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.