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
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