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.
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?
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