Gardening in Muskoka Podcast

Gardening in Muskoka Podcast Our growing season is too short to rely on recycled content & questionable hacks, so I am taking you with me on a quest to separate fact from fiction.

Join me as we debunk myths, interview experts, and ensure you get the real dirt on Gardening in Muskoka Expert Interviews & Garden Tours | Zone 4, Ontario, Canada

Join me as we explore the unique challenges of gardening in our Northern climate, helping you design and shape your property to fit your desired lifestyle. Hosted by Jeanette Inthisorn, a local Real Estate Agent, with a passion for permaculture and edible landscaping.

Delicious!We have been cooking Asian Chrysanthemum  greens for 2 years now, and I finally let a few plants go to flower ...
08/30/2024

Delicious!

We have been cooking Asian Chrysanthemum greens for 2 years now, and I finally let a few plants go to flower so that I can collect the seeds for next year.

They are almost 5 feet tall, and I wish I had a whole garden row of them right now.

Next year, I intend to feature them more prominently, and dedicate 3 times as much space to them. Hopefully, I'll have enough blossoms to collect for tea.

What are some plants you took a chance on and ended up loving?

05/08/2024

Baby chicks!

This is our first time raising day olds, and we are super excited.

Up till now, we have somehow managed to avoid chicken math. I'm hoping that continues.

We started our chicken journey with 6 ready to lay hens 2 years ago. A racoon incident left us with 4 this winter.

Now that we have more confidence, we are expanding our skill set. One day, we hope to have a breeding flock, but that is slightly outside our current comfort zone.

These are red sex-link, what are your favorite layers? And what are your favorite meat birds?

The Edible forest pathway is starting to come back up!  Ostrich Fern, Red Veined Sorrel, Lovage (transplanted from main ...
05/07/2024

The Edible forest pathway is starting to come back up! Ostrich Fern, Red Veined Sorrel, Lovage (transplanted from main garden) and Hostas (they are cousins of asperagus, and you can eat the spring shoots and leaves)

Only the sorrel is big enough to harvest this year. The pathway was started last year, and it will probably be 2 more years before things are ready to harvest in the spring (2026).

This is one of my demonstration gardens I am working on to show that you can have beautiful ornamental looking gardens, in marginal areas, that double as a source of early spring vegetables.

One of the things I am passionate about is expanding the variety of vegetables in our diet, especially because Muskoka has a small selection in our grocery stores to begin with. And also encouraging people to grow as much as they can on their property, because Ontario imports over 50% of our vegetables from other countries, which leaves us vulnerable. I always sow extra seeds and give away seedlings each year, to build up the variety of perennial vegetables in our area.

I have two more edible shade perennials to put in this year, which will be grown from seed. Angelica, which has a flower that looks similar to the fancy alliums, and purple Japanese Parsley, which I will be using where one might normally put Purple Coral Bells (heuchera). It's not Shiso (which is an annual) , and I've never had it before, so I am curious to see what it tastes like.

Let me know in the comments if you are interested in either of those seedlings, and I will send you an invite when they are ready.

Last year I gave away asperagus, rhubarb, French Sorrel and red veined sorrel, sage, oregano, peppermint and lemon balm.

I still have extra French Sorrel and Sage if you are interested.

DATES CONFIRMED FOR JUNE!Your First Garden: Starting Without the StressAre you tired and overwhelmed by the contradictor...
04/27/2024

DATES CONFIRMED FOR JUNE!

Your First Garden: Starting Without the Stress

Are you tired and overwhelmed by the contradictory advice online about gardening, and don’t know where to start? Join me in person, as we walk through each step of the process, from understanding your growing conditions, to finding beautiful (FREE) designs, ensuring they will work with our climate, to key questions to ask at the gardening centre when purchasing plants. There will be tips for starting on both tight and moderate budgets.

Make sure to bring a binder – we will be starting you off in the right direction by creating a Garden Journal to keep all of your new plans organized.

For those who cannot attend, I will make sure to post a recording of the talk as a Podcast Episode

Trying to think through the design I am moving towards for our full sun veggie garden. I want to maximize the number of ...
04/23/2024

Trying to think through the design I am moving towards for our full sun veggie garden.

I want to maximize the number of hunting perches for dragonflies, so each of the sweet peas and pole beans will be growing up tall bamboo tripods.

Two years ago I watched a dragonfly devour a deerfly like a rabbit munching on a dandelion. I want all the dragonflies. I want to amass a full out Air Force of them.

Secondarily, the further down I dig around the giant boulder, which sits nearly smack in the middle of the garden, the more I realize that it will be nigh impossible to crack and move. I am stubborn, but there comes a point at which I must admit defeat. So instead, I am making a small seating area directly above that spot, and I will have planter benches with some sort of drooping-over-the-sides edible plants. Right now, I am leaning towards nasturtiums, but I am open to other suggestions.

Right now, this garden is still predominantly acting as a nursery for all the perennials I start from seed to be planted into other parts of the garden the following year. Almost everything is technically food, but much of it needs several years before harvests are possible.

AAAAAHHHHHHH! I know this is a premature share, but I have tried growing Red Dragon Geum from seed two previous years wi...
04/19/2024

AAAAAHHHHHHH! I know this is a premature share, but I have tried growing Red Dragon Geum from seed two previous years without success.

Mackenzie seeds had some packages with only THREE seeds in them, and other packages you get 20. πŸ™„ The seed starting instructions were wrong, as geum needs light to germinate. I didn't see this until looking through the Jellito seed catalogue for next year, and their instructions were different than Mackenzie.

My heart dropped thinking that I would have a third year of failure on these seeds. But almost a month later, I have ONE!

I chose this particular colour for the pollinator garden, to go with the rudbeckia and deep orange perennial sunflowers . That was before I added the purple and salmon coloured birch guild vignettes into the mix. I'm not sure it's going to go with the changed colour scheme, but we're going to try it out for 2 years, and see.

I am at the point of refusing to give up on this specific flower until I have successfully grown it from seed myself. I will not accept divisions or cuttings from outside sources. 😀

For those wondering, the area is way too wet for our native geum trifolia (prairie smoke). That flower is an important early flower for bumblebees, and I am trying to come up with somewhere that I can fit it into our design, where it will thrive.
🐝🐝🐝

This is your reminder to try starting perennial seeds this year to fill out your garden next year.  There is no way I wo...
04/10/2024

This is your reminder to try starting perennial seeds this year to fill out your garden next year. There is no way I would have enough plants to complete my gardens if I was buying all my plants from nurseries.

Last year I sowed 2 packages of columbine into my heavy clay veggie garden, to grow out for both our shade garden and the Bracebridge Rotary Gardens.

They took forever to sprout, and when they finally peaked through, one of my over-eager children ripped out 1/4 of the lot before I stopped them. They thought it was clover πŸ€¦β€β™€οΈ

I let them overwinter in the veggie garden and finally got out today to pot them up. There were 3x as many as I originally thought I had. With the 2 seed packages and the soil, the cost was 98 cents per plant.

Start with inexpensive seeds, and work your way up to progressively more expensive ones as you gain confidence.

The first perennials I started from seed were Echinacea (cone flower). I will tell you that story when they start blooming.

Join me today at 2pm at the  Gravenhurst Public Library We will be discussing what you need to do now, to get your garde...
04/09/2024

Join me today at 2pm at the Gravenhurst Public Library
We will be discussing what you need to do now, to get your garden ready for its summer glory. If you can't make it, the presentation will be recorded, and available on the Muskoka Master Gardeners page.

Thank you to Jessica from   Riverside Greenhouses  for the wonderful and informative talk about container gardening and ...
04/08/2024

Thank you to Jessica from Riverside Greenhouses for the wonderful and informative talk about container gardening and your demonstration on how to create beautiful floral planters for our short growing season. I learned a lot about the new selection of annuals, and was shocked about what is required to maintain them in their full glory. Simple, but not what I was expecting.

Shoutout to Baysville Horticultural Society for hosting the event last Wednesday, you guys are fantastic, and everyone was talking about your carrot cake. πŸ₯•

And thank you to the wonderful ladies from Muskoka Master Gardeners who were able to come out to the talk. You ladies are always so much fun to spend time with. πŸ₯° Looking forward to seeing everyone at tonight's monthly meeting.

The crocus are blooming, and the perennial vegetables are popping back up, which means it is time for the first garden e...
04/08/2024

The crocus are blooming, and the perennial vegetables are popping back up, which means it is time for the first garden experiment of the year.

I am taking the crocus blooms as my cue to plant peas, lettuce and spinach. I will plant them twice more at two week intervals and track the speed of germination and the time to harvest. I want to believe in phenology lists, but the current lists online are either vague or demonstrably false.

The other perennials that are emerging are rhubarb, strawberries, French Sorrel, red-veined sorrel, asperagus, stinging nettle, hollyhock, and columbine. I grew all of these from seed last year. Except the strawberries, those were grown from seed 3 summers ago, and they have since 6x in number, helping to stabilize the sides of our raspberry huglekulture.

And shoutout to the garlic, I did not mulch it properly, and it still came up fine.

Sometimes I think seed companies make it sound way more complicated than it is, just to obsolve themselves of liability if things go wrong.

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