Sleeping, Creeping, Leaping

First I want to share some exciting news from the garden this week.

Voila!  Zinnias in the former weed bed/dream-vegetable-garden-that-never was!

Let's take a closer look at my lovelies!

So much better and more satisfying than

The former weed patch.  Now I just have to go out trim them and watch them multiply.  They'll last until the first hard frost, sometime around the end of September and maybe a little past that if I cover them when it frosts.  As warm as it's been this year, they could well last until the end of October.

Annie's been sharing the abundance of her garden, delivering tomatoes and cucumbers on a regular schedule.

We took some of our haul to the Des Moines area for Prince Charming's class reunion.  Our niece, Melynda, hosted us.  One of the nicest things about marrying P.C. is that I get a whole new set of relatives, mostly ones I adore! Melynda made quick work of the cucumbers.

Introducing me to an entirely new cucumber vodka cocktail. Really could there be four better things in the world than cucumbers, a splash of vodka, tonic water and a lovely view?

Melynda has the most charming lake side play house down by the pond.

I want to stay and play awhile.

Can't you just imagine yourself in here potting, or painting or creating some piece of whimsy?

Mother nature's been creating her own whimsy this week.

The storm clouds in the Midwest are really impressive in August.

After the storm, the sky is its own kind of perfection

Nature now angry, powerful, mysterious; blink your eye and she goes all soft, and lovely. She offers you the abundance of her fields and ponds with an open and generous hand.

I want to make nature all warm and cuddly, but she's indifferent to me. She works her awesome magic destroying and creating completely indifferent to people in her path.  She operates according to immutable laws, most of which I don't know or understand.

And so we study her and try to memorize her haphazard, careless, fecundity. We try to distill her nature into rules we can remember.  

One of my favorite "rules" of gardening is the old farmer's saying:

"Sleeping, creeping, leaping."

This rule of thumb tells you how long after you transplant a perennial plant, bush or tree it will take until the plant gets over the shock of the move.

It spends the first year "sleeping". The second year, the plants "creep" and the third year they "leap"

So I knew this would be the year that my bower would finally come into it's own. 

The inspiration for my bower, a shady, reclusive spot to contemplate the world.  Note the swing, in my opinion (humble or not) it isn't a bower worth having unless it comes with a swing.

Three years ago Ann, the butterfly lady not to be confused with Annie, gave me starts of autumn clematis.

Here it is blooming last year. If you don't have some of this in your garden, drop whatever you are doing and go get yourself some.  The flowers are not that showy, but the smell of this autumn bloomer is stupendous.  Lilac, autumn clematis and lily of the valley are the top three, make your heart stop and count-your-blessings fragrances that the garden offers every year.

  Oh wait, I forgot about star gazer lily.  But really, let's be honest, a star gazer is just showing off and can get a little cloying.

Here's a picture of the deck supports (far right in the picture) I wanted to use to create my bower.

And here it is today, three years later.  The plants on the far left get more sun as a result of losing half of the red oak which also removed a couple of pines on its way down.

One way to thin out and create more sunshine,  have squirrels hollow out half your red oak which will then suddenly go down just narrowly missing your neighbor's house. I'd like the other two pillars to look as nice. But we've spent years worrying about, inspecting not to mention spending a small fortune having preventative measures taken to retain the red oak.  This is the yin-yang of gardening. Conditions are never perfect and we've all just got to muddle through, accepting our limitations, even embracing them.

The bower will come, but it will be slower where it's more shaded.

I have visions of Prince Charming and me sitting here, under the fully-leafed out bower as he strums his guitar and sings sweet songs of his love to me.....Hopefully P.C. will go along cheerfully for his guitar lesson next week. The last time I signed him up for a lesson it was like getting hold

of the wrong end of a badger.

Wishing you the songs of summer, badger free, Wonder Ones!

Lessons from a Charlie Brown Garden

This is not a Charlie Brown Garden.  This picture is from Annie's hibiscus, surprise lilies (more on those in a moment) and cleome bed.  Lovely isn't it?

This is a Charlie Brown garden.  This discouraging patch of weeds greets me every time I walk outside.  What you see is a failed dream.   A dream of a lovely vegetable garden that might look like Charlie's

lovely, order, neat as a pin, square edges and not a weed in sight. Sigh.

Or like Annie's lovely vegetable garden

packed full of nutritious and beautiful vegetables.  Isn't this curly kale the most lovely shade of green-blue?

Here's what I've been harvesting since I put in these tiny little raised beds--weeds!  Wheelbarrows full of weeds, over and over again--weeds.

Every year at this time I'd tell myself like Charlie Brown "wait until next year".  Winter I'd make new plans and resolutions to become a better person, a more diligent and persistent gardener, the kind of person who can grow beautiful, healthy vegetables for her family in neat tidy gardens.  As the weather warmed each spring, I'd give myself a pep talk.  "This is GOING to be the year!  Yes sir, no worries, I've got my garden all laid out on graph paper and it's going to be a thing of beauty."

Nothing says hope and potential like a formerly weedy bed, cleared of all weeds. And nothing says failure like a defeated gardener facing a weed pile.

I have great excuses for my failures.

There are distractions of all sorts.

Bob with tacos, Prince Charming with beer and Linda

Summer picnics

Music festivals

Sheep herding competitions (bet you didn't see that coming!)

Pool parties

Yes, summer is full of all kinds of distractions which keep me out of the my teeny, tiny, in theory oh-so-managable vegetable garden.

A few weeks ago Linda and Charlie were over for dinner and walk around our gardens.  Charlie, always the diplomat, didn't comment on my weedy vegetable patch, like the true friend he is and with his best southern manners and charming drawl, he said, "Felecia, you are a new American gardner."

I love flowers, drifts and drifts of flowers.  Wild, exultant flowers climbing all over each other. It took me a couple of weeks of savoring Charlie's compliment to acknowledge that while I might be a New American Gardener, I most assuredly wasn't a vegetable kind of gardener. 

Instead of that Charlie Brown garden being a reminder of all my failures, it could become a new blank slate for more flowers.  I've always wanted a cutting garden.  This little spot has all of the right features.  It's just outside the back door, it's small, it's behind other bushes so the public doesn't have to watch the ugly part of the cutting garden when it's getting started or I've harvested everything.

And so I tackled the weeding of this garden with new resolve and energy. 

"To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom"--Socrates

As I began to accept that I'm not a vegetable gardener, other unflattering truths were easier to accept. I'm also not the kind of gardener who can get annuals to sprout from seed.  Never, ever, under any circumstances.  Kind of a bummer because most of the flowers I want to grow  in my new cutting garden are annuals, prolific, all summer bloomers, that one generally only starts from seed.

Why is self knowledge, which seems so easy, so hard?  I wake up morning after morning with myself.  Why am I such a mystery; especially to myself?  Charlie can see what kind of gardner I am, a different kind of gardner than he is.  But still one worthy of respect.

Since I'm so late getting this garden started there were no plants at the garden store.  But they did have this new tape.  See the seeds neatly positioned in the tape? And very clear and explicit instructions on how to plant.

Just lay the tape down, toss a little dirt on it.

Wait seven days and voila!  Zinnia plants. You can't see it, but they have the tiniest little buds.

It's a small start towards redemption.  You can also see that I heavily mulched these new beds and the areas around them.  No reason not to give myself a jump on the weeds.

This is what redemption and grace look like.  

If we don't learn to love ourselves as we are, can we ever learn to love others with all of their quirks and ticks?  Once we acknowledge our own human-ness with all of our frailties and short-comings, can we extend a little grace to ourselves? Can we lay that mulch on good and thick so that we don't have a weed field in our souls 10-minutes after  we finished the last weeding?  Can we offer ourselves some forgiveness?  Can I forgive myself for thinking and trying over several years to be a vegetable kind of gardener?  In that forgiveness, can we find the ability to love who we truly are?

One more word on those surprise lilies, or what Annie calls "naked ladies"

They are called "naked" and "surprise" because there's no foliage at the base of the flower.  The flower stalk comes up naked, or surprises the gardener without a hint that it was there.  Actually there is foliage.  The foliage comes up in early spring dying back as summer progresses. The lilies spring up naked in late summer.

Wishing you love, compassion and peace in the next week Wonder Ones!

August Abundantly

"Rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee. " Michael Montaigne

August came with a blast of heat, humidity and ABUNDANCE.

We've had corn on the cob

Tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, eggplant. All the bounty of sun, rain and HEAT.

The faucet of rain sitting over us all summer turned off this week requiring a good hour to water all of the planters. Which of course caused it to rain buckets yesterday.  The sky grew dark and ominous and then sheets of water came down.

Can you see how hard it's raining?  As quickly as the storm came it was gone. The skies cleared. I met Linda and her grand daughters for a swim,  before it grew dark again and boom, another torrential downpour.

Summer, she's fickle in her moods, warm and sunny one moment, stormy the next, suffocating with heat and humidity in her too tight embrace.

"The finest souls are those that have the most variety and suppleness" Montaigne"

By that measure, Summer is one fine soul, even if I find her a little hard to take.

This week we are planning trips for late summer, fall and our winter escape. Such fun and exciting prospects await us.  It's especially fun for me since Prince Charming does all of the planning and makes all of the arrangements.  All I do is sit back and enjoy the expectation!

Yesterday's two sudden and powerful thunderstorms reminded me however, of the paradoxes of life.  It's wonderful to anticipate future delights.  Anticipation enhances our appreciation of future events.  But it's also important to appreciate the NOW, this moment.

P.C. and I sat on the porch last night for an extra dose of the eeriness of a big storm's sky as it clears, gray, then green, orange and finally pink as the sky cleared just as the sun set. The fountain tinkling away, crickets and tree frogs singing. We took time to savor this August moment and to look ahead. We were doing a fine job of balancing the NOW with the FUTURE all wrapped in this moment.

This morning dawned bright and clear and thankfully COOLER! I hot footed it over to Annie's garden across the street.

 Annie is one of the best gardeners I know.  Her garden inspires me every week.  She's generous in letting me nose around her garden any time  I want and she's shared so many plants and good gardening advice (life advice too) over the years.  Let's go take a look:

I love this sweet little spot in Annie's garden.  This bed of cone flowers, joe pye weed and grayfeather (the yellow flowers in the foreground) sit under a weeping willow tree.  Is there a more romantic tree in the world than a weeping willow?

In addition to her big beautiful perennial beds, Annie does amazing things with pots of annuals.  Pots, in my opinion, are a labor of love.  While I can let ignore my perennial beds, letting weeds invade and letting them dry out; pots take tons of attention.  You've got to water them almost daily, feed them, dead-head the spent flowers.  It takes love, dedication and perseverance.   You can tell a lot about what kind of person a gardener is when no one is looking.  Annie's garden speaks to an abundance of care, compassion, love and dedication.  Don't you agree?

Annie wins the gold ribbon for the trifecta of gardening.  She's got a beautiful and weed-free vegetable garden.

curly kale 

 You can't believe how hard it is to live across the street from such an amazing gardener.  I could be just the tiniest bit bitter about her above average abilities except that I'm maintaining my zen-likeness and breathing through any envy I might be feeling.  Just the tiniest bit of comparing going on, nothing worth mentioning.

LOOK at these tomatoes!  Gorgeous no?

Pretty soon this guy will be ripe for the picking.  And then Annie will flag me down and invite me to share her produce.  All my green envy disappears as the juice of  an August tomato grown by a woman I love and admire drips down my chin.

If there's a taste of abundance, I think it tastes like an August tomato.

Have a lovely, August abundance of a weekend Wonder Ones.