by a long weekend
Looking back to last year’s entry of this diary, er blog, I see that I’ve already written about Canada’s Victoria Day long weekend, so if you are interested, do visit that post. This year it’s a wet long weekend here. After a very early and warm spring, even a heat wave in April, we’ve been having a spell of cool and very wet weather with heavy thundershowers battering flowers. That’s a rather typical pattern on the westcoast, though earlier this year.
Everything is very lush and overgrown in our garden now, calling for pruning, weeding and deadheading, and tying up rain flattened tall perennials. Yesterday we were able to work outside for a few hours before showers returned. Today, it’s an indoors day tidying up and cooking a dinner for good friends coming here for the evening. Tomorrow, if it rains we may head out for some shopping which we haven’t done for a long time. Back to the kitchen now!
May 22, 2005 in Home by Marja-Leena
Marja-Leena, thanks for this link, as I’ve been wondering about Victoria Day! I especially liked finding out about “2-4s”!
You wrote last year about gardening and wintering-over: in Vancouver, can you leave fuschias outside? If not, what do you do with them in the winter? I brought one inside and managed to keep it going by cutting it back hard, but I’m always wondering what to do with non-hardy plants. Roses are my passion but in the Vermont climate one has to tip and bury the plant if it’s not a rugosa or very hardy cultivar. I’ve pretty much given up on any others.
I’ve never heard the expression 2-4’s so it must be peculiar to eastern Canada? Here we do get frost, sometimes down to -12C, but what really kills tropicals is the immense amount of rain in the winter. I grow these in pots and move them indoors to a solarium that I’m so grateful to have. So fuschias come in too. There is a hardy fuschia bush that grows well here and stays in the garden.