I had the pleasure of touring some great gardens in the Oshawa/Durham region last weekend in the searing heat and humidity. Took several hundred pictures and had a great time with a busload of other garden writers.

I’ll be sharing some great stories about these gardens and gardeners with you over the next few months but between the Ojibway Gardens and the Mason-Hogue gardens I was well and truly impressed. And speaking of impressed, how much more fun can you have than to be a visitor at a winery when they’re serving desserts and lunch (two meals, two wineries) and you just have to buy a few bottles of their specialties for further testing in your own garden? Somebody has to do the testing but it’s a tough job and I’m up for it…

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Your Questions Answered

Someone told me human hair worked for keeping rabbits out. Also, some say marigolds planted around the perimeter. Either of these true?

A: Human hair works until it rains or the rabbit is hungry – whichever comes first. And rabbits eat marigolds so I suppose the answer is yes – marigolds will keep rabbits out of the veg patch. They’ll be so busy eating the marigolds. :-)

This speaks to one of the interesting “facts” of gardening. What seems to work on rabbits in one garden is complete bunkum in another garden. What rabbits in my neighborhood think is gourmet dining gets passed by in yours.

The answer to many of these questions seems to be – “it depends”. It largely depends on how hungry Bugs really is. It seems to depend on what other food sources are nearby and what level of predator lives in your community. (how wary the rabbit is of getting too far from cover) What kind of cover the beast uses for protection etc. etc.

This drives gardeners nuts. And it makes giving a simple “this works” kind of answer almost impossible. And this drives garden writers nuts.

I’m working on some general guidelines for rabbit and deer proof gardens but don’t hold your breath looking for a ready and instant solution.

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My tomatoes - Early Girl, Big Boy, Better Boy - are very good, no cracked skins or any other problems, but the skins are VERY tough. What's wrong? Thank you.

A: Tough skins on tomatoes is usually a watering problem. You’re giving the plants just enough water to keep them from getting blossom end rot (unless you’re getting BER as well then it is not enough water at all) but not enough to grow them quickly. It is likely you need to increase your watering.

There are two other things that happens sometime with tomatoes that are mostly grown in greenhouses and this *could* be happening here. If you have too much sunshine and not enough leaf coverage over the tomato, you’ll sometimes find the skin thickens up to protect the interior of the fruit. And just to be difficult, sometimes in prolonged shady weather, the skin thickens up because it seems to keep growing while the rest of the fruit development stops.

But if I were betting, I’d bet they don’t have enough water.

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I just bought hardy lillies for my 4x6 pond, and they're in this muddy muck...do I have to put that in my pond???I saw potting mediun for pond plants, granular ceramic, about the size of match heads & rather expensive...can I use very small pebbles (gravel)or marbles, etc???

A: Well, I do believe that lilies will likely survive with a rooting medium like small match heads. I don’t know about marbles or gravel.

But did you catch the word “survive”. They’ll struggle. There is nothing in that kind of media to feed them and the one thing you have to understand about waterlilies is they are one of the greediest of plants. I used to have a poster in my nursery above the lily tanks that said, “What happens if you don’t feed your waterlilies?” And underneath it read, “Nothing.”

If you want to see blooms on this magnificent plant, then you have to feed it and the only way to do this is to use real soil (that mucky muck) to let the roots feed. The heavier the clay soil the better for planting water lilies. Clay soils contain excellent levels of nutrition and you can use the planting food tabs to keep those blooms coming. (never use peat moss or vermiculite in your lily soil – both will float to the surface and are not heavy enough for the roots to grab onto to… been there, done that.)

With the stones etc. I’d be concerned that the food would not be held for the plant roots but would work its way out of the soil into the water (where it will feed the algae rather than the plants).

You CAN put those stones or marbles or whatever on the surface of the lily pot so it will look good and the soil will not spill over into the pond. I note that this is what they are mostly used for and not as a general growing media.

But if you think this is bad – wait until you have to clean it out this fall with the layers of organic matter on the bottom of the pond or next spring with overwintered leaves. Now, that’s gross! LOL.

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For your questioner who asked about grass in her flower bed: I have been enjoying gardening in a new way with the discovery of sheet mulching. Cover everything except the flowers (or pull those out like you said and toe them in moist soil for a month) with 6 layers of newspaper or one layer of non-coated cardboard, completely overlapping the edges, no holes for the grass to sneak through. Cover with 4-6 inches of compost if you want to plant soon. If you will be waiting to plant the bed till next year, add a thin layer of manure or blood meal, and cover with 4-6 inches of wood chips. (Tree trimming companies will deliver them here for free). The compost or manure will help the cardboard break down. The cardboard and thick layer of chips or compost will stifle the weeds. Dig through the broken down carboard or newspaper to replant your flowers. Any weeds that arise will be new ones blown in. And they will be easy to pull, very shallow roots. Rosi

A: Thanks Rosi – this is a variation on a newspaper type of mulching and new garden bed creation that I’ve written about before. There’s a ton of these kinds of variations and they all work – more or less.

But – and there’s always a but. If you add four to six inches of compost you’ll be doing something that not many gardeners can do. Just getting that much will be an amazing chore.

And four to six inches of wood chips will work with some plants but will smother out quite a few others. Annuals and veggies will do fine in such a bed as you’ll be planting them every year. Many perennials will not come back through this layer and many of them will not expand because of the newspaper (which in multiple layers will surprise you with how long it can last). :-)

But in principle, you’re suggesting laying down newspapers as a mulch and covering over top of them with some organic matter to fight off grass. Thanks for the help. :-)

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I'm a beginner gardening enthusiast and wanted to plant some hellebores on a predominantly shadey spot between my house and sidewalk (thinking that hellebores were good for shadey wet conditions.) I got my first batch of hellebores through a mail-order catalog. They were bare root with no green shoots and I planted them around mid-April. Nothing happened! I got a second batch about 6 weeks later. This batch had some green shoots on them. Thinking the soil might be too heavy (there's a lot of clay), I planted them closer to the sidewalk, some actually getting some sunlight, and set the crowns closer to the surface. They seemed to be doing better - the green stalks were starting to pop out of the ground. Then some withered after a while. I dug them up and found a couple had some mushy areas on the crowns. I sliced off the mushy parts and added some meat moss and perlite into the hole to lighten the soil, plus I moved the mulch away from the crowns. Could you tell me why the crowns got mushy spots? I thought these plants were pretty care free. Also - at what depth should the top of the crown be planted? Would I have better luck with seeds? Any advice would be appreciated

A: OK – this plant is Perennial Plant of the Year this year but it comes with some of the membership wagging their heads.

Once established, this plant is a good one and relatively carefree. Establishing it can sometimes take the patience of Job.

It does not appreciate being barerooted at all. It does not like having its roots messed with when middle-aged. Young seedlings move and old garden veterans seem to move but those middling ones are a pain.

If you have one to move, don’t plant the crowns below the surface but right at the surface if possible. Burying the crowns is a good way to kill ‘em.

Crown rot is common. Cut off the mushy parts and douse in sulphur to stop the rot in its tracks. (you can do this with bulbs too by the way) Then you can plant. Rot takes place in storage mostly. Watering is also a touchy thing. Too much and the plant rots, too little and it tends to be weak. Given the choice, I’d go with a little on the dry side (not DRY but a little dry) Let it wilt and you have a funeral on your hands however.

Modifying the soil isn’t a bad idea but generally not needed.

FRESH seeds are the way to establish this plant. Old seed goes dormant and then you’ll have the devil’s time getting them to germinate. Note that most seed from most seed houses is well and truly dormant or dead by the time you get it in the spring. Get it fresh or don’t bother.

I’d prefer to either do it from good seed or from a container grown plant that I had seen in bloom so I knew what I was getting. This plant is notorious in the trade for not being what the label says it is. There’s a LOT of mixups in the nursery trade with this one. And there’s a lot of variability in flower colours even within so-called named varieties.

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How can you tell when lupine seed pods are ready to harvest, to spread the seeds in the flower garden

A: They’ll be brown and dried out and splitting. If you can get them just as they begin to split, you can put them wherever you want. But dried out and brown is the key.

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I have a waterfalls in my outdoor pond...and the rocks that the falls go over, are covered with this blackish green slime.. is this normal? Also, I noticed that there's alot of white colored circles on my pond liner. Thanks for any help you can give me..Donna

A: Blackish green slime is either good algae (we leave it alone) or filamentous algae if it long and stringy. There’s a page up on the pond website about algae and controlling it.

The white circles are likely from the water evaporating on the liner and leaving calcium deposits. This is a good advertisement for an automatic pond filling device that will keep the pond at the same level all the time. If you do raise the water level and maintain it with an automatic filler, the scale will likely disappear in a few months but you won’t see it anyway.

From My Garden To Yours

A week of rain and my garden looks renewed. I still have plants coming up and don’t understand what’s with the grasses this year? Two varieties popped up this past week under the influence of a week of heat and a week of rain. And yet another coneflower appeared this week; it’s either a coneflower or a great weedy imitation. Heck, this is the middle to end of June. Squirrels are running around planting pine cones for next winter already and my garden is still pumping up. One series of plants that are right on time and blooming well are the peonies. The early P. tennuifolia bloomed for its week of glory and now the seeds are forming. My ‘Clare de Lune’ a yellow bloomed with its single blossom this year and gave me a hint of years to come. And the single red peony I have is now in full glorious, fragrant bloom. I remember why I like plants with fragrant flowers.

Dr. Paul Jellinek wrote a fascinating book called the “Psychological Basis of Perfumery’ and classified fragrances according to what effect they had on our behaviour. His four main classes were: 1) aphrodisiac, 2) narcotic-intoxicating, 3) physical well-being, and 4) stimulating. Musk is one of the aphrodisiac types so any flower with a musk undertone will create a psychological aphrodisiac sensation. Think roses with musky tones, and if you want to grow the Musk rose family, you’d be sending a clear message Narcotic/Intoxicating fragrances include many of the floral fragrances (such as lilac or peony) and balsam-type fragrances creating feelings of languor and relaxation. Mint, citrus, evergreen and camphor scents stimulate physical sensations and can create intense feelings of physical well-being. Many of our common cold remedies contain large doses of these fragrances. The last category is stimulating and this includes garden fragrances that have dry, spicy or bitter smells. This would include most seeds, plants stalks, forest smells, mosses and some dry leaf fragrances.

I note with some amusement that the modern perfume industry works with these fragrances and combinations to create the expensive perfumes we see advertised and we can find them all in our gardens.

Just to bring this back to garden reality though, the first to differentiate fragrances into categories was Linnaeus (the same Linnaeus who categorized flowers) in his 1752 publication, Odores medicamentorum. Floral fragrances were described as either 1) fragrantes (fragrant) 2) hircinus (goatlike) 3)ambrosiacos (ambrosial) 4)tetros (foul) 5) aromaticos (aromatic) and 6) alliaceous (garlicky). Personally, I much prefer the notion of musk-like to goat-like but there’s no accounting for the fragrance preferences of a sixteenth century monk.

Here's a small factoid that will serve you well when it comes to your next cocktail party. The average person breathes 22,000 times a day and this air moves across a patch of nerves high up in the nasal cavity (roughly behind your eyebrows) that “sense” new smells. These olfactory epithelia (there are two of them) are each roughly one centimeter square. When a new smell crosses these areas, it “awakens” the nerves and we “smell” something new. We then have to identify it by associating it with something. If the same smell is presented to the epithelia continuously, the nerve endings relax and we no longer smell the substance. This is why you have to take a break when you are smelling flowers – if you smell the same flower you’ll tire out the fragrance nerves and you’ll lose that smell for a while.

Speaking of smells. I was stewing up some rhubarb the other day and finally figured out what the fragrance of rhubarb reminded me of. It wasn’t a nice memory. I have had to shoot skunks in the hen house a few times and being sprayed by a skunk is not pleasant. The concentrated yellow “juice” they send out has a sweet odor to it before it “expands” into the nauseating skunk like smell. Having been far too close a few times, I’m pretty familiar with that smell and cutting up the rhubarb reminded me of that. Cooked rhubarb loses the smell totally.

I’m told that there are individuals whose noses are so well trained they can identify the variety of rose by its smell. I’ve never met any of those folks but it would be a fun game to try.

And finally, Jacobson’s’ Organ is a pair of sensory organs located in the noses of humans (and other mammals) that are identified as small “pits” near the front of and on both sides of the nasal septum (just inside the nose). The pit leads to a short chamber that is packed with nerve cells and from there the nerves go directly to the brain. Jacobson’s Organ does not work with normal smells but with hormones (large molecules) that often have no detectable odor. The connections also go directly to the parts of the brain that deal with basic emotions (like mating) not to the part of the brain hooked up to the olfactory process. The hormones and skin cells we shed (some 40 million skin cells a day) are a direct link to our primal emotions. The fragrances contained on those skin cells are an important part of how we see and respond to our world.

Between the floral musky fragrances of my peony, rhubarb, and Jacobson’s Organ, it has been a fascinating week for my nose.