Author: susansdailygarden

Flowering edibles

A friend recently gave me a couple zucchini starts. Blast from the past – like 30 years past – when I started and was growing vining edibles on the edge of our back yard. And the parcel of land next to us got sold. And construction started. And the vining edibles got scraped up and plowed into the construction dirt pile. Ugghhh. Well, I reasoned, I am the only one in our family who likes zucchini anyway. The melon plants would have been nice though. Lemonade out of lemons, friends gave me some of their harvest many years. I purchased from the farmer’s market as well. And this year I tried again, and planted those little zucchini starts from my friend in a plant pot, just to see what happened. In a pot because that meets association bylaws. Which I can understand. But we did have one resident a few years back who grew corn. Not in pots. (LMBO!!!) And, as an aside, we have lived by corn fields, if not right on the edge of corn fields, for 32 years. My dream house is either on the edge of a corn field or on the edge of the woods, with a little brook, which we doggone near have at the little house up north, but I digress – widely. Back on topic 😉

The zucchini starts grew and yesterday a flower bloomed. A couple verses have come to mind. First was the Job verse (1:21) “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” But, as sad as it was that the landscape maintenance kid stepped on my Praying Hands hosta and smooshed it, stepped on and broke off two daylily plants, and trimmed shrubs that were coming up on flowering season, I hardly think that even remotely approaches Job. The next thing that came to mind was “When the Lord closes one door, somewhere he opens a window.” Sound of Music. I can fly with that. And indeed I did make that little angels singing sound when I saw the first flower on the zucchini plant. Free flowers, I thought! Yellow! Trumpet shaped when they open so maybe the pollinators will even enjoy them! And if I can get a tomato cage (my daughter-in-law had an extra one a month ago), I can even train it. Lord knows it may meet it’s untimely demise if I don’t do something to keep it from the weed whipping and spraying/blower maxing/don’t bother to look where you’re stomping jubilance.

The zucchini loves this corner spot. The spot the Patriot hosta didn’t like (way too sunny). The spot where I considered growing a few sunflowers – hahaha!

Yes those are forget-me-nots in the rock – that I keep well away from the lawn. Yes, those are marks from my favorite lawn chair – I don’t care. Look at that big healthy hosta next to that zucchini in a pot.

Grow little zucchini starts! Grow and prosper!

A Rollercoaster

Hobbies – what a treat. Something you choose to do, without a time clock accountability, however you can, when you can, if you can. Something you get lost in.

It takes a while to find a hobby that is satisfying and fulfilling enough to keep you coming back. I have many friends who love to craft – make beautiful home-made cards, scrapbook, sew, knit, crochet, quilt. I have a friend who is an author. We have friends who are certifiable MENSA people, who hold patents, who design medical devices that save lives. I have a sister, and we have a son who, in their spare time develope finance and budget and investment spreadsheets with formulas that make my eyes cross. My husband LOVES to cook, and wander around grocery stores looking for ingredients for his creations. Who does that? – lol – JK. Good thing because when he doesn’t cook I revert to a very predictable set of easy favorites!

I like to design gardens, dig in the dirt, maintain those creations, and continuously enhance them. Therein lies my 3 1/2 year rollercoaster. From the (now) camping land, to the (now may get sold) very little house up north, to the townhouse LANDSCAPING (read July 15, 2022 for explanation), there have been continual roadblocks. Because I like to garden where I live. Not six blocks or six miles or 360 miles away. I like to tend my gardens. I like to get up and watch the sky turn from dark to barely light and see the lilies barely open, see the “outside” of the buds as they turn into petals that fold over and show a completely different coloring inside. I like my coffee outside in the garden after I have had a few walks around in the “barely there” light. I like the rotations from shade to sun to shade and sitting for hours on a Saturday just looking – in my scrubby clothes, jeans pulled up from the bottom to my knees (as my husband says “pirate” style), hair a mess, dog on my lap, hopefully presentable if neighbors stop by to see what’s blooming. I don’t want to go weed at a church every Thursday. That is not what makes me tick. I want to be IN the garden, where we live.

So … I am on the hunt AGAIN for a solution. Because looking at bushes lined up like soldiers at the townhouse doesn’t do it for me. Because our camping land already has more beauty than I could ever put together, and on a much larger scale than I would ever attempt. Because my husband doesn’t like how small the very small house up north felt when we actually began spending days there. And because we have grandbaby pull to the cities.

A nice small, easy to manage house, with an old back yard I can turn into a garden with grass paths and no ridiculous cycle of fertilizing and watering so the grass gets to a height you don’t like and you cut it – week after week. Ok, I will stop on the lawn speech 🙂

There is a solution out there. I hope it arrives by the time I retire. I am really hoping.

The difference between a garden and townhome landscaping

Today our landscape maintenance company came to visit. They cut back the ninebarks that I had just trimmed to below the 4′ threshold the association allows, and made them into skinny little pillars. They will not flower this year.

They stepped on on daylily and broke it off.

Then they came through with the blowers. I watched as they blew at a daylily, that had absolutely no trimmed branches or leaves even remotely left around it, until the bud blew off.

I have let our association know I will be pulling the daylilies over the next month.

Heartbreaking. The garden survived a re-roof. But not the landscape maintenance team. I have recommended that with the current level of landscaping maintenance team knowledge and attentiveness to detail, the refresh be only leafy, not even flowering, shrubs.

I think the lesson is … there is a huge difference between a well loved garden and townhome landscaping.

I wait all year for this day

I wait all year for this day – the day the first daylily blooms. Yesterday the buds looked like this:

Today:

Early this morning I also watched as a robin chased a squirrel. I think the days of that squirrel causing mischief are numbered – hahaha! There is a new sheriff in town and I suspect there are some baby robins involved.

Tonight we barely made it home from our walk, and the skies just opened up. In full disclosure – we saw it coming and we knew it was close. Afterward though – a rainbow.

And I got a trip in to the co-op to get fresh veggies and a few treats with a friend.

A good day.

Now if I could just figure out what broke off an entire daylily scape on one of my new(er) – 2nd summer – daylilies. A trailcam sort of camera may need to be trained on that area. So curious. Seems too tall for a bunny and we have never had deer at the townhouse. But maybe …

I did not plant this abundance

Up at the camping land there is a whole lot I did not plant and I do not need to keep cultured. Of particular wonder are thousands and thousands of wildflowers.

It wasn’t always that way. If fact, the first year we owned the land, we showed up one night to a shock – the trail in and the whole campsite was wall-to-wall ferns. It had grown to 4′ tall in a few weeks. It was 1:30 in the morning. We went to bed and dealt with it the next day.

I remember back then we hadn’t even brought a mower yet. The ferns have very strong stems so we used the brush saw. That, however, was arduous, so not too long afterward, a weekend’s rental of a brush mower to work on all the trails followed. It was a dramatic difference. We were concerned for a bit that we had gone too far. But 1/2 hour after cleaning the trails, the trailcams showed deer eating again. They loved it.

The trails now are not at all fern covered. If left unmowed they are wall-to-wall wildflowers. The deer can be seen going side to side, back and forth, eating dandelions early in the season, and then wildflowers.

The ferns are still in the woods – over 4′ tall and lush.

Sad

All morning long while weeding I had been seeing a feather here, a feather there. Then I went over by the linden and got sad. Something obviously got a bird.

We regularly see a tan and cream cat prowling the landscaping around the townhouse in the evening while we are sitting out on the patio after our walk. It looks like a domestic cat, nice coat and well fed. At our previous home we had a neighbor who let her cat out to mouse at night. Instead of mousing (we were in a subdivision not a farm community) it would go around emptying songbird nests.

I hope that is not what is occuring here. Very sad.

Time to weed

Up north, at the camping land, we had a bit of a “project”. It had been a while since we were there so we knew the trails would be overgrown. We expected it to be 4′ tall, and we were pretty close. The trail was 3 1/2′ foot tall, and the ferns as the trail starts to join the woods was over 4′ tall. Literally, my husband went and got the mower and mowed a path for me to get out of the truck and start helping.

Yes, there are wood ticks in all that tall growth. We permethrine our clothes and tennis shoes and spray down with deep woods off to keep the ticks off. We have both gotten tick borne illnesses and had to take antibiotics, so we know – be careful!!!

Our dog has his preventative treatment and shots too. Not playing games.

So we worked our way to a mowed trail in, and a mowed campsite. We still couldn’t see the raised garden beds though. Eventually we mowed strip by strip and found them. I think I have some weeding to do!!!

The good news is – I think the asparagus survived. We will see about anything else. And outside of the raised beds, where I planted tulips, daffodils, and iris? Probably won’t know if those took. By the looks of the trail cam pics of the deer eating the dandelions, I would suspect no. Maybe after we weed whip that area I will be able to make out something like iris or tulip leaves. You never know.