Gardening in Rain

Gardening in the rain can be very pleasant.

At least that's what I hear, I wouldn't know, I've never done it.

If I'm out in the garden and it starts to rain, I take that as a sign that God wants me to go inside and read a book.

My mom, on the other had, is made of sterner stuff.
Got rain? No problem, she has rain gear.

My mom swears that dandelions come up easier in the rain and that woman is death on dandelions. Woe be to the little innocent baby dandelion that dare to try and take root in her yard!

She has a specialty tool for the job of dandelion digging; a multi pronged thing that you jab into the ground next to an unsuspecting weed, step on the little foot peg near the bottom of the tool, and that  levers the dandelion up--viola!---the nasty thing pops right out.

Then you repeat that times infinity, in my yard anyway.

Abby and Annie don't mind dandelions,
but rain is not one of their favorite things
 

 

 

After my mom's knee surgery last year she had to take a break from her full frontal assault on dandelions, but as soon as she was able to navigate the lawn, she was out harrying them with guerilla warfare tactics. Her knee may have been unable to take on the enemy and dig him up,  but her  fingers were plenty capable of plucking their fuzzy little heads off. "If they can't bloom, they can't reproduce." she reckoned, "And at least I'm not falling farther behind."

In her on going battle against the invasive yellow peril, my mom has begun to range farther and farther afield. The other day I caught a glimpse of her in my front yard, beheading the little buggers on her way home from the mailbox.

How very clever of me to live upwind of her!

Bad Gardener

 When it comes to gardening I am too soft hearted to be a good gardener. Oh sure, I’m all for shooting Bambi and his mother, but I have a hard time thinning plants.

When my perennials need dividing I like to find a good home for them first. Will you promise them at least six hours of sunlight daily and frequent watering until they are established? They love chicken poop, so promise to feed them chicken poop at least once a year. I haven’t gone so far as to require background---look Ma! A pun!--- checks before I hand over my unwanted bounty, but I do like to make home visits and see how the little lovelies are faring.

Good gardeners sometimes are required to make difficult decisions and to know when to pull the plug on a languishing plant, and when to thin with ruthless efficiency for the good of the survivors.

That point was driven home to me last week when two of the trees in our Secret Woods suddenly fell over. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but the difficult decision was made to take down the rest.

Timber!

As I write this with the sound of chainsaws in the background---9 a.m. on a Sunday morning, yes, we are that neighbor ---my heart is a little sad around the edges. I try not to cringe every time a tree thuds to the ground.

Instead, I try to imagine that this is an extreme sport for trees “Whee! Watch me fall now!” And that they welcome the opportunity to become something else: homes, furniture, or maybe paper for poetry.

A new life awaits...

My gardens will welcome the extra sunlight now available to them, and in time, new trees will raise their branches skyward as the Secret Woods renews its self.

And if I tell myself this enough times, I hope I will come to believe it.

Watching the fall of giants from a safe distance. Notice the guy with the best seat on in the house...

If it is to be done, ‘tis best it be done quickly- Me, misquoting Macbeth

Elk Kill Permit: Year Two

You may remember that there are seven steps to acquiring a kill permit:
 1) Sustain substantial elk damage to your landscaping.
 2) Cry.
 3) Call the people who work for the department of Fish and Wildlife.
 4) Complain.
 5) Cry some more.
 6) When the F&WL officer shows up, show him your elk damage while repeating steps four and five.
 7) Hang the kill permit on your fridge.

 I said that was all there was to it,  that you would now go 30 days without seeing an elk.

But, in Year Two, I found out that on day 29 --plot twist---the elk show back up. Bold as brass, two elk in the middle of my yard, in broad daylight.

Please note the absence of flowers on top of the green stems in
the background. Stupid Elk.

"Get the gun," I hissed at my husband, while shooting pictures of them from the back deck so I could prove to the wildlife officer the audacity of elk.

He complies, as any good husband would. "Which one do you want?" he asks me.
"That one," I say, pointing.

"The baby?" my children gasp. "You want dad to shoot the baby?"

There are now all five Sume's on the back deck, one of them aiming a fire arm; all of us talking, hissing, pointing or gasping. The elk eat on, oblivious.

Baby? Are they nuts? That thing is HUGE. Baby, my eye. That thing is a baby the same way these six-foot tall, nearing 200-pound, big-footed fridge dwellers that I call my children are babies...
Dang.

"Which one?" my husband asks again, "The mama, or the baby?"
Double dang.

"Technically, mom" says one of my long-ago babies, "they aren't in your garden, they're in the grass."
"Seems a shame to shoot an elk for eating grass." says another.
"Yeah," says the third. "Seems that grass eating elk would be the kind you would want in your yard."

Clearly, I have failed to instill in my children a proper respect for vengeance. Bet if elk ate XBoxes instead of flowers they'd feel a little differently, I think grumpily.
"Okay." I sigh, "Just scare them off."

So, there you have it, the sad truth. Kill permit on my fridge, elk in the gun sights, and I blinked first.

Full Tilt Into Fall

I feel a little at sixes and sevens. The seasons, they are a changing.

If the end of summer is a headlong slide of activities and events, then we have landed with a THUMP into fall. Cool cuddled right up to Downright Chilly and, at night, flirts with Cold. Not winter cold, but it is clearly no longer summer. It's a lots of wind-gusts-and-drizzle kind of cold. Summer seems to be another country...

This week was the first day of school for local kids. All those new sweaters and corduroy will come in handy. Unlike some years where, lulled by cool mornings, kids don their new fall wardrobe only to have summer come blazing back in the afternoon. Makes for a miserable bus ride home, I can attest.

There is much to do at the Sume house and much undone. Our house painting project seems to be on hold, and I have yet to finish staining the garden arbor.

Flowerbeds need their annual thinning. Weeds could use some beating back into submission. I have a half-formed plan for one of my flower beds that involves ripping EVERYTHING out and starting anew. That may sound straight forward enough, but the bed in question is the home of a very beautiful and invasive form of bellflower that has proven over the years to scoff at my half-hearted attempts to eradicate it and only grows more vigorously.

My excuse for all these uncompleted projects? My high school BFF is visiting from D.C. and it's been a week of hanging out with old longtime friends, cooking and eating delicious things, stories and laughter and "remember that time?" There have been new friends and rediscovered friends, field trips and hikes and plenty of lounging around.

Saying "Cheese" or something...My very good reasons for procrastination.

Clearly, that leaves no room for weeding --or watering, for that matter, but with all the rain Mother Nature has seen to that little chore for me. And I'll either get around to the rest of it or come up with a brilliant excuse why I didn't. Stay tuned. 

Getting around to it...maybe

Penstemon Peril

While I consider myself a reasonably successful gardener, there are a few plants I have yet to be successful with--and by successful I mean not kill them. Penstemon is one of those.

I love Penstemon. I have planted multiple varieties and killed each and every one of them. No matter what winter precautions I have taken to insure their success, when I stumble out of my house in early spring, eyes blinking in the weak sunlight, I find nothing more than dead sticks above rotten roots every time.

Scarlet Queen is my favorite victim, with beautiful red and white polka dotted flowers that look like something Mary Engelbreit would paint. I've killed four of them in three years. All of them were purchased from different nurseries---not because I blame the nursery for the plant's failure to thrive, but because if I had returned to the same nursery year after year, I'm afraid they would report me to the Plant Protection Society and I would be placed on the No Plant List for Penstemon.

There was the lovely purple Penstemon my sister gave me to celebrate my surviving living next door to the Neighbors From Hell. To hear my sister tell it, if I had died from the experience she would have sent flowers to the funeral anyway, so I may as well enjoy a plant to celebrate my survival. I pointed out that perhaps all this talk of death was a bit over the top and she asked me if I wanted to argue about hyperbole or did I want to get a shovel and plant my plant? I got a shovel and planted my plant...

Where it survived exactly one summer.

Hand Me Downs

Gardeners make good friends. 

Those that grow veggies will happily share their bounty with you--when the veggie in question is zucchini they will insist on it; those that grow beautiful perennials are happy to share as well.

Unlike annuals -- those marigolds, petunias or geraniums you plant each summer--perennials come back every year and usually double in size. And every couple of years, most perennials benefit from being divided. That's awesome when you are trying to get a new garden bed filled up, but it becomes something of a problem for gardeners once their flower beds are full. Perennials just keep on producing.

If you hang around someone's perennial garden long enough it will be hard to leave with out at least one "gift" plant in hand.

Which is exactly how my garden came to be full of hand me down plants.

My first ever "gifted" plant was spicy pink carnations from Marie Baker. Via Yvonne Sawyer, I have some of Nina Hackney's beautiful purple Phlox and fragrant yellow day lilies. My mind's eye can still see a tiny, sun hat clad Nina, out gardening among the giant Phlox that filled her yard.

I have irises and columbine I "liberated" from the Lagerquist homestead just ahead of the wrecking ball; rhubarb and lemon verbena from Ruth Webster, as well as a vigorous shrub rose she gave me that, every June, "bloom like a house afire and smell like heaven."

My gardens are full of memories. All these gardeners are gone now, but their memories, and their plants, continue to bloom on. I am happy to share this legacy with others.

Give me a shout, bring a shovel and few empty pots (also some hose mender parts for 1/2" to 5/8" hose, as I invariably cut my soaker hoses in half) and I'll be glad to share my memories –and my plants--with you.

Compost Queen 2.0

 

I am an avid composter.
I am also a lazy composter and I never get too worked up about how much green—broccoli, potato peels--- and how much brown---shredded paper, dried leaves—I have, and at what ratios. I just throw it in there and wait for the magic to happen.

And as a lazy composter I rarely—as in never—turn my pile. Every spring I lift my compost bin off of its current location and move it over a few feet. Then I shovel the top 1/3 of the pile—that’s the part that is still identifiable as potato peels or watermelon rinds—back into the bin where it continues to breakdown into the lovely, black magic that makes my plants leap skyward and burst into bloom.

One of the drawbacks of being a lazy composter is that my pile doesn’t quite get as hot as it really should. The side effect of this is, when I add my compost to my planting area, I’m likely to get random volunteer tomatoes sprouting in with whatever it is I have intentionally planted.

Random tomato plant

 

It’s not a bad idea to avoid seeds of any kind in your compost pile, remember: In a tomato seed, out a tomato. That’s not a terrible side effect, having bonus tomatoes---and I once grew an accidental cantaloupe, which was kind of cool, once I figured out what the heck that scaly looking lump was in my flower bed--- but because of this I never—as in EVER—put dandelions or any noxious weed in my compost bin. In a dandelion, out 10,000 dandelions, and nobody wants that.

Note the Garden Fresh manicure