My Love/Hate of Gardening

[lydamorehouse]

 
Image: trillium in the garden.

As I was telling a friend this morning, I feel like my gardening has a very specific pattern. Every Other year, I'm good at it, the garden cooperates, I end up with an amazing garden, and I feel great about it. This year is the Other Other year, where I look at all the molding leaves that I've probably left too long, despite what every tells me is good for the bees and other bugs, and I just think, "Ah, f*ck. This whole thing sucks." 

I have, in fact, tried to plant things with this in mind. When I was doing a lot of hiking in the State Parks a couple of years ago, I noticed that thing that our former president who shall not be named failed to: no one rakes the forest. Like, it's fully covered in leaf detritus, and things push up in spite of all that. So, I started very carefully looking to see which plants seemed to thrive in this mulch rich, no-one-is-raking environment. I noticed that trillium managed not only to pop up despite heavy leaf cover, but also bloom in a very pretty, very showy way. So, I got some rhizomes in the mail and here we are. The other thing I planted a lot of over the years are ferns. So, right now my gardens might be a mess, but they are blooming. 

The native garden that I spent so much time and money on last years is... doing stuff? It's currently impossible to tell seedling/returning perennials from weeds, so I'm going to let things get taller and more obvious before I decide that all that work was a wash. I do think that I'm going to want to add a few more coneflowers both to that garden and to our fairly sad boulevard garden. 

The thing I'm most excited by is that I finally have some violets established in those gardens and I am praying over them every day that they will do their thing and SPREAD.

What about y'all? How does your garden grow?

Comments

[oracne]

I am growing potatoes in a pot! But it's not big enough for me to keep mounding the dirt, so the potatoes won't be edible. However, the foliage is beautiful. It is enough.

[lydamorehouse]

I have ALWAYS wanted to try growing potatoes, but the whole mounding thing has baffled me. Nice to know that the foliage is pretty on its own!

[oracne]

It's a gorgeous dark green. Possibly helped by the compost I mixed in.

[pameladean]

It is just this week going to be warm enough at night that you could probably remove the leaves, because the pollinators have probably emerged. I saw two huge bumblebees in my yard yesterday, and heaved a mingled sigh of satisfaction and annoyance. As far as I'm concerned, the leaves can stay right where they are until they compost right down. But we have horribly tidy neighbors.

Last year's drought destroyed the lawn, which is now a mixture of alien sedges, invasive if pretty weeds like creeping bellflower, moss, and (hooray) violets and scilla. If the scilla leaves would just stay around they would be as good as grass, but they will disappear shortly as it warms up.

I'm dithering over what kind of bee-lawn mixture to order and thinking I probably should plan to do vegetables in pots rather than expect to have the cleaning out of the old raised beds done in time. The beds need to be moved, anyway -- oh wait. They do not. Our new neighbors are taking out all the trees along the property line. That's the first benefit I have seen to this horror. Okay.

Sorry to think aloud in your comments, but I wonder when I'd have realized that little fact about the raised beds, which I've been meaning to move for, I dunno, five years? Sometimes if you don't do anything, a problem will solve itself. Maliciously, in the death of trees, but still.

P.

[lydamorehouse]

Ha, it's nice when dithering ends up being progress after all.

And, don't worry about thinking in my comments, I asked! And, I'm endlessly interested in these kind of details of people's lives, in all honesty. This is partly why I was an international pen friend for years. I love the minutia of daily life.

[sabotabby]

Wait wait wait you can get trilliums in the mail? It's literally illegal to touch them here. I feel like if they mailed them out and people could just plant them they'd be a lot more endangered.

I am a shit gardener and I feel guilty about most plants that come into my care. Last year I had my backyard redone and actually talked to a guy who knew what he was doing, so this year I am trying to work more methodically. Getting rid of invasive species, planting more native pollinators and low-maintenance plants, and using plants instead of trying to put things right in the ground where I can't weed them.

My pride and joys are my apple tree, which is the first thing that I planted when I moved here, and the rose bush that my mom bought me for a birthday a few years ago. Some of the exciting things that seem to be doing well: strawberries, raspberries, a gorgeous sand cherry, lilacs. Out front I planted a dogwood and a serviceberry last year, so hopefully those take. In one planter, I've already started a Three Sisters garden (corn, beans, and squash—the squash is not looking promising so far) and in the other one I'm going to be doing tomatoes, marigolds, and basil. Someone also gifted me sweetgrass so I'm trying to grow that as well. I'm hoping to get more rose bushes too, preferably of the kind that I already have, because it is the best rose bush.

I saw a massive bumblebee the other day. Just a huge roundboi going about its little day and bumping into things. Unfortunately I also have a boxelder beetle infestation.

This was maybe too much detail.

[lydamorehouse]

I actually wonder if I got contraband trilliums. Because you know where they came from? Canada.

Boxelder bugs aren't terribly harmful though, are they? We get them here, but they don't seem to do much except hang out on the warm side of the house and try to get inside.

The rest sounds lovely, honestly? I also feel like I'm a shit gardener (at least every other year.)

[sabotabby]

The boxelder beetles swarm. I have cockroach phobia and this rivals it as they are almost the same as cockroaches but brighter. And you can't kill them once they're in the house, which they have now gotten inside of, because their corpses attract other bugs.