My Garden, as Dinner.
New pics are up…
I was just reading Takoma Gardener’s post on Garden Rant (one of the thousands of gardening blogs I have bookmarked for daily ooh-ing and aah-ing). She claims that gardening in summer can be condensed to 39 words:
- “Walk your garden every day, if possible, weeding as you go. Look at your plants and occasionally remove what’s dead or overcrowding. Notice your rainfall and water as needed. And don’t plant or move a damn thing until September. “
Ha. Ha. Ha.
My garden, on the other hand, never makes me sigh and shake my head (and trowel) in frustration as much as it does in summer. Yes, all the perennials are flowering like mad, it’s true. But they’re also spreading out, flopping about, and generally trying to look as ungainly and unkempt as they possibly can during their most beautiful season. I (yes, I, who saves little anonymous volunteer seedlings and plants them in the back in the hopes that they might one day, long after I am dead, become trees) have decided to rip out the yarrow in the back as soon as it’s cool enough to plant something else in its place. I’ve tried everything to keep it from falling over; I once spent two hours outside in a rainstorm, threading it through an old peony cage. Yet it persists in floppage! Its blossoms fade, it reclines on top of other plants… out it goes.
On top of the wishy-washy attitude that my plants seem to have towards verticality in general, my poor little garden has become inundated with pests. Something has attacked my beautiful, five-foot-tall David phlox in the peak of its bloom, and now its lush, cottony fragrant clouds of flowers have withered back to dry yellow stems. I suspect voles. My roses have black spot, my tomatoes (I discovered this evening) have been cleanly sheared back at least six inches (really, it looks like they used clippers!) by some kind of caterpillar (grrr, wait till I find the beastie).
And those damn Japaneses beetles!!! They don’t multiply. They don’t breed. They fester. They swarm. I interrupt whole orgiastic multitudes of them every time I go out in the garden. Each venture outdoors becomes a Japanese-beetle-hunt. Not a single rose has survived infestation; I uplift their faces and pull handfuls – handfuls! – of the revolting, buzzing, prickly bugs off each one. My birch trees are gamely trying to cope with branches drooping with six or more to a leaf. Yes, I’ve set traps – for all the good it seems to do. Well, at least they provide me a place to stick the suckers whenever I go out on my twice-daily beetle-raids. I do get a measure of grim satisfaction of snatching handful after handful of the little beasties and manually dropping them into the traps.
So, Ms. Takoma Gardener… only one thing you said makes sense to me – that part about “removing what’s dead.” -sigh- How can someone gardening only 15 minutes away geographically be on a completely different planet?