CANADIAN REGION:What are you doing October to December 2019

 Glad to see you, Kelejan!

KJ, I've been scare on the Forum this month for one reason or the other, and just tonight I'm trying to catch up. So, I didn't know you were MIA. I get so sad thinking about you leaving next year. You can be our Regional Host for Europe!! That perks me up a bit.

Oh! sanderson, please be happy for me and not sad for yourself.  I will be as near to you as I am now thanks to this wonderful site and the Internet.

I am sorry to refuse the offer of heading Europe as I am only English speaking although I can read a cornflakes package in Canadian French and know a lot of French words, but unable to speak them, but I will willingly  take over the eventual  control of the U.K.  I reckon I can do a better job than the politicians.

I will have the help of my brother, his daughter and her partner and his grandson and perhaps I will be a little more successful in getting British gardeners to tune into this wonderful site that has been a bedrock for me these past years.  It will be exciting to start afresh and have some physical help.

Looking forward to build two or three new beds next year depending how soon a property can be found that will suite all five of us and our two dependents. So far I do not class myself as a dependent as I am sure I have a few years left to be active and give more than I need.

Recently I collected nine bags of fall leaves and when there is another dry spell I will get them shredded and used as top dressing etc.

Naturally I will not be able to take anything to England except the knowledge and love I have gained here.  I doubt if my garden will survive unless I get lucky with the next occupant. but I will prepare to get everything together and donate it to the local garden club so that my land can be cleared as I am almost sure that it is large enough to build a new duplex and the garden will be no more. I feel sad about that, but my place is far too large for one little old lady to keep it up to what is was when I first joined this wonderful group of people.

Whatever happens and where, I will still be a member of this Square Foot Gardening Forum.

I was the lucky recipient of about ten bags of fall leaves yesterday.  They came from my near neighbour and every year I have collected her tree leaves as it is only a minute's walk away.  I had been meaning to collect them but got busy with other things, then yesterday I saw a man blowing them all in a pile.  I stopped to talk to him and I found out that was doing it because it was a nice thing to do and he liked his neighbours round our way.  He said that she did not know he was doing it. I will tell her as I do not want the thanks when someone else did the work.

Then I asked him what he was going to do with the leaves and he said he was going to dump them. So I said could I have them and I told him that I would shred them and put them on my compost pile.  He was agreeable and helped me fill the bags that I went home to collect.  All done in a few minutes.  Now I will wait for the this continual rain to stop and the get the leaves shredded with my lawnmower that had a shredder and a bag and is so much easier than the way I used to do it by running the mower back and forth over the leaves and then picking them all up.

Kelejan wrote:I was the lucky recipient of about ten bags of fall leaves yesterday.  They came from my near neighbour and every year I have collected her tree leaves as it is only a minute's walk away.  I had been meaning to collect them but got busy with other things, then yesterday I saw a man blowing them all in a pile.  I stopped to talk to him and I found out that was doing it because it was a nice thing to do and he liked his neighbours round our way.  He said that she did not know he was doing it. I will tell her as I do not want the thanks when someone else did the work.

Then I asked him what he was going to do with the leaves and he said he was going to dump them. So I said could I have them and I told him that I would shred them and put them on my compost pile.  He was agreeable and helped me fill the bags that I went home to collect.  All done in a few minutes.  Now I will wait for the this continual rain to stop and the get the leaves shredded with my lawnmower that had a shredder and a bag and is so much easier than the way I used to do it by running the mower back and forth over the leaves and then picking them all up.

Nice, Kelejan!  I need to get onto my leaves, I have tons of them...but I get them removed, dang it!

I had a total of 19 bags and shredded them down to 12 twelve bags with my lawn mower.  Saves a lot of space.

Now to get them to where they are going to spend the winter.  Some on the garlic bed and some more on the strawberries and blueberries and the rest  on the compost pile

 I remember when LLama Momma won the most bags of leaves title.  I could not match her.

Kelejan wrote:I had a total of 19 bags and shredded them down to 12 twelve bags with my lawn mower.  Saves a lot of space.

Now to get them to where they are going to spend the winter.  Some on the garlic bed and some more on the strawberries and blueberries and the rest  on the compost pile

 I remember when LLama Momma won the most bags of leaves title.  I could not match her.

Well done KJ. 

Sadly, no leaves for me this year.  Think I had over 40 one year and all from neighbours.

Perhaps next year, TD.   If I had know this neigbour a few years ago we would have made a great team, collecting leaves from the north part of our town as he has a truck and a leaf blower.

It the leaves are from your own trees, then you do not need to do anything an left them fall   and they will feed the tree or bush they came from which is Nature's way.

Nothing doing in my garden since I last posted. I had intended to put my leaves on the beds and the compost heap but as usual the weather has been against me. Too much rain with few breaks in between.

Kelejan wrote:Nothing doing in my garden since I last posted. I had intended to put my leaves on the beds and the compost heap but as usual the weather has been against me. Too much rain with few breaks in between.

I got the first layer spread on all of my beds, but not even half of the leaves have fallen yet, so I had planned on adding another layer, but starting tomorrow, we'll be getting "Too much rain with few breaks in between," too. We need the rain more than I need the extra leaves, so it's all good.

Kelejan wrote:. . . I remember when LLama Momma won the most bags of leaves title.  I could not match her.

I remember that. She had a huge cache of leaves!!

It is amazing how time flies when one has so many things to do.

We finally have some snow, I cleared it from the driveway this morning, and I could have left it as it has all melted.  At least I did  have 45 minutes of exercise, rather badly needed but I felt good afterward. For the rest of our week it is the odd snowfall and rain.

The bags of shredded leaves are now sitting under my decking, and no doubt by the time spring comes they can still be put onto the garden.

I still have plenty of seeds and on  clearing out some hidy holes I have three cans of survival seeds that are sealed and supposed to be viable for twenty-five years.  As I will not be able to take them to England, even though in sealed containers, I will see if any local gardeners would like them. 

I will not be able to clear out my shed now until the spring.  As the years pass one gathers tools and gadgets and all sorts of stuff to support the gardening endeavour, and I know I will miss a lot of them when I return to England. I know that my dear brother will willingly provide me with everything I need, but one gets  attached to mundane objects like a well-used wheelbarrow, given me by my husband my first Spring  in Canada and he was soundly berated by his family until I told them that I requested it as a birthday present.  Somehow they were not on the same wavelength as I was.    But I know that all of you will understand. 

Some of the tools took a bit of saving to buy, and I will miss my latest lawnmower that was lighter, had a collection bag on it, did not need all four wheels on it to be taken off so that I could lower or raise the grass cutting height, and also made the job of mowing the lawn and shredding fall leaves such a pleasant job. That lawn mower was a Black & Decker and was the only one available in our small town when my previous motor mower gave up the ghost, or at least I did as I could never start it on my own and had to wait for some passerby to pull the string to start it.

As I have written before, this garden is now getting to be too much for me but I know I will have a new lease of gardening life next year sometime. 

One thing I will take with me is a first edition of Square Foot Gardening that my dear husband bought for me from a garage sale,,,, it still has the price of 50c on the cover and sat for years on my book shelf until I started SFG.  I read the book, and then decided to look on the Internet and found that there was an update and I did not have to dig six inches into the ground to build a bed and that is when I found this site. A day later and I would have been digging into rocks as that is what our garden was; a layer of rocks, and trying to put a fork into the ground produced a kind of clanging sound.

KJ, I just love reading your posts. It's like being right there.

sanderson wrote:KJ, I just love reading your posts.  It's like being right there.  

When I was a little kid in school, I hated composition and would look at my blank page for half an hour before handing it in as I knew i would be in trouble.

Now that I am a bit older, I realised that perhaps I really did have nothing to write about. At that time in my life, from six to nine years I had hardly lived. I could not write about school life as that is all I knew as I lived in fear of being bullied by the older children and thinking that if they read my essays, as in those days were were short of teachers and sometimes the older children would be in charge of us, and many of them bullied us much younger children.

sanderson wrote:KJ, I just love reading your posts.  It's like being right there.  

+1

+2! And I wish I lived up near you...

Thank you for that, Marie.  I sometimes wish, as I love reading science fiction, that I could transport either myself or everyone else to where ever they want to be, just to visit, mind, and see each others gardens.

But we still have miracles today, this Internet.  It has its bad side,  yet the good side, such as  groups of good people getting together doing all sorts of things in their world, really is a miracle. Talking about flowers and weeds, cooking, saving animals, keeping family together and sometimes finding family.

I think this site is a miracle in itself.

What am I doing?  Shovelling snow. 

Kelejan wrote:What am I doing?  Shovelling snow. 

Yuck.... But at least it's good exercise, lol!

AtlantaMarie wrote:

Kelejan wrote:What am I doing?  Shovelling snow. 

Yuck....  But at least it's good exercise, lol!

Not a lot of snow but I like to keep on top of it, You are right, Marie, at the moment it is about 15 to 20 minutes each day while the snow is light and fluffy.

As I am retired and I have time but when I worked full time, I was often caught on returning home not able to park my car as the snow berm at the bottom of the driveway had frozen and was so hard to clear. The snow plow operators were not encouraged to do that little extra of backing up and pushing that berm to one side.

This year one of our elderly neighbours is going around and clearing some of these snow berms and making life so much better for others.  He also clears the snow   that is on the grass at the bottom of my own driveway so that the post office van can park safely while I do my actual driveway.  This area of grass belongs to the city but we householders have the duty to keep it clear.  I have one of the largest areas of grass as I am at the juncture of a very acute road juncture and when there is snow it is hard for people to turn their vehicles so they run over this grass.  Each spring I clear it up and keep it mowed and by the end of summer it looks good again.

KJ ... Thank you for your e-cards. Much appreciated.  Happy New Year.

I hope you like the cards, TD.

And if anyone wants to  know what I have been doing today, New Year's Eve, shovelling snow  again from my driveway, three times today.

HAPPY NEW YEAR to all our Canadians, and also to everyone SFG gardener in the world.

It seems all I can write about is snow.  No shovelling yesterday, Thursday, but a little bit later today which will turn to slush and hopefully melt away when the forecast in 6C by the afternoon.

Yesterday was too terrible to walk down my street which slopes to the tunnel under the railway as the snow had turned to slush then froze after being churned up by traffic.
No snow clearing had been done the previous day and hard to walk on frozen stuff like that. 

I needed have had a crash helmet and arm and knee pads to protect myself.

On a more cheerful note, Spring is on the way and should start thinking of seed planting.