February 2022 - Week 1/2

Hey, here's a picture of icicles on the garage in order for a half decent picture with some colour in it to come up as the preview.

Icicles on a sunny day

Planning/Planting for the Year Ahead - Still

Every year that I live in Canada I find that I get fed up of winter a little earlier; this year I think I'd had enough before the end of January so, inspired by Rose, I've started bullet journalling.  I'm not really convinced by this as an aid to efficiency because as far as I can see you can spend far more time on embellishments and rubbing things out than getting anything done to actually put in your journal but I need help getting through the next 2 months of desolate, growing free misery so I'm giving it a try.  It might also leave me with a more organized record of what flowered when and where I've planted things.

Other than having fun with rubber stamps and buying coloured gel pens (only 1 actually and I'm using up old paper to be environmentally responsible) I've also sown 32 modules of Onion Redwing, 4 of Swiss Chard and 3 pots of Welsh Onions and put up a special germinating shelf under the garage window.  I'm experimenting with the onions, half are germinating on a heat mat in the dining room and the rest are in the garage on the new shelf which may have temperatures more similar to hardiness zone 7, we'll see.

Garage germination station, you can see why I didn't want this coming up first lol

I also signed up for the Canadian Wildlife Federation's free Gardening for Wildlife course and have completed Week 1.  It has given me some great ideas for new projects in the garden this year and some of them are really simple:

• Plant more shrubs - this isn't so simple but I was planning on it anyway
• Install a mud puddling station for butterflies
• And a water dish for insects
• Build a roosting box for the birds for next winter
• Leave bare patches of earth for nesting solitary bees - this already occurs naturally when the lawn dries out but now I have a great reason for it

What's poppin' in the Garden

The dogwoods I planted in the garden are doing a great job of providing winter colour, Not.  Poor things have been entirely overwhelmed by the snow:

Oh dogwood, where art thou?

This one looks ok if you put a fancy filter on it :)

It's actually managing to stick up over the snow

At least the birds are here to cheer me up.  The new state of the art bird feeder and heated bath from Wild Birds Unlimited have been a great success.

The Chickadees have started 'fee bee-ing' and I heard the first Cardinal singing last week

Jobs until next time

• Make new gardening overalls so I can kneel down without fear of 'builder's cleavage'
• Take part in the Birds Canada garden birdwatch
• Complete more weeks of the CWF Gardening course