I actually have time to write!

So I've been very, very bad on updating this blog. At least I have an excuse: my garden is out of control.

Last year everything seemed so easy (although maybe it's me looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses). I threw out some seed, it sprouted, and 2 months later we were up to our ears in produce. That has not been the case this year. The beets which grew so effortlessly last spring, are this year struggling to fight their way out of a mass of weeds that grows faster than I can yank them. The peas took forever to sprout despite obsessive watering, and are now almost 3 weeks behind where they should be. The bok choy was the worst failure of all; last year we had so much of the stuff that we were sick of it. This year we have none. Only about 20% of it sprouted, and what little did sprout got eaten down to the ground by bugs.

So although the spring crops were doing pretty abysmally, I had a chance to recoup with the summer crop. Which so far I kinda sorta have. Everything I had to direct sow; the corn, zucchini, bush beans, melon, and basil, are all doing very well. Unfortunately all my transplants I started indoors met with a terrible fate known as "ripped out of their pots by a curious 2 year old". So instead of the carefully selected heirloom varieties of tomato I'd planned on growing, instead I have generic hybrids from Lowes.

But regardless, I just keep on keepin on, and tell myself that next season will be better.

Compost

I am the world's laziest composter. Thankfully, in regards to compost, it doesn't seem to matter much. Compost happens, as they say.

I know what the problem is, of course. Most of what I throw in there is too big. I should be chopping up leaves with the lawnmower, but I always end up just dumping them in as they are. Turf that I dig up from new beds gets thrown in there willy-nilly in big clumps. Kitchen scraps vary in size from tiny carrot peelings to whole cantaloupe (it was already super-soft, so I didn't want to risk cutting it open, ok?). I actually end up with two compost piles; I like to call them the start and finish pile. The start pile has all my big junk, the turf, leaves, twigs, old Halloween jack'o'lanterns, etc. Two or three times a year I'll turn this pile, forking out all the junk that's still in big clumps. The partially composted, smaller stuff goes into the finish pile, where it gets mixed in with grass clippings, eggshells, and my small kitchen scraps. I try to keep a stash of fallen leaves from the fall to mix into the finish pile and keep it from getting too ripe, but I never seem to have enough leaves in proportion to the grass.

Turning these two piles is a pretty monumental chore, one that can easily take up a good chunk of my Saturday afternoon. Thankfully I don't do it often. I know I'd get compost faster if I did do it often, and it probably wouldn't be as big a chore either, but compost is one of those things that's so easy to put off 'til another day.

I'm not exactly sure why I'm such a lazy composter, because the idea of composting is so fundamentally appealing to me. It's one of those small things that literally anyone can (and should) do to help the environment. Our trash cans are the emptiest ones on the block; not because we're making less trash, but because more of what we do make goes into the compost. All my non-meat kitchen scraps, non-glossy paper, old phone books, yard waste, heck even my dryer lint goes into the compost. (I draw the line at wet diapers though. I don't care if they can be composted, I'm not doing it in my yard.) Just the thought of all that stuff being turned into dirt instead of landfill space is reward enough. Or at least it should be.

Regardless, I have to admit I get disappointed when I see the final yield of my compost heaps. My compost needs always outweigh what I actually have. So many times I've been sorely tempted by the bags of yard waste sitting out by the curb of our neighbor's house. I've managed to restrain myself only with the knowledge that even if I do take it and throw it on my heap, it will probably be a year before I get anything out of it. If I ever stop being a lazy composter, I'll probably be known as the crazy lady who takes other people's trash.

Camellia

When we first moved into our home in July of 2006, the first thing I did with my garden was dig up every single rose in the front yard. It was painful, and not just because of the thorns. The idea of killing plants from your garden, it's a hard thing to do. It was my mom who managed to talk me through it, and take out the sting. "Sometimes you have to be brutal, Megan." she told me. "If a plant has got to go, then rip it out. You have to do what's best for your garden, even if it means killing a plant." And boy, did those roses ever need to go. I don't know much about roses, but I do at least know they're not supposed to be an all-you-can-eat buffet for Japanese beetles. Nor are they supposed to grow a single stem that's 12 feet long.

Of course removing the eyesore roses left a big hole in my flowerbed. A big hole. One that needed a plant with about an 8-10 foot spread, and an ultimate height that could reach up to 15-20 feet. A little bit of research in a general gardening book pointed me in the direction of Camellias. Hey, Camellias, those grow here, great. Oh, they bloom in wintertime too? Even better. So I rushed out as soon as October came around to my local nursery, knowing only I wanted a Camellia.

The plant I purchased was a 2-year Camellia japonica "Professor Sargent". All I cared about at the time was that it was red, and in my price range. It wasn't until I got it home and planted that the paranoia set in. For you see, that was when I actually started doing research on the purchase I'd made- still to this day the single most expensive plant in my garden.

Oh crud, camellia don't like wet feet, and need air on their roots? Better dig it up and replant it slightly elevated. While I'm at it, I'd better fertilize it. Hmm, needs a fertilizer for acid-loving plants, I can do that. Oh dear, camellia don't like noonday sun, and the spot it's in gets just that kind of sun. Oh God I'm going to kill this plant, aren't I?

The camellia has given me my best garden lesson yet: most times, unless you really mess up, the plant will still be fine. And even if it's not, it won't die overnight. There's always time to fix your mistakes, as long as you're looking out for any.

Turns out that, despite the issues with sun and drainage, my camellia did just fine. Spring of 2007 it put out a massive amount of new growth, and by the end of that summer the plant had its first flowerbuds. Sure, the leaves have a touch of sunscald, but other than diminished appearance to the outermost leaves the plant seemed to be doing just fine.

I had a prolonged period of grace while watching the buds on the camellia swell. It wasn't until about early December that I started to worry. It still hadn't bloomed. Why hasn't it bloomed? What's taking so long? Once again, I turned to the internet, and found only worry. Did I fertilize it at the right time? What if it has bud scale mites? Do I even have the camellia I though I did? Once again, my worries were unfounded.


It was worth the wait. Turns out that the Professor Sargent blooms at the very end of the Camellia season, which here in Virginia seems to be about mid-March. A lot later than I'd expected, and although admittedly it throws off some of my garden concepts a bit, once it bloomed I just didn't care anymore. I now understand why there are entire societies and shows dedicated just to this one plant.



Best part of all? The flowers smell just like sweet tea. No wonder it's a Southern favorite.

Envy

It's with good reason that someone who's envious is said to be green with it. No one knows about envy more than gardeners.

Look in any garden catalog and it becomes immediately obvious. Plant descriptions are rife with catchphrases like "eye-catching", "spectacular", "unusual", "exotic", "striking". New varietals are shilled with the implication that you could be the first in the neighborhood to grow them.

Luckily most gardeners are good-natured about it with fellow gardeners. After all, there are so many thousands of plants out there, which can be grown in near-infinite combinations, that there's no difficulty in having a garden totally unlike any other. Every garden is a unique expression of its creator. We can't be truly jealous of another person's garden, because we know that any attempt to recreate it in its entirety would be foolish. It would be like wearing someone else's jeans; those jeans may look fabulous on them, but if you were to wear them they just wouldn't fit right.

Good-natured or not, that seed of green envy is always there, and if anything it spurs us on to do even more with our own yards. There's no shame in admitting it, and channeling it into even greater efforts on your part. Or at least that's what I told myself when I ordered my Franklinia alatamaha anyway.

Spring Fever

Springtime is both the best and worst time in any garden.

After months of being cooped up with nothing but books from the library and those beautiful, glossy catalogs that appear in my mailbox every January, I can't wait to get outside and finally do something in my yard. The problem is that "something" always ends up being too much. Not right away of course; with the first buds on the trees and gentle breezes in the air, you feel like you could do anything and everything. Plant a new tree? Why stop at one! New flowerbeds? Line the whole fence! Want to grow vegetables? Heck, we could never have to shop for produce all season!

Spring gardening is like new love, everything is fresh and full of hope, and the little bumps you hit along the way can be smoothed over, no problem. Then summer comes, and you find out that love of yours is really a irritating nag who keeps vying for your attention when really all you want to do is open a beer and watch a little tv. All those new trees you planted and beds you dug suddenly need watering, and you have to choose between either spending a big chunk of your time hosing them down, or a big chunk of money buying gadgets to water for you. Weeds are growing faster than you can pull them, and pests are eating more of your vegetables than you are.

Luckily, I have a solution. It sounds crazy, but (so far) it's worked for me (when I actually follow my own advice anyway). When you get those gorgeous, glossy seed and plant catalogs in January, go ahead and look at them. Take all the ones you like, and hide them away. A locked box to which your spouse has the only key is a good place. Don't even think about pulling them out again until July. Then, when it's too hot to go outside any time that the sun is above the horizon, and mosquitos have injected you with a healthy dose of cynicism, then you pull out those catalogs. This is when you plan your garden, when you can't lie to yourself about how much you really want to work outside.

The Butterfly garden

Remember what I said before, about people who like the concept of a garden but are clueless on the execution? It may seem condescending, but let me assure you that I'm being anything but; rather, I'm 100% sympathetic. I would imagine that everyone who begins gardening starts in this very same phase. Smitten with dreams of home-grown vegetables, beautiful flowers for cutting, or even just a peaceful haven of your own, we all start breaking ground thinking all it takes is an empty bed and a scatter of seeds (or transplants) and our dream garden is complete. When the hard truth hits, it takes real commitment to stick it through- or even worse, start over from scratch. Even those of us who are experienced in gardening can make serious blunders, but at least we can always chalk it up to a learning experience.

Mine was my butterfly garden. Being the mother of two preschool aged girls, I had fantastic dreams of having my daughters help me create this magnificent haven for butterflies, where they could learn all about nature and its cycles firsthand. The only thing magnificent in the end was how it failed. Oh, we had no trouble creating the bed in the place I had in mind. My daughter Sofia had lots of fun with her little plastic cultivator while I did the actual work of digging out the turf. Juliana drooled and watched from her blanket in the shade. After two days of work, the bed was complete, and this is where I made my first mistake. I opened a pack of pre-mixed "Butterfly garden seeds" and Sofia helped me spread it into our newly tilled bed.

Now, don't get me wrong- the manufactured seed mixes certainly have their place. I haven't quite figured out what that place is, exactly, but I'm sure it's out there somewhere.

As far as I can tell, not a single one of those seeds ever sprouted. Most likely at least half the seed would have been inviable for our climate anyway, as (I've come to learn) the companies who make those seed mixes fill them up with plants for all across the country. When looking at the bed 2 weeks later and seeing only the varied assortment of weeds I had everywhere else, I was livid. I convinced myself this whole butterfly garden was the stupidest idea I'd ever had, and ended up just throwing some random borage seeds into the empty bed. (Borage, by the way, turned out to be another disappointment. They tell you the leaves taste like cucumber, and are "fuzzy"; I was expecting fuzzy like a kiwi, what I got was fuzzy like a Brillo pad.)

Throughout the summer, the bed languished. The borage started to topple over, and the whole thing was just an eyesore; a further reminder of my failure. But something happened to melt that icy frustration, and ironically it was another failure that caused it.

My herb bed was doing well, probably because herbs are some of the most forgiving plants I know. Something weird was happening to my parsley though. Tall, heavy stalks began to appear on the plant. When those stalks started to bloom, I knew the plant was doomed. My parsley had bolted. How could this have happened? I'd just bought the plant from a nursery that spring, and it was obviously a first year plant (parsley is a biennial, it grows leaves its first year, then flowers and dies the second). My guess is that it had been exposed to a brief period of deep chill at the nursery where I'd bought it, fooling the plant into thinking it had survived a winter and not it was time to bloom. I had to go out and buy a new parsley to replace it, but I decided to leave my bolted parsley for the time being. After all, there were still some leaves under all those flowers, I might need those while the new plant established itself.

When the first parsleyworms appeared on the flowers, I didn't even shrug. Far as I was concerned, they could eat all the parsley flowers they wanted; and far as I could tell, the flowers was all they ate. As they got bigger (and more numerous) it's no surprise that Sofia noticed them. She loved to "pet" the caterpillars, and would giggle when they popped out the little orange horns on their heads. Memories of doing the same thing myself to the caterpillars on my father's parsley softened my resolve to give up on butterflies.

Sofia with her newly-emerged Black Swallowtail

By the end of the summer, we had a chrysalis of our own, picked from the caterpillars on the parsley and put into a jug in our kitchen. I also had a rough draft of our butterfly bed. It was the polar opposite of the futile seed-squandering attempt I'd made in the spring. I spent days researching all the best plants for butterflies, both host and nectar sources. Selecting the best plants (all perennials, where I could) I plotted a to-scale chart of the new bed and where every plant would go before I even broke ground. By the time my first perennials arrived in the fall, I had the bed ready. It's huge, easily the biggest thing I'd even done in the garden. It fills the entire northeast corner of the backyard, a rough triangle about 15 feet on one side and 12 feet on the other. I even put in a short paved path leading to the center, alongside which I hope to put a bench where one can sit and watch the butterflies.

The centerpiece of the garden is Buddelia davidii "Royal red". I knew they could get huge (about 8-10') so I made sure to give it plenty of room. Also in the bed is Echinacea purpurea "Magnus", Phlox paniculata "Blue Ice" and Monarda "Jacob Cline", all planted last fall. Now that spring is here, I'm starting from seed even more plants to fill in the holes. Sprouting in my kitchen right now is Agastache cana "Purple Pygmy" Achillea millefolium "Summer Berries" Gaillardia pulchella "Dazzler mix". I also have seeds for direct sowing, namely Asclepias incarnata "Cinderella" and Cosmos bipinnatus. Have I set myself up for failure again? Perhaps, but this time I know it's all part of the learning process. By the time this fall comes around, I'll know what worked and what didn't, and be better prepared to make my next plant order.

In the meantime, I still have that old bed where I grew the borage. I wonder what new blunders I can grow there. I have been eyeing those raspberry canes at the nursery . . .

In the beginning, the earth was a formless wasteland

What's said in Genesis is true for anyone surveying their new garden for the first time. Formless wasteland and chaos. Sure, some of us may get that one-in-a-million chance to inherit a garden from its former caretaker, and continue the effort of boundless love and backbreaking labor they started for you; most of us, however, get nothing of the sort. Yet even knowing just how many years of effort it takes to get that garden you dreamed of, and even worse knowing that our efforts most likely won't survive our time on the property, we still soldier on. What causes this unique disease, the mental illness called "green thumb" whose primary symptom is constantly dirty fingernails and a bookcase full of Rodale titles?

In my case the green thumb seems to have been transmitted from my family. My earliest memories are of my Nunu's garden. My Nunu didn't have a traditional backyard; instead he had a vegetable garden that has reached epic proportions in my memory. I remember the long trellis of concord grape vines lining the driveway, the cherry tree that never seemed to yield fruit to anyone but the birds. Long rows of tomatoes and carrots. The large patch of dandelion, which my Nunu would puree into a sort of green smoothie that would absolutely disgust us grandkids. The peas, oh my the peas. Probably my first memory of his house is sitting at the long, long kitchen table with my Nunu and his siblings, my aunts Lil, Enis, and Teresa, my uncles Norm and Nello, all shelling peas. There were almost a dozen bushels of peas, because of course everyone had their own garden and everyone had harvested their peas. I'd never had peas like that before, and until recently, hadn't had any since.

If the virus for vegetable gardening came from my father's family, the floral gardening definitely came from my mother. My mother's yard can only be described as a showcase. She's taken her bland empty box of a suburban yard and transformed it into a miniature strolling garden; the only grass in her backyard is a 15' by 15' square which serves more as a design element than an actual lawn. I had wedding pictures taken in her backyard, and everyone who sees those photos just has to know where they were taken. Her backyard was always a haven for butterflies, childhood memories of which have definitely inspired my own butterfly garden. Earlier on in life it was the ever-present wildlife in the yard that intrigued me; the little toad that lived in a hole in her limestone rock wall, the ever-present birds nests in the trees, the interesting bugs I could find by flipping over paving stones (a habit which infuriated her to no end). As I got older it was the plants themselves that intrigued me. The yard grew more and more shady as time when on and trees grew, so my mother replaced many of her ordinary sun-loving plants with unusual shade-loving wildflowers. The bloodroot, used as a dye by natives, which would pop up its white flowers seemingly out of nowhere in the spring. Dutchman's breeches, just because of the hilarious name. Solomon's seal, which for some reason I used to eat the seeds from as a child (thankfully they seem to have been non-poisonous).

Although I've been living with gardens all my life, it really wasn't until we bought our house that the green thumb virus, dormant for so long, began to surface. Though the yard wasn't entirely a formless wasteland, it was what I think would qualify as an amorphous wasteland. The backyard was an empty slate; all grass, with signs that there had originally been some sort of flowerbed along one fence (this later turned out to have had canna in it). The front yard was a classic example of someone who likes the idea of gardening, but doesn't quite know how to execute it. There were beautiful azaleas along the front of the house, behind which was a riot of some of the most overcrowded and disease-riddled roses I'd ever seen. The boxwood hedges had been sheared into nice shapes, but the deadwood had never been removed, so behind the thin screen of green was a snarl of dead branches looking like a Gorgon's hair. I'm not sure what flowers they originally had in the beds, as the only survivors were one daffodil, one tulip, two crocus, and the ever-present dianthus. Of course I can't forget the greatest crime, the huge old oak tree near the street, which for some reason the previous owner had decided to top. What should have been a graceful sentinel shading our lawn and home, instead looked like some comical monstrosity: a giant green Q-tip, strangely deformed and with no aesthetic appeal. Even now that Q-tip mocks me, and fills me with helpless rage against the person who committed this crime against Nature in the most literal sense.

But rather than be daunted by the state of entropy I was moving into, I was invigorated. The green thumb took me like a fever, making me delirious with aspirations which I still don't think I'll be able to achieve, but I'm going to try anyway. Because at the end of the day, I know that this sickness brings me a greater happiness and quality of life than I would ever have gotten by just putting down rocks.