Garden Reverie

    Gardening is such a lovely word. It conjures up images of broad brimmed hats, flat bottomed wicker baskets and cute little gardening gloves with a floral motif.

How I imagine gardening to be.

    My reality seems to be a little different, less Jane Austen and more Charles Dickens.
True, I have cute little gardening gloves, but whatever motif was on them is long gone, they are usually crusty with garden grime and have a couple of holes in the finger tips. And while a wicker basket is picturesque, my trusty, rusty wheelbarrow is more practical; I've invariably taken off my hat--provided I even remembered to put it on in the first place; there is a lot of sweating and---if I'm being honest--even a little swearing.

    Elk. Moles. Soaker hoses that manage to get themselves cut in half. Some days in the garden do have more swearing than others. But all that swearing has to have a therapeutic value, right? "Better out than in" as that famous philosopher Shrek once said. And certain words seem to lend themselves to garden use, being agricultural in nature.

    This is the perfect time of year for moving your plants around, relocating them to spots better suited to their needs; more sun for this one, less moisture for that one. Sometime the need is that they go live in someone else's garden. I suggest making a list of friends with gardens and then pawning off some of your extras on them. That way, you only have to dig one hole, not two. Your friend is responsible for the replanting, you seem very generous, and now you have freed up some space in your garden. Win, win, win.

      I have a friend driving over from the east side this weekend to visit, and as luck would have it, I have a few perennials sitting around in pots, waiting for a new home.

     I'll put on clean gloves, find my hat and hide my wheelbarrow. I think she'll fall for it.

How gardening really IS.
PS only one of those brown lumps is a slug.
 The other is evidence of elk with digestive up set.
Serves him right.

Putting the Garden to Bed

It is closing in on that time of year when a gardener's thoughts turn to tucking the garden away for winter...

Or, in my case, when a gardener's thoughts turn to reasonable excuses for not tucking the garden away. I HATE not having a reasonable excuse ready and, instead, have to rely on outright avoidance.

The other day my husband mentioned how nice it would be to have the tall flower bed stalks trimmed back before the snow falls. Before I could even summon my litany of reasons and rationalizations---hello! It's only October!---he hastily added that off course he understands that the birds benefit from picking the seeds out of the black-eyed Susans and the Echinacea, it's just that surely---I hate it when he calls me Shirley--they have finished their work by now and it wouldn't be selfish to trim at least a few back?

Good point. And he almost had me on that point, until he continued on to say how nice the garden would look when it was trimmed back to bare dirt.

Bare dirt?
Bare dirt?!
How would that look nice? How does he imagine that would even work?

Then I realized that he was imagining my winter garden would look a lot like the fields at DeGoede Bulb Farms after the tulip bulbs have all been harvested and then replanted for spring.

You might as well compare apples to artichokes, I told him. And besides, I firmly believe in leaving a few sharp stalks of last summer's phlox will discourage the elk from attempting to eat the tender new growth this spring.

My husband expressed a certain reservation to embracing my belief--I believe Shane snorted.

"How's that?" he asked.

I explained that when the elk go to take a big, greedy mouthful the sharp, dried stalks will poke them in their tender noses and they will run away in pain.

And, as soon as Shane stops laughing, I'm sure he'll see it my way.

My nose! My nose!
 

 

Harry’s Harvest

 I drove down Hwy 508 the other day, past Harry’s old gray house near the blinking four-way stop light.

The sun was coming warm through the windows of the car. The sky was the deep shade of blue that only seems to exist this time of year, its color polished by the change of seasons. Fallen leaves crunched under my tires and swirled up in eddies as I passed.

I looked to see if the pumpkins had been harvested yet, lined up in orderly groups on Harry’s former front porch, the Honor Can with its bills and coins, standing at attention, ever ready to supply the change needed for your selections.

There they all were, lined up and ready to go.  Tall skinny pumpkins stood with rounded shoulders among more rotund pumpkins of all sizes, their blank orange faces an invitation to carve, to create, to bring life to all the emotions of the season.



Gourds to go, just leave your payment in the blue honor can.

The lovely deep red of the Cinderella pumpkins—perfect for pies—shone brightly from their usual place at the side of the house, waiting patiently for people to come and turn them into something magical. They were all nuzzled up next to white pumpkins—one can’t help but imagine them as ghosts—and multi-varieties of gourds for fall decorating.

Sometimes, there are even a few hopeful zucchini hanging out, just in case not everyone has had their fill of them—good luck with that, zucchini!--I am in the mood for spicy Pumpkin Bread with cranberries, or a Pumpkin Roll,  oozey  with cream cheese goodness. I have a new recipe for Pumpkin Dinner Rolls that I can’t wait to try, and I gave the zucchini a wide berth as I made my selections.

Harry is gone now, gone to his reward, gone to that Great Garden in the sky. His daughter still carries on the planting and the harvesting in his honor, and I feel blessed to share in it.

Bloom Where You Are Planted, Dang It!

Ahhh, October!

Falling leaves, corn mazes, and carved pumpkins…

This time of year it seems that I am always waiting for two magical events to line up on the same weekend: for the ground to have cooled enough from summer’s warmth so I can plant tulip and daffodil bulbs, and for the weather to be nice enough that I still want to. It also wouldn’t hurt if those two magical events would also coincide with an early Seahawk’s game---so I can get outside at the peak of the day without missing a single down---and a Seahawk victory, so I’ll be in a good mood while I’m digging and not muttering unkind things about the defense under my breath.

Tulips by the bunch.
By the bulb? Not so much.

So far, I have managed to avoid my usual autumnal pitfall of purchasing far too many tulips. When I am in the garden store or flipping through bulb catalogs, I easily forget how much the deer and elk love nipping the heads off of my just-about-to-bloom tulips---they don’t actually EAT them, they just BITE them---and I get carried away thinking about all the possible color combinations. Alas, I only have secured planting locations for a few tulips.

Daffodils are different. Deer and elk don’t seem to like daffodils and will usually leave them alone, so I feel free to plant them by the bucket full. I have had, on occasion, a random four-footed pest that must have been absent the day they covered Daffodil Avoidance in Elk Class, and would eat them anyway, but they are usually a safe bet.

Moles seem to cause my daffodils the most trouble. In search of delicious worms, the moles undermine my daffodils, leaving the poor roots suspended in mid-air above the tunnel and making them vulnerable to the nibbling’s of mice and—I suspect—even chipmunks.

Occasionally some combination of pests, working in tandem, will result in the odd daffodil  or other bulb sudden blooming in a random location. An early spring walk thru the yard will show stray crocuses popping up all over my lawn. It’s an interesting look, but not one of intention.

Not MY intention anyway, I can’t speak for the chipmunks.