Under My Umbrella

It is true what they say about the weather. Don’t like it? It’ll change. First it was too hot, then it was too rainy.

 I have pot after pot of fickle petunias. Sun-loving, rain-hating petunias. A week’s worth of rain and even the hardiest of plants will start to look all sad and depressed but petunias take it a step further and look all slimy-nasty. With the wedding fast approaching (I refuse to look at my count-down calendar and tell you the exact number of days; it makes me get all hyper-ventilate-y) I don’t have any time to spare for any prima donna plant behavior. So I did what any seasoned gardener would do----I put my little darlings under shelter.

I broke out every patio umbrella I had and clustered my pots together under the shelter. Unfortunately, I had fewer umbrellas than I needed, but improvisation is the cousin of invention and I used patio tables to shelter more pots. Good thing the bottoms of the pots have that layer of recycling and are easy---relatively speaking---to move.

When the winds picked up it became a little challenging to keep the umbrellas in their stands---and by challenging I mean impossible. There came a point during the most recent storm that I decided that pounding rain would do less damage to plants than being smashed by an errant umbrella and I went out in the downpour to close up the umbrellas.

Thankfully the weather—or at least the wind—has calmed down some. We still aren’t seeing the week of sun we were promised, but that’s the way it goes with weather forecasting. Shane would always say that weather forecasting is the only place you can screw up 80% of the time and still keep your job...