Wintering Roses - The Canadian Way

Cliquez ici pour la version française

Because the earth bulges at the Equator and is flattened at the Poles, the halfway point between the Equator and the North Pole is actually 16.2 kilometres north of the 45th parallel. This means that the garden here is just about at that halfway point. It also means that we are roughly at the same latitude as Grenoble, Turin, Simferopol in Crimea, Xinjiang in China, Hokkaidō in Japan, Michigan and Wisconsin in the United States. However, our climate here in Ontario and that of the two northern states is, to say the least, very different from that of Grenoble or Turin. Only now is the last snow  melting as you can see below.

What is in Bloom in Kitchener, Ontario

Last week I had a post on what was in bloom in Victoria, British Columbia. I thought I would do the same thing for Kitchener, Ontario this week. Nothing is yet in bloom. These pictures give you an idea of the kind of winter much of North America is having.

Table in a garden

Merry Christmas

Regular readers will know we are not at home just now. However here are pictures of the house and garden taken a few years ago in the middle of winter. When snow gets as thick as in the picture below, you have to climb on the roof to shovel it off because if the weather warms up and it rains, the snow can get too heavy for low pitch roofs and they might collapse.

The porch after a snow storm with the snow blower waiting by the door.

End of the gardening Season

We got up this morning, and it was winter. At least there was snow on the ground and a very cold wind. This snow might well melt before long. However, in a week or two we should have a snow cover that will last till late March. From a gardener's point of view, this is a very good thing as the soil temperature under a good layer of snow is just at freezing point. Three and a half hours south of here, where we used to garden, when snow melted in a warm spell and then when temperatures plunged many degrees below the freezing point before more snow could fall, perennial plants suffered a lot.