Planning My Garden

When I moved into my funky old house on the hill by the river, I fell in love first with the potential in the backyard.  Not that summer – moving in August, dropping near-dead of exhaustion at the end of one of my wilder summers.  But for next, now this upcoming, summer.  A flat sun-drenched patch currently planted over with good healthy grass, looks promising for putting in a vegetable garden back by the old dogwood tree.  Two little sun-drenched patches out front, begging for rosebushes and a boatload of annuals down by the sidewalk.  A spot in the corner to start an apple tree.  A blueberry bush, just there.  Some morning glories to cover and soften those stern dark evergreen bushes, so primly and squarely trimmed by someone more austere than myself. 

So much potential, so much living canvas to work with. 

I grew up thinking I didn’t know how to garden.  I killed an air fern when I was a kid, after all.  All the poor thing needed was a little light.  I stuck it in a shadowy corner in my room.  But what I’d been naming as lack of ability was actually lack of experience.  I just didn’t grow up with gardeners.  Not until I married a man who had grown up with an avid and gifted gardener-father, and moved into a little house with two huge old – and badly-neglected – rosebushes that I literally could ‘hear’ screaming for attention, did I begin to catch the bug.  Starting with the relationship I quickly developed with the rosebushes in question (they’re really not so hard to care for if you listen to them), and continuing as I picked up tips from father-in-law’s gardening notebooks, I have learned to do a little bit of a lot of things.  I’m hardly a master gardener, have had plenty of things fail on me, but I can coax pumpkins and about eight metric tons of zucchini out of the ground, and apples out of a tree and a few berries out of bushes and a few other things.  Sometimes I can even get them before the critters do.

Which reminds me, I need to start a boatload of marigold seeds this weekend.  They’re good for deterring critters so I’ll need as many marigolds as I can get.

Undug yards and undug days and undug bits of soul:  I can do so much with all of them.  What will I do just now?

~ by Mad God Woman on March 4, 2012.