June 2,3,4, and 5th - Just the Girls and the Dirt!!

Planting Days at the Cottage!  Did I say dirt? Yep lots of dirt - shoveling, screening, carrying, sifting, packing down.  

After heading up to Gravenhurst last Friday afternoon, to help Mom with her planting (which by the way was mostly done), we left Gravenhurst on Sunday the 2nd and headed to Durham.  By the way I saw a funny quote - and since its just the girls :) I thought I should share:

A recent survey discovered that a woman's "I'll be ready in five minutes" and a man's "I'll be home in five minutes" are exactly the same.

How true!

Anyway...Monday we went on our plant buying mission.  I had brought some plants that I bought in Gravenhurst and also some perennials that Mom had potted, transplants from her garden.  I wasn't sure what I wanted this year, but was hoping to follow the K.I.S.S. method.  Its just too hard to experiment with interesting new plants up there, due to the fact that the plants get sporadic care,watering, weeding, bug proofing, deer proofing, etc.  I did decide that I would keep to the shade impatiens for the boxes under the master bedroom since they did fairly well last year and made a fairly good showing.

We headed into town, and in taking a different route, we discovered a garden centre/greenhouse at one of the florists in town.  They didn't have a lot of variety but the plants (especially in the greenhouses) looked pretty healthy.  Mom pointed out a pre-planted window box, with a mix of 4 different colours that I really was taken with.  I decided to buy this exact combination of flowers for the window boxes under the front windows.  The flowers turned out to be trailing calibrachoea  and I was only able to get the partial amount and colours I needed for the planting. 

This is similar but not exactly the colours that they had.  I was fairly certain I could get the rest of the colours at the usual flower market I go to, at the L&M market in town.  I continued my shopping and picked out some really interesting varieties of coleus for planting in pots by the front door.  

When I entered the other greenhouse I again discovered an really vibrant pre-planted container with 4 different colours of impatiens (colours I would never have put together) and they were quite stunning.  So I picked out the colours for the 2 boxes under the bedroom window.

These are similar colours

We finally made our way to the L&M market flower market, where I picked up the rest of the calibrachoea colours -  I also picked up a few perennials including some bachelor's button and silver mound.  The only thing I couldn't find was enough of the pale yellow colour of the calibrachoea.  So with Mom in tow, we crossed the street to the FS co-op store to see what they had to offer.  Luckily I found 2 more pale yellow plants and also some spikes (Dracaena) that I had forgotten to get.

Whew!! That was it - I had everything I needed for the window boxes, along with the creeping jenny or Lysimachia nummularia that mom had brought from her garden.  We came home in time to have a refreshing drink and think about what we would have for dinner!!  

Getting started

Next day, Tuesday, we set about getting dirt prepared and plants planted. Since my mother is an amazing gardener, I do let her give me directions for anything to do with flowers, and she said we should sift/screen the dirt from last year’s containers with the bagged dirt we got at the garden centre and some humus from the compost pile here.  This actually took a lot longer than I had ever imagined, simply because we didn't have a sieve for dirt - so (take heart friends that eat salad at our cottage) we use the salad spinner basket.  So we did a really good job but it took forever!!   It was a pretty beautiful day – sunny – not too hot.  We accomplished a lot but we were exhausted.

Sifting and Smiling!

Unfortunately when we went to start the bbq for dinner - it was a no go.  I even had Paul on the phone with suggestions but to no avail.  We ended up having to do our dinner on the stove so we were a pretty hungry pair when we finally got to eat.  We were so tired we didn't even watch one of the videos that we had rented.

Wednesday morning, it was still a pretty nice day when we woke up.  We still had more planting to do, but definitely the end was in site.  We realized that we had come away from Gravenhurst without the pots of seedlings that mom had started for me, which was just a well since we had our hands full with finishing what we had.

We managed to take the dogs around for a little walk before she headed out for home late in the afternoon.  I have decided to wait for a few weeks to take a picture of our plantings, in order to let them take hold.

Paul and I will head up again this coming weekend just to make sure that all these plants are watered and to try and finish more planting before the Father's Day weekend.