Let's talk about gardening
There are plenty of people dissecting the chaos that’s going on around us right now, so let’s talk about something useful we can do for ourselves. Gardening is a long time passion of mine. It started when I was 10 or 11 and one of my elderly neighbors gave me a cutting from her garden. I was hooked from that day on. I dug holes and planted a little bit of everything in my parents’ yard. I asked other neighbors if they had any spare seeds or daffodil bulbs, or if I could dig up some that were growing on the side of the road near their property. A lot of those were old home places, so I had a strange mix of daffodils I’d never seen before. Later I had a cut flower business and did pretty well at the farmer’s market, but it was difficult to really get it off the ground like I wanted with a full time job that actually paid the bills.
My parents really didn’t mind. Neither of them had the time or inclination to deal with flowerbeds or ornamentals. Both worked, and we had fairly sizable vegetable gardens that needed a lot of attention in the warmer months. I eventually put in rose bushes, an annual cutting garden, and a few invasive plants like monkey grass (I didn’t know better at the time).
They later got on board with flowers and shrubs and decorative trees, and their yard was full of beautiful blooming things. As they’ve gotten older, they’ve pared back the number of things they have to maintain, which means digging up and cutting down some older trees and shrubs that were probably on their way out anyway. Except that monkey grass. That shit is still there. Don’t plant monkey grass, kids.
What I do now is a mixture of ornamentals and vegetables, perennials and annuals, and I try to plant native species when I can. The soil at our house is not the greatest, so it takes a lot of work to make it live, and I used raised beds for vegetable gardening. I do miss the soil at my old house where all of my flower gardens were.
So, let’s talk about gardening. What do you want to read about? Is there anything you want to learn? Let me know and we’ll dig in together.
Until next time…
Jennifer