for making our season fantastic!

We closed up the last of your vegetable gardens yesterday (now I just have to get to mine!) Please let me know if there is anything we missed, or did not complete to your satisfaction.

Your garden is now beefed up with fresh soil and natural organic fertilizers, planted with garlic and protected with plastic. We removed your fencing and rebar, since we heard from you at the end of last year that the rebar was dangerous in the snow. We will repaint it over the winter, and bring it back fresh and sparkling in the spring. The fencing and trellis netting unfortunately does not last more than one year – fresh fencing, and trellis netting are included in the replant packages.

We were blessed this season with a beautiful summer. While we had less sun than in 2013, the extra rain made it a little easier to keep up with watering in the hot summer months. I hope you were able to take advantage of the good weather, and get the most out of your vegetable garden.

The three most common reasons for under-performing gardens were: 

• a lack of water, 
• gardens becoming root bound with tree roots
• too much shade.

If you had trouble keeping up with watering, we can install a simple irrigation system on a timer next year. If your garden was root bound, the only permanent solutions are to move the garden away from any trees, or to put a bottom on the garden and raise it up off of the ground. If your garden did not get enough sun, we can move it to a sunnier location if there is one available, or we can plant more shade-tolerant vegetables like leafy-greens.

We will be in touch in March to see what services you would like from us in 2015. Urban Seedling will be expanding our garden centre at our warehouse, where you can come to get gardening supplies, seeds, seedlings, soil and natural organic fertilizers. We will also have more horticulturalists and landscapers on staff for yard work.

Thanks to your support, Urban Seedling has more than doubled in size again this year. While this is very exciting growth, and we are very grateful to you for coming on this journey with us, we have been having some trouble keeping up with communications and good organization, both of which are very important to us. We will be redoubling efforts next year to always let you know what is going on with your garden, when we will be visiting, and what we will be doing when we get to you.  If you have any ideas about how we can make the Urban Seedling experience better for you, please let me know.

Please take a moment and either email me a testimonial that I can include on our website, or write us a review on Google, or both!  Your customer feedback is invaluable to us. Thanks!

Have a great winter!
Tereska,

Tasks around the yard before the season’s end

While we still have some warm sunny days left in the season, now is the time to close up your garden’s for the year. If you would like us to do it for you, let me know and I will schedule your yard closing.

The vegetable garden still has a few weeks left. Not all the green tomatoes will ripen, but that does not mean that they are lost. Green tomato ketchup is an absolutely delicious topping for eggs, meats, crackers and cheese or fish. It is important to harvest them before the first hard frost so they don’t get mushy. Cucumbers in a sunny spot will keep producing, and lettuce should be nice, crunchy, delicious and ready to harvest. Add kale and swiss chard and take advantage of your fall salads!

Raspberries and blackberries need to be trimmed back. Old raspberry canes (brown) can be cut down to 2″, new (purple) canes should be cut to 3 or 4′. They will bear fruit in the early summer. Cut blackberry canes back to 3 or 4′ as well. Tying canes to stakes or fencing helps a lot to keep things orderly.

Blueberry bushes just need pruning to remove dead or damaged branches. Also remove any branches that are rubbing or touching. The bush should be open airy shape for maximum fruiting. 

Once leaves fall off your fruit trees, wrap the stem in a tree wrap to protect from rodents, and add mulch to cover the roots. If your tree or shrub is in a pot, it needs to be protected by digging it into the ground (ideal) or insulating with styrofoam and old blankets. Snow is a great insulator and can be piled on the pot for extra protection.

Outside the vegetable garden, you need to chop down soft stemmed perennials like hostas and peonies. Divide them and spread around the garden if they are getting to big or dense. Remove spent annuals. Weed all the gardens and remove all debris to best control pests and disease. Plant bulbs of spring flowers like daffodils and tulips. Plant new perennials, trees and shrubs.

This is a great time to lay new sod, or reseed your lawn. If your lawn is not what you wish it was, let me know and we’ll come and give you an estimate. Add compost or topsoil to your lawn, and seed any bear patches.

Continue to hunt and kill snails and slugs. Re digging and redoing garden borders, replacing rocks and cleaning out all nooks and crannies helps keep slugs down for the next season.

Help us make things better

We have about a month left to the season. We will come back to your gardens to remove the plant residue, add a bunch of fresh soil, compost and natural organic fertilizers. At that time we will plant garlic and cover your garden with plastic to protect it for the winter. 

Your garden should be pretty easy to maintain for the rest of the season. Keep any weeds out, water, hunt for slugs, and keep on harvesting. Hopefully the sun sticks around! Cover your garden if the weather dips below 4 or 5 degrees at night, and take the covers off to let the glorious sun in. This beautiful hot, sunny weather will certainly help to ripen tomatoes and get those greens growing. 

I would like to take the time now to reflect on what we’ve learned from this season, and what we plan on doing differently for next year. If you have any thoughts or suggestions on how we can do better in the future, please let me know. We strive to support you in your vegetable gardening and help you have the best garden possible.

Next year we will reorganize how the vegetable garden is planted to avoid shading out newly planted seeds and seedlings. We will make sure that the tomato, pepper and eggplant seedlings are larger when we plant them, and we will be adding ceramic tile around the base of peppers and eggplants to encourage them to provide more fruit. We will also be offering more comprehensive maintenance packages for those who need extra help. For next season, you will be able to sign up for monthly, biweekly or weekly vegetable garden maintenance.

Do you have any reflections on how this season went? Or any ideas about how we can do better next season? Please let me know.

Tereska

How to protect your garden from the cold weather

You’ll notice your neighbours packing up their vegetable gardens now that the night time temperatures are getting colder. We wait until the end of October to pack up your Urban Seedling vegetable garden to get the absolute most out of the growing season.

We planted cold tolerant varieties of leafy greens in your garden, and in the city we have the advantage a couple of degrees warmer weather. This makes it easier to extend the season later into the fall. All that you need to do is to protect your garden on the cold nights. Tonight it is supposed to go down to 1 degree! That means that if you want to keep your tomatoes, peppers and eggplants going you will have to cover them with a floating row cover or light sheet. This traps the warmer air near the plant and gives them an extra 3 or 4 degrees to get them through the night.

It’s also important to keep on watering your garden, although you’ll notice that the garden won’t dry out as fast as it did in the heat of the summer. Keep hunting for ripe tomatoes in the depths of your tomato vines and keep on picking your beans. Any beans that have been left on the vine too long will be tough and stringy at this time of year, but new young ones are still delicious.

You should be able to start harvesting your lettuce leaves soon. As soon as the plant gets big enough that you can take a couple of leaves off and still leave the ones on the inside growing you can start making salads. I’m glad to have the lettuce back!

How the cold changes your garden

Now that the night time temperatures are dipping below 10 degrees things will change a bit in your garden.

First off, to help your tomatoes ripen before the frost, you should cover them at night with your floating row cover, or a light sheet. This will keep the warmer daytime air close to the tomato vine. Also, cutting the tops of your tomato vines (topping) is a great way to focus energy into ripening your green tomatoes by the end of the year. Here is a video for more detailed instructions.

Your leafy greens will start to change as the weather gets colder. Swiss chard and kale leaves will darken and get crisper. Your fresh new greens, lettuce, spinach, roquette will also be crisper darker and sweeter than they were in the spring and summer.

Make sure to keep on watering especially since it hasn’t been raining much. To protect your newest additions you need to keeps slugs out of the garden. If beer traps and hand picking aren’t cutting it, try an iron phosphate based slug killer like Sluggo, or Slug-be-gone. It is a bit of a harsher option, but still approved for organic gardening.

Don’t for get to thin your radish and bok choy if they were sown from seed in your garden.

Fall garden salad with walnuts and apples
Pickling veggies

Cover your tomatoes

It seems like it’s going to be a cool night tonight. The radio tells me that it might go down to five degrees tonight in Montreal. This is not a killing frost by any stretch, but it will help a lot to ripen your green tomatoes if you cover the vines while it is cold out. Tomatoes prefer weather that does not go below ten degrees.

Take your floating row cover, or a light sheet, and simply drape it over the trellis. This will trap warm air close to the tomato vines and keep them warm and happy.

How to care for and protect your garden

Now is a great time to give your garden a fresh start. We should be done everyone’s replant by next Friday the 5th. Take this chance to give your garden the care it needs. At this time of year all that means is keeping up on watering and weeding and keep an eye out for slugs and a few other nasty little buggers that we have noticed during our replants these past 2 weeks.

Stink bugs… if you have noticed black spots or lesions on your tomatoes you may have a new friend in your garden you want to be rid of immediately check out this website for a more detailed attack plan but i will break it down for you. Rubber gloves and a bucket of soapy water, the gloves are for the smell, stink bugs can spray you with a nasty lingering odour as a defense.  They are slow, so pick them and toss them in the bucket, keep the garden well weeded and keep an eye out for the eggs and the nymphs. The clusters of oval small green eggs are often on the underside of leaves and need to be washed away, and the nymphs are some of the most beautiful insects I’ve ever seen but don’t be fooled they are still nasty.
  
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The adult stink bug looks like a little brown shield
I’ve noticed some in a few gardens but no epidemics, lets keep it that way. 

Slugs are out again too. Cut the lid off a beer can and bury it almost all the way in the garden. This is the most successful slug trap I’ve seen yet. Also keep weeds and grass away from the side of the garden as they like to hide right by the wood in the tall weeds. We also now have some Diatomaceous Earth in the garden centre that you can buy as a physical barrier

I Would like to congratulate many of you for your work in the gardens we’ve seen some truly beautiful gardens during this last round of replants and we are proud to have helped you in your success.

On the flip side some gardens are not doing as well, it usually seems like a watering problem so if that is your problem we do offer irrigation for the gardens or just pick up a timer and use a sprinkler or a drip hose and water every day! Some of the gardens we have noticed are root bound by surrounding tree roots so if you are very underwhelmed by the progress in your garden but you have been working really hard at it, it may be due to too many tree roots in the garden.

We have learned from last year and now all our gardens are installed with a layer of geotextile at the bottom of the bed but many gardens installed in 2012 or 2013 wont have it so if your garden is filled with brown roots and soil always seems dry and plants are small, let us know and we will be sure to dig out the garden and line it with the geotextile before next year’s planting. Tree roots will travel long distances to get into our gardens as they are filled with super rich soil and are also watered far more than anything else in the yard.

 For those gardens that were not doing well we will have removed any under performing plants and added extra leafy greens so hopefully you will be able to make up for your summer garden with a lush fall garden and you will enjoy spending some time in the garden again with the fresh start.   

Thanks for reading,
Shawn