With a few warm weekends already under our gardening tool belts, yards have begun begging for some early attention.
Business is blooming at gardening centres, with outdoor season having kicked off early this year. Amin Datoo, manager at Sheridan Nurseries Ltd. in Toronto, called this surge of early-season business “phenomenal.”
While readying for the season by cleaning up grass, tending to flower beds and lining up vegetables to plant, so starts the annual strategizing of yard design, as home owners contemplate how to make their backyards sing louder than the birds in their birdbaths.
“The backyard is your outdoor living room,” said Datoo, who has been with Sheridan Nurseries for 35 years. “The pride in accomplishing a nice garden — it’s something that not only you enjoy, it’s something that you feel good about.”
Datoo said among the usual gnomes, trellises and ironwork decor items to decorate outdoors, pots are a plenty this year.
“People are using pots more to decorate decks and patios — the pots are not just for the front door anymore,” he said. “It gives you what we call container gardening, with the pots you can put a lot of nice flowers in them and it gives you a lift, the height, the colour, and a focal point in the garden.”
He said a trend this year is to plant vegetables and herbs in pots, rather than the “old-fashioned way of having a vegetable patch.
“You can grab a piece of lettuce from your garden and eat it right there. That’s pleasure,” Datoo said.
