, and stack nicely.

Metal pots attached with ordinary hardware to a fence. Easy peasy.

Nowadays I collect anything metal, like old aluminum wash buckets for  planters. They look great clustered together. I have a passionflower in one that actually has rollers on the bottom, and a sturdy handle, useful when I have to move it.

I found these metal sap buckets attached to a fence with ordinary hardware. What sorts of non-traditional containers have you found useful, and what’s the craziest thing you’ve used to give a plant a home? What worked? What didn’t?

Dino is friendly & knowledgeable, surrounded by happy plants and the great rain barrels Fiesta sells.

The people at Fiesta Gardens would never think of taking plants off a delivery truck and then forgetting about them, or letting them bake in the sun to fend for themselves. Plants in many retail spaces are lucky to get a splash of water now and then, but that’s not the case here. Here we have a plant enthusiast, Margaret, who really cares about the plants she provides. Between Margaret and Dino, the two plant specialists here, plants are well sourced, well researched and well looked after till you get them in your hot little hands. (especially hot these days!)

I caught Dino and Margaret at Fiesta Gardens on a blistering hot day and they took time out from ushering out orders or cleaning perennials to tell me a bit about themselves.

Margaret came to the garden world like many other gardeners, from the world of art. I find it is often a natural progression for many artists and writers, to take relish in nature, growing things and creating spaces of beauty. She has lectured at the Royal Ontario Museum and worked in pottery, and said it’s only natural that she became interested in plants, as the clay of pots comes “from the earth”. She’s also something of a scientist and researcher, and constantly has botanical projects on the go at the store and at home, ever curious to enlarge her knowledge of the plants she provides. Growing up in a tropical country no doubt primed her interest in growing things, and she is currently passionate about the plants of Africa.

Horticultural education is crucial to Margaret, she wants to know that the plants she sells are going to thrive when you get them home, and she’ll fill you in on any plant requirements and how to look after the ones you buy.

Dino’s main passion are the large nursery items, the shrubs and trees, but he is particular about the annuals and vegetable starts he sells too. He was sprucing up an order of massive hanging annual planters when I spoke to him. To me they looked magnificent, he said, “They weren’t bad.” High standards here.

Apart from the fact that the plants are well cared for and ready to thrive when you get them home, the selection is fantastic too, with unusual specimens of vegetables, like black-eyed peas, callaloo, and scotch bonnet hot peppers, among others. The Hort Couture section is full of hard-to-find plant specimens like agapanthus, castor bean, and many other varieties new to me.

All this is available right downtown, no need to drive out to the burbs to buy a tree. And when you buy that tree, or pot of annuals, you know it’s had the best head start it could possibly have.

Large pots of castor bean plants waiting for homes. Some may try to follow you home.

There’s one way to have instant tropical drama in your garden and that’s the addition of a castor bean plant (or three) to your landscape. These massive palm-like frondy beauties (Ricinus communis) are native to Africa and can grow up to 15 feet high in the right location. I can’t say they’ve ever achieved those heights in my own garden, but they’ve topped out at over six feet for me. I used to grow these from seed and hadn’t thought of them for awhile until my sister started hankering after some. Our mother used to grow them in her garden every year, so we have fond summer memories of these plants.  I hadn’t seen the plants anywhere in the past few years, or the seed, so I was thrilled today to see these healthy specimens for sale at Fiesta Gardens, already about three feet tall in large pots.

Apart from the striking, visual drama of their structure, the colours are also satisfying: variable shades of greeny bronze with bright red stems and veins. A clever, functional use of the castor bean plant can be to cover up an unsightly view, or to create a screened area in your garden.

Globular, prickly, red pods (that you can see just beginning to form in the picture above) contain the spotted seeds. The unusual looking seed pods add to the sculptural and decorative quality of the plant; however they are considered poisonous, (the toxin ricin can be extracted from the seeds) so caution is necessary in making sure that pets or children don’t ingest them. Cutting off the seed pods and disposing of them can ensure that won’t happen.

Like all plants with known poisonous aspects, cultivation of these plants is a bit controversial, and in some areas there is talk of banning them. However, a great deal of everyday plants that we commonly live with are also poisonous, including monkshood, chrysanthemums, lily of the valley and rhubarb leaves.

Unfortunately these tender plants live only one season, and come frost, they’ll be gone; but while they’re here, what a show!

The rolling farmland of Ontario's Hastings County

Recent events have me thinking about our small world, pardon the cliche, and how technology, old and new, can connect dots, neighbourhoods and people. What does this have to do with gardening? Well, this post is also about bread, and a particular wheat that’s grown in the Ontario countryside–Hastings County– just two hours outside of Toronto.  Her Majesty the Queen also makes an appearance.

As it’s my first post here, a little background on me: I’m a multiple location gardener. In the city, I have a small rented garden, a community allotment, and (shh) a local guerilla garden. I’m also lucky to have a garden in the country where I spend as much time as I can. City mouse and country mouse, that’s me.

The past weekend I was in country mouse mode, where older forms of communication operate. For example, Dave, my neighbour, is “notified” I’m home when he sees my hatchback door in the up position across the field. Information sharing is mostly old style — actually dropping by the house and yakking about the news in the nabe (a small collection of houses in the middle of nowhere.)

Big news this weekend was about one of our neighbours, Patricia Hastings. Dave: “You know Pat down at the end of the road? You know she’s got a mill now and she’s been stone-milling her own organic wheat. She’s growing Red Fife, a special old kind. Well, they baked a loaf with her Red Fife flour for the Queen when she just came to Toronto.” He looked proud. “Wow!” said I. “That’s gotta be good bread.” “Oh yeah, it’s selling in all the fancy stores in the city.” Patricia was invited to go downtown and Dave said she may have hob-nobbed with some royals, or royal “handlers”. All very exciting, 6 degrees of separation-wise.

I don’t know Patricia well, but when I’d meet her on the road we’d talk about our flower gardens, and I was always charmed by her English accent-music to my ears. I’d been to her farm for events held by Canadian Organic Growers, where she is head of the local chapter, but didn’t know a lot about the farm, other than it was organic.

Well, Dave my country neighbour gave me the goods about the special wheat and flour Patricia’s producing, but what came next was really cool. Back in the city I punched Patricia and Red Fife wheat into Google and found that my country wheat story had already found its way to the big city–some on this very site. (And this on my first week blogging here: Synchronicity or what?) I found bakeries that swear by Patricia’s flour for their bread, like St John’s Bakery on Broadview, and that Patricia’s farming efforts won a Premier’s Award for Agrifood Innovation Excellence. The Red Fife wheat is an Ontario heritage variety and its nutty flavour gets raves.

Slow Food co-chair Paul DeCampo (now at Food Share) is a fan as well, “Not surprisingly, I am kind of partial to the Red Fife loaf, and really respect St. John’s for working directly with Patricia Hastings of CIPM, the grower and miller.

And it’s all made with wheat grown down the road from my house. I can’t wait to try some. The St John’s Red Fife breads are available at Fiesta Farms and other locations around the city. All their breads look amazingly tempting.

Psst: I didn’t find anything on Google about Patricia Hasting’s brush with the Queen; that’s inside stuff, and you heard it here first.

Before

Our yard is small, we live in the city so we accept it. Most of our gardening is done in containers. We stick to herbs and flowers mainly after a few unsuccessful attempts with tomatoes.

My husband Kerry is in charge of the yard. His idea of gardening is to let weeds thrive so things look lush & green, hence the lovely milkweed and crabgrass border leading to our door.

We have this horrible area in the back of the yard that barely gets any sun. Kerry decided he wanted to make it nice, so he transplanted some of his precious weeds over to it.

Enough was enough. I dragged him to Fiesta’s Garden Centre and told him to stock up on real plants. After the requisite ‘kid in candy store’ routine, we brought everything home and started planting.

Some English ivy, Lady ferns and forget-me-nots went in, with a few Stiletto hostas – the most reliable shade plant ever. Our dog Betty regularly digs up the hostas or lies on top of them and they just keep on growing. We like tough plants that can stand up to dogs. Maybe that’s why Kerry has such a soft spot for tenacious weeds.

Some other plants that do well in shade are wild geranium/cranesbill geranium, Jack-in-the-pulpit, Dogs Tooth violets, plumeria, bleeding hearts and Canadian Colombine.

Get yourself some rickety old pink flamingos and you’ve got a lovely shade garden. The forget-me-nots didn’t do so well, but everything else is thriving. It’s been hot & dry so Kerry is watering every day, including the milkweed & crabgrass border.

After

Fiesta Gardens now sells the popular Urban Harvest organic Seed Collection

Just Arrived:

Many vegetables and herbs including Organic Red Oak Leaf Lettuce, a must for any vegetable garden.