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
When the garden first begins to return in March, I might find something new to get excited about once per week: a snowdrop, a sprout emerging from the cold earth. Now, dozens of new things happen every day. I can sit outside and admire the garden for hours.
Today I wandered around with my camera, then looked back at photos from when I mulched on my gardening vacation in March. It’s so different now, and it’s only May!
Dwarf lilac
Back bed from the foot of the hill: marjoram and purple salvia in foreground, lambs ears and rue in front of the chair, shasta daisies to the right
The sugar snap peas are flowering
View from the top of the hill
My new passionflower ♥️
Lambs ears, penstemon, Walker’s Low nepeta
Yarrow
Penstemon
I planted the new bed (background) last weekend. The zinnia seeds have started to emerge, and the milkweed seedlings have survived so far. I put in some red salvia annuals so there’d be at least something there while everything fills in.
The Mexican feather grass isn’t coming in very thick this year 😦
Each spring, I take a week off of work to tend to the garden. Mostly this means spreading mulch over all the beds I killed grass for so I can grow butterfly-friendly plants. I’ve lucked out with weather each year, including this one. My vacation began on the spring equinox, and I had five days of sunshine and warm enough temperatures to work in short sleeves.
In previous years, I ordered 12 cubic yards of mulch to be delivered on the first day of my vacation. This year, thanks to the new bed I carved out in winter, I ordered 14 yards.
And it wasn’t enough. I called my mulch guy mid-week, and luckily he was able to deliver two more yards for me while I still had time to spread it. I finished on Friday, just before the rains of the weekend. Now, I’m back to work today, but the garden is ready for April rains, lengthening days, and sunshine. My chairs are out there, ready for me to sit in them as soon as it’s warm enough.
Back bed before mulch
Front pile in progress
Almost done with front pile
This is where most of the front pile went
Making progress with the second pile of mulch
Gah! Ran out of mulch
I couldn’t make it stretch; I needed at least 2 more yards
Once I decided to kill more grass, I called my mulch guy to ask if they delivered top soil. He said yes. I got excited, and I asked him for three cubic yards, as soon as possible. That was two weeks ago. A snow storm was on its way at the time, and his dirt was still wet from the last snow. “I’ll call you when the weather is okay to deliver,” he told me.
Thursday afternoon, I was on a run on our second consecutive warm, sunny day — the first sunny days in what seemed like weeks. My phone rang when I was about 10 minutes from home. It was my mulch guy, so I stopped to walk, and panting, I answered the phone. Maybe he could deliver that day!
“Hi! I’m calling about your top soil, the weather finally is clear – ” he said.
“YES!” pant pant. Very excited. Grinning.
“We’re about to get another six days of rain -“
“Can you deliver it today?!” I said. In my excitement, I kept interrupting him.
“Yes. Today is the only day. I’ll be there in 30 minutes. You want it at the top of the hill, yes? I’ll meet you there.”
He delivered it in the late afternoon. I covered it with a tarp as the sky clouded over. With six more days of rain on the way, I wondered when I’d get a chance to spread it. If only I could get the cardboard down and the dirt on top of it, the rainy days would be perfect to water it in and get the cardboard good and soggy so that it will start breaking down at least a little bit before I want to start planting. With potted seedlings, I can dig through the cardboard for their roots to get into the earth. I’m worried about sowing seeds though; if the cardboard is still too stiff and new, and I sow seeds in the dirt on top of the cardboard, their new roots won’t be able to penetrate it. The sooner I can get the cardboard over the grass to kill it, and under the dirt and rain to start breaking down, the better chance my seeds will have.
Planting plans: flat-leaf parsley, basil, milkweed, Mexican sunflower, and jalapeños I can start indoors then transplant the seedlings. Zinnias, chives, cilantro, and dill I will want to sow directly in the bed.
Yesterday, I couldn’t stand not taking advantage of the coming wet weather. So despite gross gray skies, rain, and a constant drizzle, I decided to go ahead and lay down the load of cardboard I’d collected from a nearby recycling dropoff. The soil was sodden and heavy, and I’m lucky I didn’t throw my back out as I shoveled, wheeled, dumped, and spread. It was pretty grueling work, and I was glad when I was done. Today, I sip coffee at the window and watch with glee as rain soaks my work.
I need maybe one more load of cardboard to finish off the area for my bed. Hopefully by the time I get to that final load, the soil will be drier. And spring will be that much closer by then!
Cardboard over the grass I want to kill
My wet dirt
Halfway there
The deck on the right is where I sit in spring, summer, and fall to watch the garden
Done! For today. This took about 2.5 hours. One more session should do it. Except I need more cardboard.
Butterfly Mind 