Mid-winter gardening
A mid-winter Gardening Escape from last weekend's grey, overcast, bone-chilling Sunday afternoon -- that's what I was looking for. The day was warm enough to promise hope of an early spring (and the start of the gardening season), yet it still had the dampness and dullness of a mid-winter day. Mercifully, Toronto's Civic Garden Centre provided me and about twenty other obsessive gardeners with the escape we were looking for by mounting an afternoon course entitled, City Gardening: Plans and Plants for 1999.
We knew at once that we were in a precarious state of mind when landscape designer Judith Adam held up the special gardening edition of Martha Stewart Living http://www.marthastewart.com. It's a dangerous time of the year, she warned. We've had enough of winter, we've thumbed the seed catalogues until their pages are curled, our eyes are saturated with the full colour plant photos on the covers of seed packets. Our thoughts have turned to gardening and we'll stop at every magazine rack to satisfy our horticultural urges.
Having acknowledged our seasonal weakness for the glitz and glamour of gardening, Judith quickly brought us back down to earth with a seminar that focused on first principles, reminding us that the key to successful gardening is in the soil, the water, and the nutrients so essential to those centrefold plants featured in the gardening magazines we love to buy.
If you can relate to any of this, put down your copy of M S L and come with me on a cyber-tour of Judith's first principles of good gardening:
Water: Throwing water up into the air is a popular way of getting plants wet. At one time or another, we've all used an oscillating sprinkler that sprays water through the air, across the lawn, and into the garden. But Judith warns that by hurling water through the air, you'll loose up to 40% of the moisture through evaporation, leaving less to reach the ground where plants need it. Equally as inefficient are in-ground irrigation systems designed primarily to water turf grass. When used in the flower bed, the 45 angle of the sprays hits plant foliage, the water drips down the leaves to puddle on the ground. You're left with very dry spots and very wet spots in the garden.
Instead of either of these methods, Judith recommends watering at ground level. If all you have is a traditional hose, lay it on the ground in your flower bed where 100 percent of the water will reach your plants. Move it around from time to time until the entire bed has been watered.
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