Let Go and Let God

I've been working diligently to save these bushes. We started yard work here eight years ago. I distinguish yard work from gardening. In my head, yard work is fixing or maintaining growing things. Gardening is picking and planting growing things. The yard work started long before the gardening.

Most of the yard work was done with a chain saw. We cut down dead trees, then dead bushes, then worked on grooming the stuff worth saving. These bushes along the shed seemed like they were worth saving. I read up on trimming bushes, and I learned that you can cut one third of the bush off every year before it blooms to get it back down to a smaller size. For two or three years, I learned that spring comes and passes faster than you expect.

But last year, I knew when I needed to take action. We got out in the yard and started cutting. To cut off one third, it required a cut that was above my head, so Mark cut and I dragged to the street. We filled the front of our yard along the road with branches. We eventually ran out of spring and energy, but through the summer, we went ahead and cut right to the ground the bushes we decided were so bad, they weren't worth saving. They looked like the best trimming in the world would never produce a well shaped bush.

This year we cut off another third. I spent a good deal of time watching them grow this spring. Up top, near the cuts, fills in first, making a weird, top-heavy bush. But slowly, the green fills in toward the ground. During one of my daily bush checkings, I notice this:


These beautiful bushes are popping out of the stumps left after hacking these bushes to the ground. I had wondered how I'd every get the dead, lifeless, useless stumps out of the ground. I guess they had other plans.

I love my new sprinkler. It's one piece, has no moving parts, and is made of cast iron. It was exactly what I wanted. I've had more sprinklers that I can count just appear out of the garage in the spring toes up. I wanted a simple sprinkler that wouldn't die after one year. The best part was that it was the cheapest sprinkler in the store. I considered that a lovely bonus.

I took this picture of my sprinkler, and was quite delighted to find a rainbow. It reminded me of Genesis 9:14-15: “When I bring clouds over the earth, and the bow appears in the clouds, I will recall the covenant I have made between me and you and all living beings.” Me, too.

I am oddly obsessed with my grass circle. We had an indentation in the yard. Once when Rob was between fourth and fifth grade, he was mowing and the mower fell into it and got stuck. Our neighbor was driving by and helped Rob get it out of the hole. For the next four years, whenever someone mowed, they made a production of mowing around it. This year, I had an idea! We filled it with dirt. Duh. It's not like it's a big production or anything. We have plenty of dirt. But I have watered it faithfully and the little grass has sprouted. I enjoy checking on it. Weird, I know.

Ta Da!

This isn't really a good picture of the stairs. When I'm outside with my camera, I can't see the image in the little window very well. I can just see the larger shapes, so I'm not aware when I'm not getting the part I wanted.

I wanted to show you the weeds growing out of the cracks of the stairs. Every year I've done this one yard task. I love these stairs. Old and full of history, they remind me of the Parthenon. Someone thought stairs in the yard was worth all the work of cutting stone and spending resources back when things weren't as easy to do as they are now. Heavy equipment rental stores weren't down the street when these were built. I think they were built in 1950. OK, maybe they aren't quite like the Parthenon, but they aren't like Wegman's Plaza, either!

I've never missed a summer cleaning them. The first few summers I was here, they were the only thing in the yard that got any of my attention, except maybe a margarita or two.

The part of the rock garden that remains in spite of the septic leach field that covers the bulk of it continues to seem daunting to me. I will continue to ignore it this year.

Tradition! (Cue the Fidler On The Roof music.)

I had lived here about three years when I finally got around to planting some flowers. After renting for twenty years, I'd acquired no gardening knowledge. The only flower I could identify was a dandelion. Armed with that and some enthusiasm, I went to my neighbor's flower stand to make my first purchase. I bought two kinds of flowers: begonias and petunias. Rob helped me decide, which boiled down to the two of us looking at flowers grouped together on the "shade loving flowers" side and picking flowers labeled begonias, and then looking at flowers grouped together on the "sun loving flowers" side and picking flowers labeled petunias. Now we knew a new thing: begonias like shade, petunias sun.

We wheeled our haul home on our wagon, which should have been my first clue that there was trouble ahead. I planted begonias in my big, cement planters, which I was wise enough to put into place before I filled with dirt. OK, Mark put them there. I planted a bunch of petunias in pots and placed them in my sunny back yard. I'd filled all my pots with a third of my flowers. So I kept planting. And planting. And planting. All the ones in the ground died within the week. I don't know why. The second thing we learned was that when you know nothing about flowers, don't start with a wagon load.

The petunias in the back yard died a slow, merciless death. First, the dog knocked the plants over, repeatedly. I finally found a safe spot for them along the garage. Then the deluge hit. I'd never noticed before that when we had a hard rain, all the water flowed over the top of the gutters and created a water fall, a hard, damaging waterfall. My petunias didn't die quickly; they just looked really bad all summer.

There was some good news. Rob and I spent that summer checking out everyone else's flowers with a new-found enthusiasm, as if we'd earned a place among the gardeners with our hard work. Every where we went, we'd look at the flowers and ask, "Which are those, petunias or begonias?" Our world had expanded. As the summer progressed, the begonias in the front pots flourished. I'd gaze out the windows at them, water them, and I love them. I think they loved me back. So the next year, I bought just the right number of begonias for my front pots, planted them, and was 100% successful with my flower gardening!

This year as I planned my "annual" Memorial Day flower purchase and planting, I realized I'd reached a milestone in my gardening. I had a routine, a routine I knew worked. I was embarking on my third year of flower planting, like regular people! I enjoyed anticipating this one, little slice of predictability out in my yard communing with nature.

I trotted off (with no wagon) to purchase my eight dollar's worth of plants at the neighbors. When I got there, there were no begonias! I stood there in their driveway dumbfounded. I needed begonias. Someone wandered over to help me and explained that the flowers for sale in the driveway were what was left over after their big corporate sales. It seems my neighbor supplies the University of Rochester with its begonias. As far as I'm concerned, the U of R stole my begonias.

I only knew one thing: I can grow begonias. Eventually Sandy, my neighbor, came out and commiserated with me, since I was finally able to convert from just standing in her driveway dazed to being able to verbalize my problem. My real problem wasn't that I needed begonias. I just needed flowers to grow in a shady spot with my very limited knowledge!

She suggested impatiens. In the end, the lack of begonias was just the push I needed to try something new. I'm falling in love with my impatiens.

Spring 2008

The Vegetable Garden

This is my second vegetable garden. Last year's vegetable garden is now referred to as "the gardening fiasco." It's always said with some lighthearted joy, though, because the garden did its job. It taught us all kinds of things we needed to learn.

The most important thing we learned was that if we planted seeds, when green things popped up, we had no idea what was a vegetable and what was a weed. I used a unique method to try and distinguish them. I just waited. I figured that eventually, vegetables would hang off the vegetable plants. Within a few weeks of implementing that plan, nature, in her infinite wisdom, demonstrated the folly of that method. My garden was, um, funny. I just stood there and laughed, made jokes about it, my family's inadequacy, and the irony that a bunch of self-professed smart people couldn't figure out such a basic human skill. We couldn't feed ourselves. What kind of humanoids can't sustain life?

A few weeks ago our neighbor's goats had babies. I said in passing one night at dinner, "We should get a goat." My 17 year old son said, "We're not really goat people. Remember the garden? That kind of care would be rough on a goat."

The funniest part was that long after we'd abandoned the garden as lost, pumpkins and tomatoes, which we never planted, appeared. Apparently, not only don't I garden well, but I compost pretty poorly, too.

All was not lost. We did get two beautiful zucchini, one pepper, three little baby pumpkins, and twenty tomatoes. Not bad for a couple hundred dollars.

This year, we are using this new knowledge to grow garden number two! Our garden is 14 feet by 22 feet. We bought plants, not seeds, but as you can see by the four pepper plants not in the ground, we bought too many. The stuff we planted is kind of squeezed in too close already. I guess that stuff I read about measuring and planning how many plants to buy based on your garden's size is good advice.

We have tomatoes along the shed wall, way too many peppers in the front, two potatoes, a few zucchini and cucumbers, and some cabbage and cauliflower. We put in a lovely edging because last year's garden did not have a real stopping or starting point, which caused trouble when we tried to weed. I will plant grass on the outside of the edging, and eventually it will look very sharp.

Fairy Rings

I have this fairy ring in my front yard. For some reason, fairy rings fascinate me. I read up on them, and they are just a simple fungus that is spreading, but they look cool. I think I have a new one starting, too. I took a picture of it to see how fast it grows.

I'm not even sure that it's a fairy ring, yet. I'll keep watching it.

Rochester, the Lilac City

I don't really remember thinking much about lilacs as a kid. I loved them, but I didn't analyze my love. Every kid I knew had a lilac bush in her yard, yards which were small and simple. It hadn't occurred to me that there was anything special about lilacs. I thought the whole world had them and everyone enjoyed them, like taking a bath. I moved away and forgot about them, but when I came back after twenty years, every spring the lilacs blew me away. Then, the memories came back. I loved the smell of lilacs, I loved to examine the flowers, and I loved to cut them and bring them in.

We have an old, gnarly lilac bush in our backyard. It was overgrown, squeezed out by other overgrown plants, and looking sad. I pondered this, then went to my brother-in-law's lake house last year. His lilac bushes were flourishing. I asked him for gardening wisdom, and he said he hacked them down a year or two ago, and they came back better than ever. I got brave, trimmed my lilac, and waited. It came back this year better than ever. I was empowered.

I bought four little lilac sprouts from the grocery store and planted them with Mark. Within a day or two, two of them were sliced in half, probably from a bunny. I was so sad. I went to buy more, but the store was out. I looked at the garden store, but the cost was WAY more. I moped. Mark suggested that we get some sprouts from Jim, our brother-in-law. What a good idea! We went to the annual Memorial Day party with a bucket and shovel and came home with three new sprouts with wonderful roots.

This time we put wire around them, to protect them from the bunnies and other creatures whose destiny it is to disrupt my efforts. How can something so cute be so disruptive?