Thoughts About The Garden.

It was a warm day today, and the sun is now up when we have supper, and therefore I'm straining towards spring and trying not to be disappointed that, in fact, it is still very much the middle of January.

Still, let's talk about gardens.  Because it is warm. 

For the past five years that we've been here I've planted a vegetable patch and every year I am pretty disappointed in it.  I'm not much of a vegetable gardener; my talents (such as they are) lie in the realm of flowers.  Last year I extended the linear bed in the back garden and started another bed around the rock wall and one in the front garden as well.  I filled the front garden plot with a bright green vine called Creeping Jenny, and some big annuals and some smaller annuals and also a bunch of Lily of the Valley that I dug up from under the spruces.  I think my goal is to focus on those beds and really try and fill them up with colour, and also to take out the 4x4 wooden raised beds and give them to my parents, who enjoy vegetable gardening.  I will plant a bunch of scarlet runner beans, though, because they bring me bees and hummingbirds.  And also I will keep my garlic in, if only because I must have 100 bulbs in the ground right now.  The rest will go.

So what flowers to plant!?  How exciting.  I have very bad luck with bulbs, except for oxalis, which the chipmunk won't eat.  So plenty of that around!  But last year the dahlias did well, and the sedum went crazy to the point where I split one big clump into four plants.  The ground sedum spread fantastically.

I think I'll branch out into hardy plants that will withstand our sporadic attendance on them.  The issue is that we have so much travel to do in the summer, and our garden suffers.  In the fall I transplanted a lot of daylilies, and that should withstand whatever I can throw at it, and of course the sedum and other drought-tolerant plants are fine, but generally speaking the garden sags a lot when we are gone.  This might be part of the problem with me growing vegetables, but it isn't a problem I can fix.

It's hard to believe that in six months the sun will be nowhere near setting right now but will have hours left in the sky.  The children will play outside after supper, and I will be watering the gardens in the evening with the cat beside me, watching to make certain I do a good job, and the chipmunk who is fast asleep at this moment, surrounded by his or her seeds, will be on the big flat rock, trying to eat my tulips.