The Garden Merry-Go-Round



I’ve just spent another day on what I call the Garden Merry-Go-Round.  It happens every spring when there’s so much to get done that I find myself jumping from one horse to another, so to speak. I leave one project to fetch a trowel and get waylaid by another needier project. 

I started by tackling the perennial border which I’d been mulling over all winter,  having decided it was time to make this 100 foot long bed easier to take care of in my old age.  I have already discovered that I’ve made myself a ton of work to accomplish this plan.  Just getting rid of three quince bushes that not only required the prickly job of pruning twice a summer, but were constantly sending up new shoots, sometimes as far away from their mother as a couple of yards, turned into a major job.

The other part of the plan to ease my old age involved removing certain plants that continually self-seeds in the wrong places. Phlox, Lady’s Mantle and  sprawls of black-eyed Susans were all growing in undesirable places. I’d already placed a bucket of compost every ten feet or so, waiting to be turned into the soil as I removed these unwanted plants.

Making the bed less work had turned into a lot of hard work, but since I always enjoy killing two mosquitoes with one slap (much nicer than killing two birds with one stone) my garden cart was ready with a pile of empty pots which I plan to fill with  the plants I dig up to donate to the Douglas Library in Canaan for their  plant sale.  It’s this Saturday, the 19^th from 10 to 3, the reason this column is early.  Besides plants they will have books and baked goods for sale. 

I’d filled almost a dozen pots with my  plants when I realized I should get the camera and a much-needed pair of garden gloves.  Since it was on the way, I took a buckets of weeds with me to the compost pile and got waylaid by the sight of the rugs I’d spread last fall to smother a carpet of weeds.  It was time to find out if this idea worked, but before I rolled up the rugs I took some pictures. 

It really did work, didn’t it?  But all that clear space… I couldn’t think about how fast it would turn back into weeds, so I returned to my border job.

By the time I’d  filled a few more pots with the  plants I’d dug up,  my back told me I should quit, but then I remembered another job that would be relatively easy, cutting the dripping vines of ivy that cover the Abitta’ garden's  stone wall, a nice stand-up job.  It looks so much prettier when you can see the wall,  doesn’t it?

As I took a bucket of ivy cuttings to the compost bin, I saw another job that needed doing.  This is always what happens on the Merry-Go-Round. But taking photos of everything is making this an easy column. Have you noticed the incredible amount of fungi that has sprouted on all outdoor wooden surfaces? My fences are covered with little red-capped moss and other scaly fungi.  

After I took a photo of the gate, I got the paint scraper and tackled the fungi problem.  Boring.  I put the scraper away and suddenly realized I hadn’t even planted my peas, something I usually do in April.  Ah, that allowed me to kill two more mosquitoes. Where my pea vines climb the fence there were a dozen forget-me-nots that could go to the Douglas Library.

Once I’d filled more pots with the forget-me-nots, I planted the peas, raked half the vegetable garden and got out string and stakes so I could put in a row of carrots and one of onions and another of bush beans.  By then, thank heaven, it was lunch time.  A restful hour reading the Wall Street Journal while I ate.  

  

I’m afraid you haven’t learned a thing from me today other than how hard I’ve been working.  This happens often, and now I know why.  Today’s  WSJ had an article which claims that talking about yourself activates the same pleasure zone in the brain as eating good food and receiving money!  Living alone, I rarely get to talk to people, so obviously I am often tempted to talk about myself through my columns.

I hope you’ve been on your own Garden Merry-Go-Round and reveling in the end of Winter.  But do take time out to visit the Douglas Library’s sale.

Advice for a Beginner



I’ve never been very enthusiastic about “how to” books, preferring to blunder my own way through my projects, no matter how ignorant I am about the job I’m tackling.  The big hazard with this approach is the volume of mistakes I can make – slipcovers that don’t fit, jams that don’t jell and blossoms that don’t bloom.  Even so, I believe that famous proverb “Experience is the best teacher,” as well as my own saying “Mistakes are the glue that makes new facts stick in the brain.”

Last week I received a request from a “Blooming Gardener” for advice on how to start a flower bed, so I put the sensible sayings above aside and have been reading several of the garden books on my shelves to get some “how to” advice besides my own.  I’d probably have saved myself a lot of mistakes if I’d read some of them fifty years ago.

My first flower bed grew like “Topsy” with nothing but “hand-me-downs” from friends and neighbors.  At that point my garden knowledge was limited to vegetables. I didn’t even know how to plant the iris corms my friend Bunny gave me, or what color and when to plant the box of unknowns (they were feverfew) my neighbor Jeanette brought me one April, or how tall a clump of something called phlox would grow.  Instead of reading a good garden book, I just stuck all these “hand-me-down” gifts in front of the sheep fence.

Reading about plants is definitely helpful, but don’t depend on the descriptions in the garden catalogs.  They always exaggerate a plant’s good points and rarely tell you about its bad ones.  Get some books from your library with good colored photographs and hard facts. Ortho Books - All about Annuals, All about Perennials -  are good basic books. No book can substitute for the real thing, but you can get enough of an idea to make some choices.  Read about their height, color, lateral spread and the time and length of their flowering.

If you’re as much of a beginner as I was, you may think that the word “perennial” means “lives forever” or “blooms all summer” but neither is correct.  Some perennials are so fussy they may only live a year or two, or so invasive you wish they would, and as for blooms, most will have only a few weeks of flowering, so to maintain a garden of continuous bloom requires careful study.  Annuals, on the other hand, are comparatively inexpensive and bloom all summer.

When I went looking for a good photo for this column  all the handsome flower beds I found were overpowering,  what you might only find on a garden tour of fancy estates.  They were all full of perennials with a mere smattering of annuals.  Even so, I would reverse that order and use primarily annuals with a limited number of perennials to begin.

A few well-behaved perennials include hostas, astilbes, tree peonies, day lilies and Asian lilies.  Once you’re made your choices of plants, visit a local nursery to look at them in the flesh, and then draw up a plan. Try to be as artistic and natural as Mother Nature, breaking up your planting lines.

Obviously the bed should be designed so that no large-sized plant hides a smaller one, but don’t just make rows, short, medium and tall. If your bed is a border, it needs a background, be it a hedge, a house, a wall or shrubbery. Whatever its color, be careful about your colors.  Don’t plant a red beebalm against  a red background, or a white phlox in front of a white  white board fence.

The border’s width should be determined by the height of the tallest plants.  A wide border that contains only bedding plants is as dull as a chorus line of flat-chested go-go dancers; a narrow bed lined with only tall plants is as gawky as a row of plucked ostriches walking a tightrope.

As for color, a flower garden is a place where you can run riot with bright splashes of primary colors or experiment with limited color - pink and gray, blue and white. When you’re planting annuals, use at least three of one kind in a cluster as single specimens get lost.  If the bed is to be multi-colored, no one hue should dominate and the strongest colors should be separated by planting creams and whites in between.

Despite the fact that the “blooming gardener” addressed me as Hasty instead of Hatsy, (actually I get called Hasty a lot, probably because I am)  I’ve tried to give her the basics. I’m sure she hoped I’d give her specific flower recommendations, but that would deprive her of half the fun of making a garden. 

Good luck, Blooming Gardener, and don’t forget my little saying “Mistakes are the glue…”