Garden Nasties

Let's be clear up front - I have no horticultural training whatsoever!  My feelings about the garden are based entirely on my experience as an 'undergarderner' (he who does the grunt work) for 38 years.  I'm also a very slow learner, because it's only been the last 2 or 3 years that I finally began to think I am understanding how some of these plants behave.  Here are three beautiful flowers that I recommend you either do not have in your garden, or control very carefully!

The first is this delicate and beautiful Yellow Clematis.  It's got a nice flower which blooms at this time of year, a pale yellow.

And the seed heads are really striking, especially in a heavy dew or after a rain.

But the vines are relentless!  No matter how often you pull them out, they pop back up again a few weeks later.  They spread both by seeds and by the vines, a piece of which can generate a new plant.  The vines root along the way too, creating new plants as they grow.  It started in our garden in one corner, and looked very pretty, but I would guess we now have hundreds of rooted plants throughout the garden, in spite of repeated pulling.  And pulling appears to be the only way to get rid of it.  Now a troublesome invasive plant in western Canada, don't let it get into your garden!  There are many more beautiful and less invasive clematis varieties.

Valerian is another pretty plant, which blooms in late June.  The individual blooms are tiny.

And it attracts butterflies and bees, which is why I leave it to grow and flower.  I photograph more bees and butterflies on this plant than any other.

But it self-seeds prolifically, spreading everywhere.  You get some idea here from the white flowers spread through a large swath of our garden.  It can squeeze itself in beside any other plant, and it stands 4-6 feet tall.   I try to manage this one by letting it bloom and pulling it out before it goes to seed, but I'm not very successful.

The last of these three is that beautiful Gray-headed Coneflower that looks so wonderful in our meadow these days.  This self-seeds so easily that I have completely banished it from the garden.

But to do this you need to recognize the young lower leaves in the spring, before they flower.  In spite of all my efforts this year I spotted 3 or 4 plants in the garden yesterday.

This photo taken out in the meadow shows how prolifically and easily it self-seeds.  All of these are 'volunteers' that have grown from seeds blown in by the wind.

There is a bit of philosophy behind your choice of managing these flowers.  At one extreme is a garden of nicely separated plants, with substantial areas of bare mulch in between.  At the other is a chaotic mixture of crowded plants all mixed together.  'Volunteers', plants that come up from seeds on their own, help create this mix, referred to often as an 'English Cottage Garden'.  I try hard to find a balance someplace in the middle, but you need to choose your own balance, from being ruthless to being quite slack about allowing these 'volunteers' to grow.

Crops Update

The farming season rolls along here as always, some crops now harvested, and others still growing.  Here's my August report on our crops in the valley.

I've seen a lot of farmers out getting a second cut of hay, or maybe even a third.  Probably a little less of the grass species in the mix, and more of the alfalfa, which matures later in the season.

As often as not the mower is followed by the gulls, a common sight on recently cut fields.

Two crops will still grow awhile yet.  The corn is high and the corn cobs are well on their way.  

And there's just the hint of yellow in the soybean fields.  Neither will be harvested until later in the fall.

As for the mixed grain, it's a mixed bag.  Several fields I've seen have been combined, and the straw baled.  Here the dark bales in the foreground are straw, from the field of mixed grain, and the white-wrapped bales are hay.

But this field of mixed grain, just around the corner, hasn't been harvested yet.  It's certainly ready though.

Earlier in the season, the barley stems were higher, but as the oats came on they surpassed the barley, so the oats are standing tall now.

And that one field of canola I've been following looks ready for harvest, the tiny seed pods just about dried out.

If you've never seen canola seeds, crushed to make oil, they are really tiny, by far smaller than our other grain crops.  I guess there'll be one more 'Crops Update' in the fall, when all the harvest is finished.

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Macro Shots in the Garden

This is about the best time of year to get some interesting close-up macro shots in the garden.  The plants in bloom now simply look interesting up close.  It was a beautiful day, so out I went for a quick walk around the garden with my camera.

The bright orange Ligularia has one of the most complex little flower centres.

A spiky Purple Coneflower.

The dark brown centre of a Brown-eyed Susan is hard to photograph, but there's a spiral pattern there in the centre.

The 8 foot tall Cutleaf Coneflower has a neat little cap at the centre of each bloom.

Garlic Chives has a circle of tiny white blooms, forming a neat triangle before they open.

I like the uneven corrupated centre of the Helenium.

Those yellow flowers all look red or orange when viewed from underneath.

And I'll have more to say about this little beastie in a day or two, but the seed head of the Yellow Clematis is quite striking!

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More Beyond the 7th Line

As we head north toward Meaford, there are more favourite sideroads and the secret places I can explore down them.  Let's start with the wetlands.

Down one of the sideroads is a Bruce Trail property known as the Young Wetlands.  It's a large beaver pond, with a stream flowing over the dam and downstream.  I was able to get partway out on the dam to get this picture.

The beaver seemed to have been absent for a few years, but then they returned, raising the dam, and building a series of smaller dams downstream, flooding the trail crossing.  It ended up far worse than this picture shows, and an entire new crossing had to be built last year.

There's another big beaver dam and wetland down one of the other sideroads, this one on Wodehouse Creek.  I've explored around here several times too.

Then we hit the Bruce Trail itself, in this view heading west from the 7th Line through some nice deciduous forest.

The first stretch of trail here is riven with several mossy crevices in the limestone, a common pattern along the edge of the escarpment cliff.  And a great place to hunt for ferns.

There's also another ephemeral waterfall here, a waterfall that only flows in the spring.  We had to climb down a short cliff to get this picture; exploring comes with its own adventures!

This stretch of trail will only be 10 minutes from our new home, so I'm sure I'll be back here regularly.

Finally, along the Bighead River near Meaford you can follow the Trout Hollow Trail downstream past the site of the sawmill where John Muir worked in the 1860's.  This would have been the view from the front of the cabin where he and other mill hands lived.

We know exactly where the cabin stood because of both this extant map, and some archeological work.  Muir also did a sketch of the cabin, kept a journal, and wrote letters back to a family here after he left Meaford, heading first south and then west.

Just upstream is the ruins of an old hydro dam, which is another fascinating story.  It never lasted long as it was washed out by a big storm a few years after it was built.

Hope you've got the idea that the landscape here has lots of spots of interest for me to go exploring.  From our present home I drive north to these spots, from our new home I'll be driving south, but I expect I'll still get back to many of the same places.  Today was a wonderful late summer day, cold in the morning and tonight, but very nice during the day.  We got a lot of work done outside potting up plants we're going to take with us.

Beyond the 7th Line

The 7th Line is not merely a route from our place to Meaford.  It leads me past 16 different sideroads, each of which takes me to interesting places I can walk or explore.  Waterfalls, sinkholes, trails, wetlands, you can find all kinds of things that interest me along the sideroads beyond the 7th Line..

An astonishing half of the 16 sideroads off the 7th Line are now dead-ends, all but two of them formerly travelled, but now unused because of steep eroded slopes along the Niagara Escarpment.  On several of them you can still find the dog's-leg track that vehicles once followed to get down the hill - but no more.  there is very little traffic, and lots of trails to walk down.

This view looks across the valley from the opposite side, and shows you the edge of the Niagara Escarpment than runs north and south parallel to the 7th Line, cutting off all those sideroads.  The 7th Line is just beyond the top of that slope.  Three sideroads from the west reach a dead-end in the space of that photo.

The spots I visit regularly start right at the beginning, directly east of Hutchison's Corners, where the the top entrance to the Beaver Valley Ski Club is found.  This is a view over Avalanche Gully, looking southeast down the valley.

On the right hand side of that gully, torn out by a post-glacial river and waterfall, is today's ephemeral waterfall, which only flows in the spring when there's too much water to fit down the sinkholes.  there's quite a stretch of escarpment cliff here.

Extending north from the ski club over two concessions is the beautiful Kimberley Forest, about 1000 acres of forested escarpment slope.  There are wonderful trails here, originally laid out for cross-country skiing, and now used by many groups.

At the far end of the forest are the Wodehouse Karst sinkholes, here in a photo taken in Feb. 5 years ago.  Now there's a new Wodehouse Karst Side Trail here, running past the sinkholes from the 7th Line to the main Bruce Trail.

Over the edge of the hill is Kimberley Springs, where the water that disappears into the sinkholes flows out, cutting a ravine down the slope.

Down the next sideroad, you come to the top of the old Talisman Ski Club, now Talisman Springs Resort.  The ski slopes are abandoned, but the view is terrific.  The Bruce Trail is about 50 feet behind me.

Skipping a few concessions north, we find the Sligo Side Trail of the Bruce Trail.  This view is actually quite typical of the trail, which runs along a lot of fencerows at the edge of hayfields - when it's not running through the woods.

At the other end of this side trail, if you explore a little on a County Forest property, you'll find the remains of this old log cabin.  This is only half a mile from the stone Sligo Schoolhouse I showed you the day before yesterday.

Tomorrow we'll pick up at this point and check out a couple of places further north.