I was distracted at work yesterday. I waited for my mulch guy to call, then once he did call, and once he delivered my 15 yards of mulch — one pile in the driveway for the front beds and a second pile at the top of the hill out back for the back beds — I couldn’t stop looking out the window at it, or walking outside to smell it.
Now it’s Saturday, I am off of work for a week, and I’m waiting for the sun to come up so I can get started. I hear birds out there singing in the dark.
My excitement level to go to the nursery is high. I’ve been waiting for months. I can’t wait to see what flowers they’ll have in stock this early in the year that I can go ahead and buy. I have a few spots in the beds that are waiting for their plants before I fertilize and mulch.
Unfortunately, I think I’m going to have to cut down on my grass-killing. My continued expansion of flower beds is starting to get expensive. Between mulch prices going up and me adding another 300 square feet of flower bed last year, my garden budget is pretty much maxed out: I don’t have a lot left over for plants. I spent much of February dividing perennials to stretch what I’ve already got, but I want new flowers too!
I just want to kill a little more grass to round out the new bed so its edges aren’t so sharp, and then I’ll be done, I swear.
Only a few more hours before I can get to the nursery. Writing this got me a few minutes closer.
We are in the middle of a fool’s spring, and I took full advantage of it this weekend. From after breakfast to before dinner yesterday, I had shears, rake, shovel, loppers, wheelbarrow, bungee cords, hose, and bags of dirt scattered all over the yard. I pruned roses, cut back ornamental grasses, raked leaves out of flower beds, moved lavenders, transplanted hydrangea, and kicked poor performers to the curb.
As I worked, I smelled fresh mint in the mint patch. I listened to birds chirp and leaves rustle in a warm breeze. When I pulled away dead debris and raked out dry leaves that have insulated the ground these last 5 months, I found green emerging underneath.
My mind can finally rest about the garden. Friday was warm, and Saturday was above freezing. Both days I dug holes and moved plants. Then Sunday, as it snowed, I finally found a way to plot out my ideas for how to change everything.
The thing I love about gardening, aside from the fact that I get to be outside, and it connects me to the earth and all the little creatures — worms, birds, bees, bunnies — is that I can change it every year, like moving all the furniture around in a room to create a space that feels new and different.
At the end of every summer, I think, “Everything in the garden is good, I don’t need to change anything next year.” And then February comes, and I’ve been inside too long, and I decide everything, in fact, could be better. If I just transplant these daisies which are blocking the sun for half the bed, and pull out these Russian sages that are hidden by the Black Eyed Susans, and put some perennials in the new bed because really, that one was fine for its first year, but the annuals-from-seed took too long to come in, and then they were messy and too tall and reality didn’t match the tidy vision I’d laid out on graph paper.
My main objective this year was to break up a huge clump of Shasta daisies that look gorgeous during the 2 week period they’re in bloom, but the rest of the season are poorly placed — they get too tall and block a large swath of prime bed space. Their placement bothers me every year until they bloom, and then I can overlook it while they make me happy with their bright cheery blossoms, and then after the blooms fade, they irritate me again.
So Friday, when it was warm, I started breaking up the Shasta daisies, all 40 square feet of them. I completely rearranged the new bed I created last February on my latest grass-killing spree, and anchored the bed with a clump of transplanted daisies. I filled in the rest of the bed with flowers that will complement them in bloom time and in color, so that I don’t have to wait until July for something to happen like I did last year.
And, on Sunday, I finally figured out a way to plot out plants in a way that I can visualize how they’ll look in the space. I photographed the back beds, then annotated the photos using Preview on my mac. I had to combine two pictures to get a full panorama of the back hill, but I think I’ve finally (mostly) gotten to a point where next time it’s warm enough to work in the garden, I know which plants to move and where. The images aren’t perfect — the perspective is weird because of the hill and the angle, so the spacing isn’t super accurate — but they’re good enough for me to finally be able to rest my mind, now that the ideas are documented instead of me having to hold the vision in my brain.
Now I just need good weather and time. I’m dying to get everything moved and for stuff to start growing again.
Done! These are the plants I’ve already moved (except for a few I still need to buy)To do: move every single one of the plants represented as a circle on this photo 😬
I walked the garden yesterday. The sky was blue, the air warm(ish), and the brown ground was golden with sunlight. When I got to my destination at the top of the hill, where I’d planted bulbs last year, I found what I was hoping for: new green.
The snowdrops are pushing up little buds. The crocus and daffodil leaves are emerging.
IT’S HAPPENING. Warmth and growth and green and flowers are on their way!
I only got four hours of sleep last night. My mind raced with garden plans. I could not stop it. On my lunch break, I’d gotten out our measuring tape and walked the garden again. I needed dimensions to draw the beds on graph paper because I want to redo everything. Back inside, I sketched and plotted and tapped the pencil eraser on my chin. I drew and erased, drew and erased. Checked seed catalogs and garden designs on Pinterest. Drew and erased, drew and erased.
I continued to draw and erase long into the night, without a pencil and graph paper, as I lay in bed trying to go to sleep. I finally fell asleep after midnight, and was awake again at 4. My mind immediately went to the garden.
Today will be warm, and I need to be out there digging and cutting and moving plants. I’ll start work early today so I can end early. I need to get in the garden and out of my head.
It’s that time of winter where I walk from window to window, observe the garden, and mentally rearrange everything.
Last year, I thought for sure that I wouldn’t need to do that this winter. I thought everything was pretty well settled in, I’d let the stuff in the new bed go to seed so it could reseed itself, and this year, I’d just let the garden do its thing.
In June and July, it bothered me a teensy bit that the new bed, all annuals started from seed, had nothing to show for itself but bare dirt and tiny sprouts. It didn’t fill in until August and September, and then it was so full it didn’t blend with anything else. And the plants got too heavy and dense for themselves and were mildewing. And the Shasta daisies are too tall for where they are; they’ve bothered me for years, but they look so pretty for those two weeks when they’re all in bloom that I haven’t touched them even though their placement is all wrong. And the Russian sage bushes didn’t really work out the way I thought they would where I put them. And the blue catmint is crowding out the white coneflowers, which are some of my favorite flowers in the garden and I don’t want to choke them out.
So now, of course, I want to redo everything. I blame the Prairie Moon catalog that came in the mail a couple of weeks ago. I’ve bought all these books about butterfly gardening, about host plants and nectar plants and gardening with natives, and here comes this free catalog in the mail that has all that same information, plus sells the plants, plus sells kits, complete with layout suggestions, to plant an entire bed for birds or butterflies. I’ve got my eye on the Colossal Pollinator Garden kit, except that several of the plants included in the kit are not deer resistant, which means I’d spend $200 just to get everything either eaten or trampled by the gang of deer that roam our neighborhood.
Regardless of whether I purchase a colossal pollinator garden kit, the catalog solidified for me that the garden was not, in fact, settled last year, and I will not, in fact, just let the garden do its thing this year.
I started drawing new plans in my graph paper notebook, and I wish for better tools. It’s too hard to draw stuff over and over again, and get the scale right, and figure out how to show “this needs to move here,” and I don’t like how messy my plans become with erasures, and imperfect circles, and the realization that I’ve forgotten plants along the way. And I forget to plan for blooming throughout the seasons, so that there’s always something interesting going on in each bed, and the beds all harmonize together. A degree in design would probably be helpful here. But I don’t have a degree in design, so I’ll just use the tools I have and I’ll do it my own messy way, and I’ll try stuff and maybe it will work and maybe it won’t. The stakes are pretty low, and in all cases I have a garden that grows.
I love this about gardening: that I can continually play. I like change too much to just leave it the same every year.
The town pickup for fall yard waste is a week from Monday, and I’ve got a lot of clipping to do. I spent all day Sunday cutting back the brown Shasta daisy stems, yellowing lemon balm, broken Tithonia that fell over in recent rain, and about half of the blackened echinacea stems. I couldn’t bear to cut the echinacea all back — just this morning, goldfinches swayed on their crispy cones — so I left some at the back of the bed. But they’re really terribly ugly, and we only have so much room for composting; I had to cut some of them for the town to take away. My yard waste from today lines about 20 feet of our curb. Unless I get a chipper, I don’t have space to compost all the vegetation from the annuals and perennials in my garden.
I dug up a bunch of stuff I decided I don’t like anymore, like the wormwood that gets shaggy by the end of summer and that’s just not that interesting to me, and the lambs ears that grew so aggressively, they killed off some of my favorite plants. I dug out some lemon balm, too, to thin it. And I pulled out the tomatoes and their supports.
Mostly it just felt good to be out in the garden again. It hasn’t required much of me this summer, which is good, because I was off paddling and doing other fun things, and I didn’t have much to give. I enjoyed being among my plants again. Roses scented the air while I weeded their bed, and when I sheared the lavender and the lemon balm, the mint and the rosemary, I got to smell all their herby fragrances. Butterflies still float and flutter. At any given time, there would be three or four monarchs on the Zinnias and Tithonia. We still have one more chrysalis (that I know of) that we’re waiting for to release its butterfly.
After I cleaned up a bit, I took my camera out for some October garden shots.
Tickseed and purple salviaMumsDogwood berriesOak leaves trying to figure out what color to beMum and rosemaryLollipop vervain and RudbeckiaTithonia (Mexican torch sunflower) gone wild
Butterfly Mind 