Early spring? Or just a tease?

It's not even the end of January, and it's already as though spring is just around the corner. Here's a hint...the very first Bantam chicken egg!

Pond Adventures

From the very first time I saw a pond in a garden, when I was about six years old, I've wanted one. I built one of my very own in 2004, with help from a mini excavator and a couple of supervisors. It's lined with EPDM, which is the same rubber sheets you can use on a roof for waterproofing. The advantages to using this product is that as it's rubber, it stretches just a little so it conforms to the shape of the hole you've dug. The downside is that it does tend to become degraded if it's exposed to full sun, and it's easy to puncture it with any sharp object, such as rocks or metal things that may be in your pond. Other than that, I'm totally happy with the way it's performed.

My usual autumn chores include the nasty task of cleaning out the homemade filter, hosing out the pump and removing the pipe from the waterfall where it spends the summer to it's winter position wired onto a pole or a chain just above the surface of the water. All was well until we got a cold snap of down to -18 for a week, and the pipe froze solid. The whole idea, by the way, is to keep a hole in the ice to enable the methane gas to escape so the fish don't die. Some people just use a pump (like me) that runs all the time to keep a hole open, others swear by the use of a stock tank heater that floats on the surface melting the ice around it. So, after the pipe froze, I decided to fall back on a more primitive method of methane control and siphon out a couple of inches of water leaving an air space under the ice. Luckily for me, HH was brave enough to put his mouth on the end of the garden hose and get the water started - I'm glad he didn't get a mouthful of pond water!

Happy New Year

Here we are, teetering on the edge of a new decade. Can you picture where you'll be in a year, in two? It's exciting, and scary to try and predict how our gardens will look then. I'm planning on having a fabulous vegetable garden in 2010, and I've already got some of my seed order picked out. I also saved lots of seeds from some of the bean varieties I grew, now I just need to fine tune my rotation of where to plant everything. Luckily, there's still lots of time - it's really winter where I am, and more snow in the forecast. Keep warm, everyone - and be safe!
Happy New Year from Blue Fox Garden.

This is the time of year that I seem to do a lot of cogitating - when I'm not building a website that is! I've had a great time putting together Drought Smart Plants, but now I need a break. Blue Fox Garden is dormant, waiting for spring, so there's not much to do there. I can take pictures of snow covered perennials, and watch the birds, and plan for 2010.

When I look back at the Aha! moments that triggered my addiction to plants, it's the ones that didn't seem that significant at the time. When I lived in Bradner, in the Fraser valley, I had a few of that kind of moment.

I had two small children, and living on a small farm seemed very isolated. I got involved in gardening in a big way, as previously, I had lived in apartments without much outside room. I was free to do pretty much whatever I wanted. There were old fruit trees which had been neglected for years, so I got a book and taught myself how to prune them. Some of my efforts were pretty bad, but I persevered and found out that plants are very forgiving of amateurish efforts. Within a couple of years, I gained confidence and felt I knew what I was doing.

The property was just over four acres, and mostly fenced and cross fenced, but bare and open, with a neighbor to the west which was a chicken hatchery. It got very unpleasant in the late summer and the lagoon got lower. The stench in August was abominable. I used to take my little Audi Fox car, little kid in tow (the other one was in school) and fill up the trunk with three foot high Douglas fir seedlings, and transplanted them to the fence line to try and block out the sounds and smells from the hatchery. I also collected many oak seedlings and put those along the driveway.

Then I did something that's totally against my rules - I went back to see how the trees were doing, many years later. I was astonished at how big they were, the oaks were over thirty feet tall, and the Douglas firs were a full, double row hedge all along the western edge.

I'm shocked at how fast the time goes, and if I could do it all over, I would have planted many more trees! Now, I don't have that kind of energy. I've learned how to work smarter, not harder.

October in Blue Fox Garden

I've been really out of the loop lately - my fault entirely, as I've been having so much fun writing web pages for Drought Smart Plants about xeric gardens, thyme, Sedum, Sempervivum, Jovibarba and many other interesting things. (Shameless plug!)

Here's a few things in the garden that had to be dealt with:

Seven remaining chicks are grown up! I've got three that are silky types, with fur-like feathers, and one like a miniature white leghorn, two mottled grey and black, and one black one with a fuzzy topknot. Very cute.

I always clean the pump and the filter from the pond, then reinstall it a little differently. Instead of flowing over the rocks and making a waterfall, I attach the end of the pipe to a long stick spanning the pond so it makes a burbling effect. This is to keep the ice from completely covering the pond and killing the fish by methane poisoning.


It's surprising how much colour there is in the fall garden. More subdued than that of the flowers in summer, but beautiful nonetheless.

Drought Smart Plants

I've been very busy lately - in fact, I have totally abandoned my garden in favour of my new baby - my new website baby. It's a steep learning curve, and I'm doing it all myself, from writing the pages, to uploading them, to editing the pictures to put on it. The most fun has been taking the pictures in my garden, and that's been the only time I've actually set foot in it! I promise to get back out there soon...as soon as I get more pages done. Check it out, see what you think. Leave me comments here if you have any suggestions (I'm sure there will be a few as it's still a newborn).
Drought Smart Plants is live!

Rock walls and other projects

I always feel at this time of year that I'm running in place - there's so much to do before winter arrives, and less than a week away is the first day of Autumn. I feel a great sense of satisfaction and relief in finishing the Eggporeum run, so that at least the chicks can get out for some sun. They seem to have grown in the four days that they've been allowed out - is that possible?

Here's the final result for this year on the rock wall - phew! I must have rocks in my head! I've planted many varieties of Sedum in the top of it and Sempervivum right into cavities in the rock wall itself, and the wheelbarrow has 20 types of Jovibarba in it. They're similar to Sempervivum, but the 'chicks' grow out of the top in most cases, and in others, the main rosette splits into several others.

Lots of harvesting still to do; this is the first year I actually have tomatoes ripening on the vine, and I'm so sick of summer squash that the chickens can have what's left. Time to think of planting more garlic, this will be the full crop of 60 cloves of Red Russian. I'd like to get more varieties so I can sell seed, but that's for future years. Still to do - get some firewood, clean up the greenhouse and stack all the flats and pots for storage, move all my succulent plants into their winter home in the back bedroom under lights...you get the idea.