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

[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.