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Moss Balls make intriguing indoor plantings

28/10/2019

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Kokedama groupingKokedama | Photo: Pistils Nursery
Like an ever-increasing number of people – especially young people – I enjoy growing indoor plants.  I love the care they need and the green fullness they give in return.  Each plant enlivens a room in its own way.

Right now, I have a whole garden of indoor plants in my living, ready for sharing at The Craft Revival, the semi-annual uber craft event coming Sunday, November 24, 2019 in Thunder Bay.  I've made several dozen beautiful moss balls for sale like the ones pictures here.



Kokedama ball in processSoil formed around plant roots
Photo: GardenGate
Following the traditional Japanese planting form called kokedama (koke means 'moss' and dama means 'ball'), the plant is removed from its pot.  Clay-enriched soil is shaped into a ball, then wrapped in living moss.  The moss is carefully bound in place with string.  The result is a living plant sculpture. 

​Kokedama can be displayed individually or in a group; often several are hung together, creating a beautiful string garden.

Kokedama has its origins in Japan during the Edo period (1603-1868).  This period of economic growth and political stability saw a flourishing of arts and culture.  Nerai Bonsai, the ancient tradition of compact gardening, became more popular.  In Bonsai, the plant grows so compact that, when removed from its shallow base, the roots hold their shape and the soil remains in a compact ball.  Kokedama is an adaptation of this Bonsai method.  Everyday tropicals can be used to create sculptural plant forms that carry the beautiful Bonsai tradition forward in new ways. 

A wide selection of plants can be used for kokedama.  I prefer small tropical varieties such as pothos, ferns and marantha.  These plants enjoy the water-holding quality of the clay soil mixture used and benefit from regular misting between waterings.  In fact, a moss ball is a plant partnership between the central tropical and the moss which is also living.  Misting helps to keep the moss fresh and green.

Preparing a supply of kokedama has been a labour of love, but with my garden laying its head down for winter, it has been a joy to source new plants for the indoors and create these living sculptures. 

I hope you will look for KOKEDAMA by THERE BLOOMS A GARDEN at 
The Craft Revival next month.

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Gardening memoir offers passion and advice

13/4/2018

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Like most novice gardeners, when I first took an interest in growing things, I didn't know what I didn't know. As I gathered bits of advice at the nursery and from friends, I also gathered stories.  I discovered the delightful value of reading gardeners' memoirs.

Tottering in My Garden by Midge Ellis Keeble was the first book in this genre to come my way. Billed as "a romp through 40 years of gardening," this Canadian actress, broadcaster and teacher describes the six gardens she has established in the various places she has lived.  She conquers many challenges, including clay, sand, shade and tired soil. 

I learned two important lessons from this book. First, that every gardener has more than one garden within.    And second, that gardening is an endeavor worth sharing through story.
During the time I was building my current – and fourth – garden, I picked up Elizabeth's Garden: Elizabeth Smart on the Art of Gardening at a book swap. "During the last years of her life, Canadian author Elizabeth Smart devoted herself to creating a magnificent garden around her cottage in Suffolk, England.  She documented her gardening in a series of eleven journals and twenty notebooks," says Google Books' thumbnail sketch of the title: The resulting book, edited by Alice Van Wart, includes excerpts from Smart's writings from 1967 to 1984, and "describes the evolution of her garden, and herself as a gardener."

This last observation – the evolution of the gardener – is the reason I love gardening memoir.  I am always curious about the motivations and passions of the people who create gardens.  These stories remind us that gardens thrive on imagination as much as they do on compost.
garden rose Rose | Photo: moguerfile.com
hese stories also tell us as much about the gardeners as they do about the gardens.  In recounting the autumn catastrophe of hunting hounds pounding through her lovingly-created pond and the sad job of re-establishing it, Elizabeth Smart observes, "You have to abandon pride along with sightly fingernails when you take up gardening." 

Sadly, Elizabeth Smart's book may be difficult to track down  I suggest making a request at your public library if you want to read it.

​Just this week, a colleague shared Alexander Chee's story, 
The Rosary, published in The New Yorker (April 18, 2018). It's a rather improbable account of establishing a rose garden in the ruined yard of a Brooklyn apartment.  It's a story of blind faith and rambling rugosas that strikes at the heart of garden memoir. It made me smile.

If you need a break from watching the snow melt or your tomato seedlings stretch toward the light, I highly recommend stories shared by other gardeners. They will cheer you. They will encourage you for the season ahead.​


A little more detail...
Elizabeth Smart
 (1913-1986) was a Canadian poet and novelist.  Her novel, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, detailed her romance with the English poet George Barker.  Published in 1945. her book is widely considered to be a classic of the prose poetry genre.

Midge Ellis Keeble (1913-2011) was an actress, author and broadcasting pioneer who worked in the early days of CBC.  Her obituary in the Globe & Mail.

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On growing food... and ourselves

10/4/2017

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Angelica seed heads PHOTO: Peter Cooper
Winner, Geometry in your world
http://www.abc.net.au/science/photos/2012/08/15/3568269.htm
When another growing season draws near, I feel newly aware of promise and possibility.  Soon I'll be reaching for my spade; just now, though, I've been reaching for advice on cultivation – and on what gardening can mean in our lives.  

In her good reflective article, 
What gardening can do for us, Toronto-based garden writer Gayla Trail (yougrowgirl.com) declares that "Growing food transforms us into producers – something we desperately need in a passive consumer culture where we have become an audience watching life rather than producers making it. Growing food provides a connection to and an understanding of where our food comes from. It schools us in what food looks like when it comes out of the ground or off of the vine, with all of its shapes, flaws, beauty, and flavor. The work involved in growing our own food provides first-hand knowledge of the labour that goes into growing it and teaches us not to take it or the work that farmers do for granted. It transforms our expectations and turns us into educated consumers who know the value of good, well-grown produce."  

I encourage you to read Gayla's full article.  She also explores the effects of gardening on creativity, on being more aware,  on connecting to the earth, and on connecting to the child within.  These are values I seek in my gardening life too.


I do believe gardening transforms us in many ways, including into healthier people.  When I work in my garden, I feel more connected to the weather, to the shape and structure of plants, and their needs as they bloom and mature.  I come to know once again the good work of coaxing food from the ground, the reward of nurturing flowers into beautiful bloom.

I agree with Gayla when she says, "No matter what goes on in my life and no matter how off-balanced and alienated I may feel, stepping into the garden brings me back to centre, back to myself, and back to that sense of connectedness to nature, the processes of life, and the greater world beyond."

What do you find when you step into your garden?  Share in a comment.

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A greenhouse blooms in the country

9/3/2016

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Tell me, do you dream of having a greenhouse one day?  What about a greenhouse big enough to start a nursery business?  Fifteen years ago, this was Karen Breukelman's dream.  And while the timing was a surprise, Karen put her love of gardening together with her desire for home-based employment and launched 'My Blooming Business'.
greenhouse
View of the greenhouse interior
Photo: My Blooming Business
PictureKaren Breukelman
Photo: therebloomsagarden.com
Today, country and city gardeners alike take the drive to Karen's rural greenhouse for a healthy selection of plants.  Karen was a member of the Thunder Bay & District Master Gardeners and she still shares her gardening advice with customers, often showing them how a plant blooms or matures in her own garden.  She knows her plants, especially those that are hardy for our cold climate.

With spring just around the corner, I asked Karen to talk with me about her greenhouse business and her love of gardening. 

The interview follows ...

How and when did you start your greenhouse?
A:  We started in 2001 when we purchased a greenhouse from the old experimental farm.  The opportunity to buy a 22 x 100 foot greenhouse came up by tender.  We put in a very low bid  and found out two days later that we got the greenhouse and that we would have to move it to our farm about a kilometer away.  We had to take it apart like a jigsaw puzzle, reassemble it at our location, and then decide what we would do with it.  So it wasn't a planned thing, it was something that just came along.

At the time we thought maybe we would go into the cut flower business, but the first year we opened to the public [with bedding plants], we also offered plants as a fundraiser for the Thunder Bay Christian school.  A lot of the patrons of the school are in our area.  The fundraiser let people get a taste of what we were growing at a good price.  Then from there it grew and grew. 
also What plants do you grow?
A:  I try to grow all the basics that would have been in your mother's garden and your grandmother's garden ― the geraniums, the petunias, the pansies, the marigolds.  But then I also try to grow things that are new and different and unusual.  I'm trying to be a one-stop shop where people can come and get their basics in the four-packs or full trays and they can also get things that you wouldn't find at a big commercial greenhouse.  I look far and wide for things that are unusual.  

Every year I have a few new things and I bring back the popular things from the years before. 
I try to have the old heirloom varieties ― like the nicotiana that grows six feet tall that you just can't find anymore but people remember their grandparents growing ― and I try to have something that's just coming out on the market.

I grow a lot of vegetables.  More people are interested in growing their own.  We noticed last year that the trend to growing your own vegetables is gaining.  And also canning, people are canning.  For the vegetables, I try to have short-season varieties, things that mature early, like green peppers that will turn red within our season.  Anything I grow is for our region ― Zone 2-3, 3b ― so that people will have success.
purple pansy
Photo: My Blooming Business

I think gardening is something a lot of people did with their parents and so those old-fashioned plants are as important as the new and unusual.  Plants take them back to when they were with their parents or grandparents.  It's nostalgic.  I try to have that kind of feeling in my greenhouse.
                                  ― Karen Breukelman


What do you find your customers are looking for?
A:  One of the things people are coming for is someone who will take the time to talk to them.  I have a lot of people who come to my greenhouse who don't have a lot of experience with gardening.  I can take the time ― if they come on a quieter day ― to help them choose plants and just help them to understand how to garden better.

What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned in running a greenhouse?
A:  That's a good question.  I think, how all-consuming it is at a certain time of year.  You almost have to brace yourself for it because once it starts, you have to be all in.  Once I start the greenhouse at the beginning of April, it's morning to night that you are thinking about it.  Because we are a family-run business, it's me, my husband Gerald, and our daughter who helps when she can, when she's not in school.  I don't have back up and once I start I can't leave the property for any length of time.  That was what surprised me when we first started.  But it's exciting, it's invigorating, it's lovely work. 

Do you have time to grow a garden for yourself?  What do you have here on the property?
A: 
Last year, because it was our transition year and we were moving [from the dairy farm which was sold to a new property and new house], I didn't have any flowerbeds.  I missed it so much!  We didn't even have grass.  I realized how much I missed puttering in the garden.  So at the end of the summer we put in sod and I outlined my beds. 

There is a big oval in front of the house.  I want masses of plants there, for impact.  I want you to be a hundred feet away and say, 'Wow, what's going on over there?'  I'm going for impact from a distance ― that is my plan.  At the end of the house we put in a large perennial bed that's about 9 or 10 feet deep and about 28 feet long.  I haven't started working on that one at all.  I am very excited for this year. 

We are also going to put in a vegetable garden.  I didn't have a vegetable garden last year.  Again, I missed it so much.  You don't even realize how much you appreciate being able to walk out the door and get some lettuce or herbs, right?  It's just so simple. 

When you imagine your garden in the future – say, in five years’ time – what do you envision?
A: 
I think, established perennials beds, but still playing with annuals, because I have so many choices in annuals with the greenhouse and lots of fun things that I get to try.  In my flowerbeds I like to try out new plants and see how they do.  I like to test out different things and just play.  The annuals give me that opportunity to mix it up and change it every year.

What kind of garden appeals to you?
A: 
I like a crowded garden.  I like a flowerbed that the plants are close enough that you don't see the dirt.  I guess a cottage garden style.  Mixed with stepping stones and old pieces of wood, things you've collected over the years, just things that make it personal.  I like to throw interesting things in that catch you off guard ― little surprises.  But I'm going to have to work on that here yet, and figure out what my surprises will be!

My Blooming Business is located at 341Hanna Rd. Thunder Bay, ON  (807) 474-3235
Also find the greenhouse on Facebook.

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Dear Garden 

15/10/2014

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I didn't expect we would be saying good-bye this soon.  But life has a way of intervening in even the best-laid plans and you see, my green friend, I must move.   I must leave you behind, my country garden.
Picture
Photo: therebloomsagarden.com
Oh, yes, I will miss you –  I miss you already, for you have been my teacher and my muse.

What a novice I was when we first met! 
You were patient – you gave me that whole first season to observe and learn your ways.  Then the work began.  So many sunny perennials to learn, so much to discover about building soil, so many projects to help you become your best.  But as one gardening friend says, it was 'joyful work'. 

Dear Garden, I hope you know that w
hat we shared was a creative endeavour.  Every season brought new ideas, new inspiration.  It was like working on a beautiful painting, very slowly and lovingly.  It gave me peace and joy in equal measure.

Yes, you were a fine green muse.

You have a little "townie" sister now, a modest garden on a tree-lined street made with some of you.  The plants are settling in; like me, they are grateful for the mild days we've had this fall.  I think you would like how things look.  But don't ever think I will forget you.  I couldn't.  I learned to be a gardener thanks to you.
Picture
Photo: therebloomsagarden.com
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