How to make a vertical garden from a wooden pallet

I feel in love with this vertical planter at the Toronto Home Show. I wanted to buy one on the May long weekend, but they were out of stock, and I'm impatient. That, and it will cost over $300 to buy one (but it does have a kickass irrigation system).

So I decided to make my own with a wooden pallet. Finding the pallet was the first challenge but then I just walked down the laneway behind the shops on Bloor Street and I found several at a corner  market that sells produce. I asked permission before taking it and then carried it home.

The pallet was a bit danaged so I reinforced it with a few screws. Then I took off every other plank on the front and then lined it up with one of the remainig planks and screwed it into the back, forming a bottomless shelf. Then I took some of that black weed membrane you see in the garden centre (it is perforated to allow water and air to pass) and cut it to line the shelves. Then I stapled it in place with a staple gun. I put soil in the pockets and started to plant. But alas, I discovered that my pockets were very droopy because I made the pockets a bit too roomy, so they sagged below the "shelf" when full of wet soil. To remedy, I used the two additional planks and cut them into squares the same depth of each shelf and then fastened them on at the bottom (two per shelf) to give each pocket some support.

Only time will tell how durable the weed membrane will be, but my herbs are growing nicely. I had intended to add an irrigation system to it as well, but wasn't sure what type of hosing to use, so I left it off this year. I'm sure that I will regret this in those dog days of summer.

An excellent side benefit is that when you water starting at the top, all excess water filters down to the lower shelves. Economical and efficient.

Total cost of my solution: about $10 for the weed membrane and a few bucks for staples. I also bought a staple gun, but it is not really fair to place the cost of that here cuz I'm going to use it for lots of other stuff.

How to kill wasps

Summer is so short, I want to enjoy the back yard as much as I can before the snow starts flying again. But, our al fresco dining is often interrupted by pesky wasps. I'm not sure if the garbage strike stimulated the wasp population of Toronto, but it has been a dangerous summer for a person who swells from wasp stings.

A few weeks ago, we were having friends over for a BBQ and the yard was full of wasps. I had heard that you can create a wasp trap with a water bottle filled with a bit of sugar water or pop. I made two such traps, but used some old honey for the sweetener. We caught a few that night, but it didn't stop one of my guests from being stung. (Sorry Frank!)

The traps have been sitting in the back yard, but not idly. The bottle on the left trapped considerably more wasps than the other one. Is it a higher concentration of honey? A different bottle shape? Or does misery like company? I don't know, but I made a third trap today and I encourage you to make one and help reduce the wasp population of Toronto.

Bring on the cull: How to rid your garden of slugs

After a long winter of renovation, I thought it would be nice to just sit back and enjoy the fruits of my labour and some of the fruit of the garden. May was a bit cooler than usual this year, so I was about 10 days late getting the tomato and pepper plants in. We have not had any success growing peppers, but this year I purchased a more mature seedling and gave it a prime plot, where tomatoes have flourished in past years.

Pictured above you will see the pepper plant, which now resembles swiss cheese. Seems that somebody or something was feasting on my fruit before me. (Not fair! I pay the taxes here!!!) Unfortunately, my friend Corinne's garden was also suffering from the same affliction, several blocks away. Worried for her transplanted Brown-eyed-Susans, she took action sooner than I, and discovered that it was slugs who were fattening themselves in our gardens. Slugs. I had heard of these translucent pests before, but they'd never taken up residence in our money pit plot. It was time to fight back or risk losing all the basil.

The internet provided a simple solution. Dig a small indent in the soil and place a shallow saucer in the hole so that the rim is on the same level as the soil. At dusk, open a beer (any brand) and toast the slugs last day. After enjoying a few sips, pour a splash into the saucer. If your garden is large, you will need many saucers and more beer. I could only find two suitable saucers, so created some small slug wells by cutting the sides off some individual yogurt containers. Now this is the hard part: wait until morning. I suggest a warm bath to help you sleep, as I had difficulty nodding off due to eager anticipation.

The sunrise will reward your patience (and love of beer) with saucers full of dead slugs. Hooray. Bring on the cull. Who knew that something so delightful as beer could be so lethal to these garden pests (yet safe for pets and children). I recommend burring the drowned critters in a shallow grave which will decompose into rich compost, feeding next year's crop of peppers. It's the circle of life at its best!

The carport of my dreams

After a winter with near record snowfall, it is natural for one to dream of a carport. Watching Dan shovel all that snow out of our uncovered parking spot really exhausted me. If I build him a carport, we won't have to worry about snow for the next four years. We will be guaranteed to have record low snowfall if I invest in such a structure.

Spring was in the air last week, and I felt that it was time to get moving on some quotes. I canvassed friends for landscaping recommendations and came back with only two names. One is coming tomorrow to do a quote, and the other one is considering if he has time to do the job at all. I then joined the Home Service Club, who guarantees the work of their recommended contractors or you don't pay. They promised me calls from three contractors within 48 hours to arrange quotes. We are getting close to 46 hours and still no calls. The jury is still out on this club.

As I wait to hear back from contractors, I started researching, and found this great carport plan online. It looks simple enough. Isn't it something that Dan and I could do on our own? It is kinda like building a fence, with a roof -- do I really need a building permit for this?

I called the City of Toronto, just to be certain, and discovered that their bureaucracy really is as bad as people say. I looked on the website and found a definition of a carport but could not find out if a permit was required to build one. So, I called their info line. After listening to several menus and making several choices, I was routed to a voice mail for the help person, who is away this week. The message said that somebody else would return my call, but then the mailbox was full, so I couldn't leave a message. I called back a few more times, trying to get a live person, but with no luck. My suspicion is that you do need a permit, so I have registered myself for an info session on May 13. At this rate, I may have a carport before the first winter snowfall. That is, if I can even afford it!!!

Spontaneous Sunflowers

Our house is now hidden by a giant sunflower - and we didn't plant one. When it sprouted in the spring, we were going to pull it out, as we were unsure what it was, but when I noticed that the neighbours had one too, I thought that it couldn't be a weed.

Our garden has been dug up three times in the first year and a half that we've been on Montrose. The last excavation was this spring, when they were installing the new gas meter. All my bulbs and perennials were dug up, so we had no idea what might sprout up this year. Our bulbs were likely in somebody else's garden, along with all the compost that I'd replaced the clay with. They certainly didn't return the compost to my garden. The 7' deep hole had been refilled with clay. I had worked so hard on the garden last year, only to have it dug up again. I kinda gave up and didn't put as much effort into it, because they might just dig it up again. So when this mystery plant sprouted up, I just let it grow.

As it grew taller and taller, I had to wonder: did Dan cash in his retirement savings to buy some magic beans? Was he sucked in by returns which would out-perform the stock market? He doesn't seem like the lottery/dreamer type, but you never know. What else could explain the giant mystery plant in the front garden? Would it ever stop growing?

Finally some flowers formed when the stalk stopped growing at about 7 feet. It is too short to climb. Maybe it is an inversion of the 7 foot hole that was dug in the garden last summer? How symbolic. Or maybe a bird or squirrel dropped the seeds there. Yeah, that's much more likely than the magic bean explanation. Either that or spontaneous sunflowers.

Our Garden! Our Beautiful Garden!!!!

I'm going on a five day canoe trip in Killarney today. I was working late last night to get all my work finished up, and on my bike ride home I was thinking - I'd better water the garden. I want to make sure that it will survive the 5 days without me. We have spent a lot of time and money working on this tiny little patch of soil that we call our front garden. When we moved in, it was terribly overgrown with some invasive creeping plant, that took weeks and weeks to get rid of. My friend Chris helped me to carry loads of compost over from the park on Environment Days. Dan and I spent many evenings shopping at Garden Centres. I read dozens of gardening books from the library. I started shopping at Lee Valley. I've had many emergency massages after a weekend of back breaking work in this garden. But it is now full on summer and we have some beautiful flowers growing and I feel less ashamed about the state of our garden. Sometimes, we even feel pride. So, you can imagine the horror when I came home from work to find two plywood sheets laying on the garden.

My initial thought was - what the hell. You are crushing my flowers! Dan was in the house working and hadn't even noticed it, since he came in the back door. He came out and lifted the boards to reveal this 6' deep crater where my beautiful flowers once bloomed. What the hell!!!!

Yes, there was a backhoe parked across the street and some patches of asphalt had been dug up. But why would a problem across the street require them to ruin my garden???? Finally I found a neighbour who told me that the water main runs under my garden, and they needed to run a new line to the house across the street. So, they dug up my garden. Bad luck, I guess. Lucky that they didn't have to dig up the neighbours interlocking brick. What would they do then?

So this morning, I'm running around packing up my last few things when I heard a scuffling outside. I opened the front door and there were four men standing on my front garden, who sheepishly turned to greet me. They explained that they will replace all the flowers that they ruined, but for some reason, I can't imagine that it will be that easy. I watched the guy work inside the big hole for a while, then decide to leave them to their work. After all, I'm going on vacation!