A late-winter and early spring project is now in the final stages. My back yard was a gravel slope down to the street below and over the years I have hauled in concrete blocks to build three retaining walls for 3 garden levels. Each build was a little better, using the right kind of blocks, backfilling with porous … Continue reading →
When we hiked the trails around the area in late March, we saw the first appearances of sagebrush buttercups and yellow bells. At the same time, early spring flowers started to bloom in our home garden. Most of these were bulbs we planted some years ago. The first leaves poke up in the third week of March and in … Continue reading →
Mock orange (Philadelphus lewisii sp.) is a native long-lived deciduous shrub that is an attractive addition to the home garden. It can be spotted more in the Okanagan Valley than in the drier grasslands of the Kamloops hills. Our home garden mock orange shrubs started as a purchased cultivar. It grew to about 3 m and produced beautiful and … Continue reading →
Our flower gardens continued to flower through October. In November, we started to lose the least hard flowers (nasturtiums, gazania, zinnia, and more), some flowering plants started to go into dormancy, and a few hung on as the temperatures hovered around 0 ºC. The last flowers in bloom in exposed spots were snapdragons (Antirrhinum sp.). We had quite … Continue reading →
