When I wrote my first post, I stated that because I weed and work in so many yards, I have more than one garden. I mentioned a friend of many years, a ninety two year old whose driveway borderers, backyard flower beds, and deck pots I weeded and maintained. That gardener, dear Jo Douglas, passed on two weeks ago. I had not expected her to last the winter but frail though she was, Jo still lived in her own home, welcomed visitors, prepared her meals, read, did crossword puzzles and played regular bridge games. This spring, fearing that she had little time left, I had put extra work into her deck. She spent most of her time in the room where she could see the containers on it. I planted the flower box on the deck railing that she could see best with pansies, hyacinths, primroses and strawberries early in March. I made sure there was a pot overflowing with large leaf basil and parsley just out her deck door. I put Early Girl in her tomato pot and added orange andyellow marigolds to it I made sure the Missouri sunflower, the yellow oenothera was planted so she could see it as she dressed. It was her fathers favorite flower. Each spring multiple bulbs boomed profusely along her drive and afterwards I planted the impatiens, and petunias she asked for. I added others of my choice and this year, I chose annual phlox and crystal palace lobelia. Jo had always taken pride in having the best blooming displays in her neighborhood and I made sure this was especially true this summer. I thought this would enough to keep her with us all season. Sadly she died two days before the first tomato ripened. It has been a cooler summer in southern Idaho than usual . Another year she would have had a tomato from that pot before she died.
I cannot have everything I want. I cannot be sure that everything I plant will grow as I want it. For instance I wish I had not put wave petunias along Jo's drive. There is just not quite enough sun for them to bloom as profusely as I wanted them. The single petunias, the the"daddy" strain on the other side of the drive, always bloomed better. Jo was happy with my planting but that happiness did give her any extra time with us. I need to be keep humble. I know that any of you reading this and others I will never know have gardeners you love and miss as much as I miss Jo. I wish I had been a perfect gardener,not just a good gardener for Jo.
If there is a lesson in this, it one that I and anyone reading this has heard in other forms. Seize the minute. Plant for now as much as for tomorrow. Put off somethings for the future but not people. See your friends. As gardeners, remember always how much joy annuals can bring as transitory as they are. I came late to gardening because it is transitory. I wanted everything to stay the same and season to season, year after year, gardens respond to weather, seasons and occasionally, what is in the nurseries. Life does not stay the same.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Yet Another Reason for a New Garden Blog
I hunted for years before I found the world of garden blogs on line. I should have been able to find them earlier.It is a symptom of my ineptness with the internet that I did not. It wasn't until I found May Dreams Gardening that I found a way into other gardening blogs.I adore the opportunities May Dreams gives us by listing so many other gardening blogs on the side of her site. I read gardening blogs from Idaho I did not know existed. I got this blog by following the link she set up for people who want a gardening blog.Maybe one day I will be listed on her site but I need to do some work on this first. however I am very grateful to May Dreams and I want to start this entry by mentioning her.
Next I want to talk about one of the ways I am different from other gardeners who write the marvelous blogs May Dream helped me find. I am not only renting and regretably, part of my yard is a weedpatch only. However I hire myself out for weeding work. I am someone who will weed an area and when I am done, but I will have found any perennials that have been hidden. Because work in other yards than my own, when I think of gardens, I think of more than what I do on this plot I live on. I think of one on the brow of a hill, windy with a view of the foothills I never tire of looking at. I don't forget the backyard, pots and and driveway beds I maintain for a 92 year old I have known since 1973. I consider the needs of the client who has a small patio condo and likes to try new plants every year. I appreciate the overgrown, shaded front yard of a neighbor who has been hiring me and I also appreciate her hot, gravel bed I am carefully clearing of knotweed, prickly lettuce, mullein,vetch and sweet pea along with stray juniper starts, applying Preen as I clear an area.I really don't care for using chemicals but in this last case, if I wasn't using Preen, her brother-in-law would spray with worse products. Since he is injured, often tired, and does things to his own energy levels, he sprays at the wrong times and just adds extra poison to try to make up. I love the man and I work for him too, weeding his yard,but I do not want to work after he has sprayed an area indiscriminately.
Gardening also means my church garden. We have around seven acres. There is two rental houses, a couple of asphalt parking loots and gardens and flower beds everywhere, all of which need weeding all the time. We maintain a poplar grove that was on the property when bought it. We have planting beds everywhere, all around the courtyard, an herb garden, the iris beds along the sidewalk that feature iris's menbers gave us forty years ago, Jeremiahs Adventure Garden that one member gave us and maintains in one corner of the property. One side is lined with forsythia, lilacs, and wild roses. We treat an overflow ditch as a water feature. We have a waterfall in Jeremiah's garden and a flowing fountain in the courtyard that runs over water sculpted lava rock. There is a labyrinth to walk.
All the other gardening blogs I read seem to be only of an individual yard. Actually, there is lot of sense to this. Plants, seasons, experiences, weeds and soil along with cats, dogs, and friends, one small yard can make a fascinating garden book. It is harder to write of gardening in a variety of places than one yard that evolves throughout a number of years. But my gardening life is not about one yard but many. That is the gardening experience that goes on
Next I want to talk about one of the ways I am different from other gardeners who write the marvelous blogs May Dream helped me find. I am not only renting and regretably, part of my yard is a weedpatch only. However I hire myself out for weeding work. I am someone who will weed an area and when I am done, but I will have found any perennials that have been hidden. Because work in other yards than my own, when I think of gardens, I think of more than what I do on this plot I live on. I think of one on the brow of a hill, windy with a view of the foothills I never tire of looking at. I don't forget the backyard, pots and and driveway beds I maintain for a 92 year old I have known since 1973. I consider the needs of the client who has a small patio condo and likes to try new plants every year. I appreciate the overgrown, shaded front yard of a neighbor who has been hiring me and I also appreciate her hot, gravel bed I am carefully clearing of knotweed, prickly lettuce, mullein,vetch and sweet pea along with stray juniper starts, applying Preen as I clear an area.I really don't care for using chemicals but in this last case, if I wasn't using Preen, her brother-in-law would spray with worse products. Since he is injured, often tired, and does things to his own energy levels, he sprays at the wrong times and just adds extra poison to try to make up. I love the man and I work for him too, weeding his yard,but I do not want to work after he has sprayed an area indiscriminately.
Gardening also means my church garden. We have around seven acres. There is two rental houses, a couple of asphalt parking loots and gardens and flower beds everywhere, all of which need weeding all the time. We maintain a poplar grove that was on the property when bought it. We have planting beds everywhere, all around the courtyard, an herb garden, the iris beds along the sidewalk that feature iris's menbers gave us forty years ago, Jeremiahs Adventure Garden that one member gave us and maintains in one corner of the property. One side is lined with forsythia, lilacs, and wild roses. We treat an overflow ditch as a water feature. We have a waterfall in Jeremiah's garden and a flowing fountain in the courtyard that runs over water sculpted lava rock. There is a labyrinth to walk.
All the other gardening blogs I read seem to be only of an individual yard. Actually, there is lot of sense to this. Plants, seasons, experiences, weeds and soil along with cats, dogs, and friends, one small yard can make a fascinating garden book. It is harder to write of gardening in a variety of places than one yard that evolves throughout a number of years. But my gardening life is not about one yard but many. That is the gardening experience that goes on
Monday, July 12, 2010
Why Another Gardening Blog
I am writing a gardening blog because as much as I enjoy other blogs, none of them quite include what I read gardening blogs looking for. For instance, most of them include more photography than writing. Eventually there will be photos on this blog but I want the writing to be the most important portion. Most garden bloggers own the land they garden on. I am renting. Most have more garden space than I do. I am in a two bedroom, duplex with a small yard. Most garden bloggers can take marvelous photos in their own gardens. Me, I have a weed patch.
Several years ago, my partner asked to stop watering the backyard. She thought that it would die and we could start over again. Nah, except for my back flower bed and the rhubarb I refused to let go, the place sprouted cheat grass,crabgrass, pepperweed, wild morning glory and so on. I kept my flower bed free of these but for the crabgass that comes in from under the fence, and I keep that to a minimal amount. I like a small amount of crabgass in my garden-very small-because I have noticed that crabgass encourages worms. Worms seem to like to follow crabgrass roots and worms seem to find nourishment where crabgrass grows. I have begun to weed and slowly to put some grass back in. My partner suggested we wait until we get ahead and then do it all at once but this I have wouldn't agree to. We will never get ahead. And I want to see my tulips next fall without looking through weeds to do so.
I am slowly bringing back my foxgloves. I have some but this property used to have a full flowering bank of them. The foxgloves came from my partners side of the family. Her grandmother collected the seed in the yard of a daughter of hers in Portland, Oregon and foxgloves used to sprout everywhere. When they almost complete disapeared, my partner quit caring about the yard. I had been encouraging them and we had ended up with a nice, wide eight foot group of them against the fence on the south side. But we were going through a crazy period with no time and the lawn mower was on the blink so I hired a mower. He was to come and mow the yard when we were gone. I didn't think to instruct him to leave the foxgloves alone. They were well over three feet high and in full bloom. Mowers mow grass, not flowers in full bloom, right? Wrong!!! This man wanted my business and he wanted to be through. He cut those foxgloves back to the roots, utterly destroyed them. Only a bare few showed up the next year. I had paid him in advance so there was nothing I could do. He did attempt to talk to me but I ignored him. Someone so stupid that I have to tell him to leave a three foot high stand of blooming flowers alone is not worth one syllable of my time. I learned the hard way that no mower is over to be on this property unless I am there. Mowers are not gardeners. Anyway, once we did not have foxgloves, or no more than a few, my partner seemed blind to what else was growing.
I did have some foxgloves left and I began trying to bring them back. But there were very few and they did not seem as vigorous. Maybe they needed a larger amount to polinate each other adequately. Plus I had also gotten into nasturitams and I planted a few too many of those. Nasturtiams are rapacious about space. They spread wide and they smother other plants under their leaves. They killed over half of the foxgloves that were left by smothering them. Remember foxgloves are a biennial and take two years to grow. The second year they are giants and can usually take care of themselves-sans mowers-but the first year they have to be babied. Or they do now in my backyard. When there were hundreds of them, even the first year foxgloves were hardier .
I was sentimental about that old strain but I have begun buying other foxgloves seeds. I have Pam's Choice from Thompson and Morgan, a two foot high plant with wide pink blossoms that point upwards and it is doing well. I bough ta "sunset " strain of foxgloves from The Nature Company in town. These are mild orange and yellow and seem to spread, not rise up in spires.I am going to Offut Lake outside of Olympia, Washington in late July for a family reunuion. I will gather wild foxglove seeds there. The ones from Portland decades ago were originally hand gathered in the northwest. Foxgloves seems to be the key to this yard. The more foxgloves I have on it, the less wild ideas my partner gets about destroying this yard-in the cause of rebuilding it. The more foxgloves we have, the more work gets done.
Several years ago, my partner asked to stop watering the backyard. She thought that it would die and we could start over again. Nah, except for my back flower bed and the rhubarb I refused to let go, the place sprouted cheat grass,crabgrass, pepperweed, wild morning glory and so on. I kept my flower bed free of these but for the crabgass that comes in from under the fence, and I keep that to a minimal amount. I like a small amount of crabgass in my garden-very small-because I have noticed that crabgass encourages worms. Worms seem to like to follow crabgrass roots and worms seem to find nourishment where crabgrass grows. I have begun to weed and slowly to put some grass back in. My partner suggested we wait until we get ahead and then do it all at once but this I have wouldn't agree to. We will never get ahead. And I want to see my tulips next fall without looking through weeds to do so.
I am slowly bringing back my foxgloves. I have some but this property used to have a full flowering bank of them. The foxgloves came from my partners side of the family. Her grandmother collected the seed in the yard of a daughter of hers in Portland, Oregon and foxgloves used to sprout everywhere. When they almost complete disapeared, my partner quit caring about the yard. I had been encouraging them and we had ended up with a nice, wide eight foot group of them against the fence on the south side. But we were going through a crazy period with no time and the lawn mower was on the blink so I hired a mower. He was to come and mow the yard when we were gone. I didn't think to instruct him to leave the foxgloves alone. They were well over three feet high and in full bloom. Mowers mow grass, not flowers in full bloom, right? Wrong!!! This man wanted my business and he wanted to be through. He cut those foxgloves back to the roots, utterly destroyed them. Only a bare few showed up the next year. I had paid him in advance so there was nothing I could do. He did attempt to talk to me but I ignored him. Someone so stupid that I have to tell him to leave a three foot high stand of blooming flowers alone is not worth one syllable of my time. I learned the hard way that no mower is over to be on this property unless I am there. Mowers are not gardeners. Anyway, once we did not have foxgloves, or no more than a few, my partner seemed blind to what else was growing.
I did have some foxgloves left and I began trying to bring them back. But there were very few and they did not seem as vigorous. Maybe they needed a larger amount to polinate each other adequately. Plus I had also gotten into nasturitams and I planted a few too many of those. Nasturtiams are rapacious about space. They spread wide and they smother other plants under their leaves. They killed over half of the foxgloves that were left by smothering them. Remember foxgloves are a biennial and take two years to grow. The second year they are giants and can usually take care of themselves-sans mowers-but the first year they have to be babied. Or they do now in my backyard. When there were hundreds of them, even the first year foxgloves were hardier .
I was sentimental about that old strain but I have begun buying other foxgloves seeds. I have Pam's Choice from Thompson and Morgan, a two foot high plant with wide pink blossoms that point upwards and it is doing well. I bough ta "sunset " strain of foxgloves from The Nature Company in town. These are mild orange and yellow and seem to spread, not rise up in spires.I am going to Offut Lake outside of Olympia, Washington in late July for a family reunuion. I will gather wild foxglove seeds there. The ones from Portland decades ago were originally hand gathered in the northwest. Foxgloves seems to be the key to this yard. The more foxgloves I have on it, the less wild ideas my partner gets about destroying this yard-in the cause of rebuilding it. The more foxgloves we have, the more work gets done.
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