Spring was very dry in our area this year and we were hard-pressed to keep our newly seeded gardens watered. Other areas, as usual, had too much rain. My hot peppers, grown in containers as usual, did very well for the most part. The tomatoes on the other hand, produced lots of fruit but were very slow to ripen due to our cool temperatures. Even when I moved the containers to a south-facing wall they seemed to just sit there content with their green state. It was a strange year for gardening. One of the local market gardeners had a failure of his sweet corn - it was slow and the ears were small. My onions and potatoes were very good but I had the worst carrots ever. Oh well, we'll just have to see what happens next year. (grin)

Our annual spring greenhouse and garden center exploration tour was a great success again. We decided to head out in a different area where we had never been. We only had a couple of ads clipped from newspapers and a couple of county maps, however by keeping a sharp lookout for signs along the roadside and talking to people at service stations and in cafes in the small towns we passed through, we found a number of new and exciting locations. Of course, in spite of our "best intentions" we came home with the car stuffed to the gills with our plant treasures.

To reiterate, this is a great deal of fun and well worth trying if you can manage it. I suggest you go with one or two gardening friends - no more than that unless you can take a large vehicle or more than one vehicle as you will probably stuff it to the gills with your great plant "finds". To arrange an outing of this nature go through the telephone books and yellow pages pertaining to the area you wish to explore; read the gardening sections and ads in the local newspapers and get some good road maps. County maps showing ranges and townships are great if you can get them. Pack plastic bags, newspapers, soft tying material such as strips of old hosiery, sunscreen, mosquito repellant, notebooks and pencils (you always forget names), camera and film is a nice addition to pictorially identify unknown plants or plants with no name tags that are labelled on the table only, one or two good plant identification books, water or softdrinks and possibly even a light lunch - this is thirsty work even on a cool day. Wear sturdy shoes and clothes you don't mind getting dirty or mud splattered - you aren't going out to Sunday brunch after all, you are going gardening; take jackets, hats, sunglasses, reading glasses (at my age you need these), boots if it has been at all rainy or wet, and gloves. You are going to be wandering around rose bushes, display ponds for pond plants, narrow aisles between benches full of plants, ducking under hanging baskets and picking your way across sometimes very muddy parking lots. This is all great fun, you will meet interesting people and maybe discover some unusual plants.

By request I have kept the section about tabletop gardening in this edition: I have been talking to a few people who complained about a lack of space in which to garden - people who have to share space in a yard and people who only have balcony space. As a result, I conducted a little experiment with some of my plants that were grown in containers. I have a round picnic table that is about 4 feet in diameter. On it I placed a 5-gallon pot with a Sweet 100 tomato plant in full fruit, a 5-gallon pot with a full-sized tomatillo also bearing fruit, two slightly smaller pots - one with mints, the other with a variety of herbs including sage, thyme & trailing rosemary and two small pots filled with basils. I also added several pots with flowers such as Osteospermum, marigolds, Purple Wave petunia, begonia, mimulus etc. It made a rather striking display and I was quite amazed at how many plants would fit into such a small space. I have scanned a photograph of it which you can see if you look at the Tabletop Garden. One Sweet 100 tomato plant will provide quite a lot of nice fresh eating cherry-type tomatoes. Tomatillos are also very prolific. If you want vegetables more than flowers you could plant some lettuce, a small variety of cucumber, possibly some climbing beans or even some green bush beans if you just want a few. You can grow quite a few herbs in a small space. Some people even grow potatoes and carrots in tubs although I have never tried it. Of course, it would be nice to tuck a couple of pansies or violas in here and there, and a nasturtium or geranium (maybe even a scented leaf geranium), just to add a little more colour. One thing to avoid is overcrowding to the point where you can't reach the pots to water or harvest the plants. Too much overcrowding could also result in some nasty fungal or bacterial problems, but if you use a reasonable amount of common sense these should be relatively easy to avoid.

To add to this idea I want to mention that while on a trip to British Columbia I went to Granville Island in Vancouver. There I saw, for the first time in my life, floating houses. These were actual houses, mostly with two storeys, that were moored to the dock. The most exciting thing to me was the fact that nearly every single one of them had plants growing all over the place. They were in containers, of course. There were trees, vines, flowers of all sorts and I'm sure I saw a few containers with vegetables and herbs. I couldn't quite work up the nerve to go and knock on any doors but I would have loved to have talked to some of the resident gardeners to see what they had to say about their soil mixes etc. Ah well, maybe next time I will be braver. However, it does go to show that if people want to garden they will usually find a way to do it and in my opinion that is just great.