garden

Pay it Forward

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All along the Mohawk Trail through the town of Charlemont someone planted daffodils years ago.  It’s probably a 10 mile stretch of the road on the north side where there are clumps of various types of these flowers.  I look forward to seeing them every year and am always sad to see them go.

Daffodils also grow in what seems to be random places.  You drive by what may once have been someone’s home, now gone and there are daffodils blossoming on what may have once been their front yard. I find the resiliency of these flowers amazing.  Not only do they come back year after year they multiply.  A few turn into hundreds.

This is one of the things I’ve learned about gardening over the years – it’s slow.  Whenever you are planting perennials, shrubs or trees you always have to think years down the road.  Don’t plant things too close together or you will end up digging them up.  Take into consideration the spread of some plants before you plant them.  I have echinacea that takes up a good part of a garden now, that was the intent.  It has other things growing with it but I love that sea of pink in the summer.

Bill thinks the idea of planting new maple trees in the front yard of the house as pointless because we won’t live to enjoy the shade.  I say plant them now so my grandchildren will have beautiful trees shading the front of the house in the summer like they did when I was a child.

Perennial gardens are gifts to future generations in my opinion.  Some of the gardens I have in Rowe were planted by my mother, most of the plants cames from her friends and aquaintances.  She planted them for herself and to beautify the property but as a gardener you know that she probably knew that the garden would go on long after she was gone.  I love being able to go through my flower gardens and know where the peony came from or the dark purple iris.  They came from people I loved dearly that are no longer with us.   I love my gardens because I remember a day spent with Bill or my sister sweating with a shovel or moving stones.  Year after year I will walk down the stone path and see how my flowers are filling in.  A few years from now I won’t have to worry about the weeds because the perennials will have taken over.  A few years after that I will be dividing things up and giving them away – to people I care about.  It’s all about paying it forward.

Counting Seedlings

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Our yard has 6 very large maple trees in it, all varieties.  Each spring I do battle with the seedlings that emerge from the ground.  I have a large perennial garden in that yard that is an oasis for these little saplings.  It doesn’t matter how much I rake the seeds out these are always popping up in the spring.  Right now they are the bane of my existence.

I have a bit of an OCD with counting and a few years ago I turned pulling these up into a counting thing.  Every morning when I take the dogs out I go into that garden and pull up no fewer than 25 of theses little trees.  They are only about 4″ tall and are surprisingly difficult to pull out of the ground.  Honestly it’ll probably take a couple of weeks to get them all out of the garden at that rate.  The consequences of not pulling them up now manifest themselves fully by fall when I have to go out with my shears and cut them to the ground because they’ve grown up in the center of my phlox unnoticed.

Counting my way through this garden every morning also gives me the opportunity to visit the plants that are coming up now (and the weeds).  I visit and revisit certain spots to see who made it through the winter or where they’ve moved from last season.  It’s a getting to know you thing every spring.  I guess if it wasn’t for pulling those saplings I could potentially visit an unfamiliar garden come June.

Thrive Where You’re Planted

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During the Blizzard of ’78 my sister was in the hospital for some emergency surgery.  Her later to be mother-in-law sent her a pot of daffodils – there were a dozen in the pot as I recall.  Once they had died back they were planted in a border garden around the patio.  Over the years they have naturalized to the point of hundreds.  They are all over New England at this point.  Everywhere I have had a garden they are now too numerous to count.  They have been given away to friends and family in  MA, VT, NH and CT.  They are now in full bloom in Enfield, around the front of the house, along the driveway, in the perennial garden in the back yard.  They are scattered all down the bank going into the back forty in Rowe.  These amuse me most of all.  For years my mother’s mulch pile was over that bank.  There was a stone wall there many years ago and it was completely grown in with trees.  She would dig up things that she no longer wanted or bulbs were perhaps pulled along with the weeds – over the bank they would all go.

I have planted many plants in a perennial garden only to watch them migrate to where they really want to be.  They will self seed in a sunnier or wetter spot and the original will die back.  It’s no use trying to get them to grow where you want them to, they just grow where they are happy.  That’s how I feel at times about being caught between Enfield and Rowe, suburban and rural, noisy and quiet.  I just want to be where it’s sunny and quiet.  Then I think about those daffodils. They speak volumes about thriving where you are.  It doesn’t mattered the soil type, the sunlight, the moisture – they all seem to like where they are and continue to multiply year after year.  In my head I know that’s how it should be – thrive where you are – but some days (especially sunny spring ones) I just want to be in a quiet spot.  Maybe transplanting daffodils.

Happy Earth Day – go dig in the dirt!

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Earth Day Coming Up

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Earth Day has evolved for me over the years.  I used to spend my time cleaning out my flower beds.  I’ve planted trees, shrubs, and flowers on this day.  This year I seem to be on a mission to augment as much of my food supply as I can with things that I’ve grown.  This Earth Day week will be spent in prep for the vegetable and fruit growing season.  Seeds will be started and although it seems late to some I can’t plant ANYTHING until Memorial Day in Rowe.  There is still snow on the ground and the entire back forty was completely frosted this morning.

I want everyone to know the feeling you have when you eat or serve a meal with food that you have grown.  You know everything about this food.  You may have nurtured it from seeds or have seen it eating grass on a sunny hill.  You have watered and fed and cooed over these plants and animals.  You have planned and brought these home grown ingredients together into something that is fabulously delicious in its own time.

Years ago (really not that many) people ate what was in season.  You didn’t eat tomatoes in January unless they were the “hot house” variety that completely lacked in both taste and nutrition.  Vegetables were not flown in from Argentina or California during the winter. The cycle of meals had everything to do with what was ripe at the time or food that you had put up and was in your cellar or freezer.  Growing up I remember my aunt and cousins staying with us when the garden was really beginning to produce.  For lunch each day there would be sandwiches made with the freshest of tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce.  A platter just laid out with the bounty of summer, a taste that can not be replicated in any way other than to pick the produce, slice it up and eat it within minutes. I understand what it’s like to share the food that I have grown with the people I love.  Hard work goes into it but it’s worth it when you see the look on someones face that is eating a particular plant for the first time or an old familiar one that tastes completely different because it is so fresh.

This year I think everyone should at least put a tomato plant in a pot of soil on their patio or steps or yard.  Throw in a few basil seeds for good measure.  This is sooo inexpensive to do and you will be paid back ten fold in something that you can not buy, the true taste of summer.

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It’s That Time of the Year

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End of year garden 2012

Many people are getting their seed catalogs out and pouring through them this time of year.  It’s good to do a little planning and have your seeds ready to go whether you need to start your tomatoes in the house, are sowing some seed in your hot or cold frame or are just thinking about what will go where in the garden this year.

I’m a planner, it’s one of my favorite parts.  I plan what I’m going to plant and where it’s going to go in the garden this year.  I plan what plants will be next to the others keeping companion planting in mind.  I plan different designs because I hate how boring it is to look at a garden with plants in rows. I pour over the charts I’ve kept in past years to make sure I don’t plant the tomatoes and potatoes in the same place year after year.

I work on an order with High Mowing Organic Seeds that I continue to change week after week from October on, waiting until the last minute to place it.  I read their website for all the info I can gather about the new seeds I want to try growing.  There are always the tried and true to grow like last year’s Gold Rush yellow snap bean.  I cannot say enough about this bean, it was prolific.  I started picking beans in July and picked them until frost.  They weren’t those tough, tasteless beans either.  They were tender and tasty until the very end.  I lost count of how many pints I canned but I know Sue and I complained towards the end of the season every time we picked enough beans to can once more.  Of course now I’m glad I did.

The other plant I grew this year and introduced to everyone I knew was Joan Rutabagas.  I grow them every year and was a little in awe at how few people had never tried rutabagas (probably because they are my favorite vegetable).  They require a fairly long growing season but are very cold hardy so they weren’t dug until well into October.  I fed them to everyone.

Every year I pick one or two new plants to try. Some work out very well like the Gold Rush beans. Some don’t
 but I feel like I haven’t given it a real chance unless I plant it a couple of years in a row. Each growing season is so different.  Here’s the problem, every year there are more and more things I want to plant but I don’t have the space to plant them all.  I have to cut down my list of seeds.

Sad, sad.

There are currently 27 items in my cart.  I probably should get rid of half.

What it really makes me do is plan a new garden in another spot on the property.  It’s always some nice piece of lawn that Bill has worked on for years.  He’s not going to like this.