Category Archives: months 01-03: winter

January thru March

attracting birds, bulbs, months 01-03: winter, months 10-12: fall, perrennials

Cyclamen Coum – February Romance

02/20/2012 svseekins 8 Comments

I think February is sleeping in. The days are getting longer, but it seems so slow. Standing at the kitchen sink, staring out the window at the drizzle, I let out a squeal. Hot pink blooms at the base of the apple tree! I’m saved! Happy dance.

cyclamen coum - full bloom — photo by SVSeekins

Cyclamen coum shouts for me to come outside and play. I drop everything to grab the camera. Kneeling down on the soggy lawn, I fumble for the Close-Up setting. The rain dribbles down my neck, but I don’t care. Blooms! I see blooms!

For such a tiny flower, it packs a punch.

I mean, snowdrops are lovely, but they’re demure, unassuming white flowers. Cyclamen coum are bright, exotic, FEISTY flowers. Round 1 goes to C. coum.

In round 2 C. coum throws a low blow to my gut. It’s a little pricier than my usual comfort zone, especially considering that it comes in such a tiny pot. But determined to have real colour in the winter garden, I stayed strong & paid the price.

cyclamen coum - debris — photo by SVSeekins

In round 3, I struggled with where to showcase the winter bloomer. I keep the little bed under the apple tree empty – mostly because I read somewhere that certain bugs climb up tall plants as a way to get high into the apple tree & infect the fruit. I don’t know whether that’s really true, but it gives me a clear spot, visible from inside, for the cyclamen to show off. Good thinking, eh?

C. coum are so small that they could easily be lost under a pile of leaf debris, so in round 4 I get busy & do the winter clean up chores.

cyclamen coum - January — photo by SVSeekins

Their speckled, round leaves started to show in October. By mid-January, C. coum had minuscule, bright fuchsia buds. I often found myself outside cheering them on. It took a few extra weeks for their flowers to open. That entertainment value wins them round 5.

So now, I’m on my knees with the camera, looking a bit foolish, but happy. I’m head over heels. How many more rounds to go? None, round 6 is a simple knockout.

Cyclamen coum has got to be my all-time favourite – EVER. 🙂

cyclamen hederifolium - February - leaf only — photo by SVSeekins

Hardy Cyclamen is more often known as a fall bloomer. Most varieties start in August, and some continue through November. There are lovely examples growing in Abkhazi Garden.

Cyclamen hederifolium (with ivy-shaped leaves) is a bully, overrunning many other varieties. There are several small patches around our yard, but I’m being ever so careful about placing each variety separately and not too close together.

cyclamen hederifolium - September bloom only — photo by SVSeekins

On a positive note, C. hederifolium’s flowers seem to appear magically out of nowhere, and the leaves show up weeks later. That’s kind of cool for a bully.

cyclamen hederifolium - February - rock crevices — photo by SVSeekins

Cyclamen are well-suited as a rockery plant, too. I’m happy to have success with some rooting well into the steep mossy rock in our side yard. My hope is that it’s tough to mix varieties when they’re each growing in their own crevice.

Garden gurus Carole & Bill Dancer have lovely masses of hardy cyclamen flowering throughout their garden beds at this time of year. Bill says the cyclamen spread effortlessly. He chuckles that the ants do the work. They happily move the sticky seeds around for him. My guess is the ants are just as susceptible to this February romance as I am.

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attracting birds, bulbs, months 01-03: winter

Snowdrops – January Gems

02/16/2012 svseekins 13 Comments

The first year at Richmond House I was ecstatic to see snowdrops blooming on January 11. Months earlier I’d planted some & the early pay off was thrilling. Happily more were proving that they’d previously been naturalizing around the yard.

The following year, having a better idea of where to seek out the delightful little blossoms: January 1 – discovery!

Another winter it was December 27.

But this year, even searching vigilantly through the Christmas & New Year holidays, it took until January 11 for my first snowdrop encounter.

With West Coast’s winter being dull and drizzly, a promise of the spring to come is like a ray of sunshine. So even though white flowers are not usually near the top of my list, I celebrate January snowdrops.

These plants are treasures. When hit with snow for a few days in the middle of the month they barely twitched. If anything, by the time I went back outside, more were blooming! In the cool days of our winter snowdrop blooms last for weeks & weeks – well through February.

I like to get down close to the earth & take a close look at them. It’s fun to discover the little green tatoo on each petal. And who knew there were so many varieties?

Clusters in my garden haven’t yet become abundant enough to divide, but now is the time to do it. Usually the recommendation is to wait until a plant is in dormancy before moving it. With snowdrops that rule doesn’t hold true apparently. That’s pretty handy, because once they die back I can never really remember where they are.

I’ve used this time of year to shift snowdrops into different locations, as it was a mistake for me to attempt growing them in a spring-flowering meadow. Although they bloom before the grasses start to grow, their leaves are still busy storing up for next year’s flowers when C has the uncontrollable urge to dust off lawn mower in late February. Zip, there goes the meadow.

Shorter bulbs, like crocus, might stand half a chance in our lawn, but not snowdrops – – nor daffodils. Those are best left to naturalize in our beds & borders.

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© copyright 2012 SVSeekins

attracting birds, months 01-03: winter, months 10-12: fall, projects

For the Birds: Suet Logs

12/29/2011 svseekins 9 Comments

Quick link to Recipe
(thanks to DavidSuzuki.org)

Each December, the urge to CREATE sweeps into our home. C looks forward to taking a few days off before Christmas to play in Santa’s Workshop.

This year the project idea came from a store-bought gift we’d given C’s mum this summer. It was a bird feeder – a Suet Log to be more specific. It’s just like a tree branch with holes drilled & filled with a suet mixture. The birds, especially the woodpeckers, flocked to her 3rd-floor deck. They LOVED it

The fellow at the store said many birds find their food inside the bark of trees, so these feeders attracted more birds than those looking for seeds. Customers had reported over 110 different varieties of birds using this feeder.

C had to make some himself. His Santa’s Workshop project plan was in place early.

All summer & fall, we put commercial ‘bark butter’ into Mum’s feeder each time we were at her apartment. After a while, the cost added up, so I figured it was time to try making the birdfeed from scratch, too.

A year or so ago Swan Lake Nature Sanctuary gave me instructions for pine cone bird feeders. They were stuffing homemade bird suet into open pine cones. The idea intrigued me. I figured the fat should work just as well inside the drilled holes of C’s logs as it would inside the pine cones. Although I came across those instructions this summer & put them ‘somewhere safe,’ do you think I could find them now?

In the end, I found a recipe from Garden Wise magazine that would do the trick.

suet bird feed ingredients — photo by SVSeekins

Procuring most of the ingredients was straight forward. Peanut butter, dried fruit & breadcrumbs were already in the kitchen. I washed eggshells & stored them frozen until needed. The sunflower seed & millet was sourced in the bulk section at Buckerfields, a local feed store.

The rendered fat (suet) was a little tougher. I looked around for plain suet blocks that could be melted down & converted into this pliable recipe for the logs. Even on sale, these wouldn’t be cost-effective.

It turns out, suet is available from the butcher. I went to a butcher that specializes in British fare. The British use suet in spotted dick – a steamed pudding. Who knew?

Once I’d collected all of the ingredients for our bird suet, it didn’t take long to put it all together.