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

[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.