Life update – Susan's Daily Garden

Howdy, Pressers! I thought I’d better get back online after over a month off 🙂

It has been a very different fall experience this year. Some of that was planned, and a large portion was not. It has been good to take the time to reflect, adjust, and plan forward.

As I have shared, in 2025 I fulfilled a bucket list item. I pretty much exhausted the opportunities that presented for propagation work with my daylilies. I researched and planned and did a boatload of daylily crosses. I also harvested every daylily pod from the work the pollinators accomplished. The result was a lot of seed. Hundreds and hundreds of seeds. I was not ready for that, and I did not enjoy what followed – a lot of time storing the seeds and then starter planting and finally transplanting them into the garden. That full experience taught me that I had exceeded my threshold for where I wanted to go with annual propagation work. I knew that volume was not going to be for me. I made a decision to cut way back this year, and I did. WAY back. The result was very good. Save one pod, all of my seeds from this year’s harvest were collected and in storage by the Autumnal Equinox. The last pod was a self-seed (pollinator created) on an Autumn Red (our oldest historic daylily in the garden). It was definitely worth harvesting, and I did that on the day after the Autumnal Equinox. All seeds are now in storage.

So, on the daylily side, the revised scope of my daylily propagation work this year was very manageable, and definitely the way forward for me. I set my goal of not spending time harvesting and storing daylily seeds when I really wanted to be out and enjoying our Minnesota fall, and I accomplished that goal.

This year I also made some pretty transformative changes to the townhome garden areas. Quite a few of my recent posts chronicled the townhome garden reno. And, by mid-September, with that done and all but the Autumn Joy sedum rootings planted, it was such a blessing to just “be” during this beautiful, and this year, unique, time.

Additionally, with the garden at the historic cemetery wrapping up its 4th year since the reno, nice and full now, with a known, established cycle of needs, my work there is also changing. The community has embraced that garden, and often when I go to weed, there is very little to do. Replacing the heaving rock with mulch was pivotal for that garden, and a large part of why weeding it so much easier, but not all. We are definitely getting unenlisted help 🙂 So my more intense work there is winding down. I expect next year I will still do the spring mulch topper, periodic weeding, and the fall cutbacks that are needed, but that garden is established now and has multiple caring, attentive, hands tending it 🙂

The Autumn Joy Sedum are very pretty right now in the historic cemetery garden

But, as I mentioned, this year, fall is unique.

In August I shared that my Mom passed. My Mom was not the person we were intensely praying for on New Year’s Eve of 2025. That was another close family member. Praise God that He is blessing that family member with healing. We are extremely grateful! So grateful!

My Mother’s passing was unexpected. My Mom was 85. Of course, I knew she was aging. But when Mom passed, my world kind of tilted, and I had to work hard to find new footing. I did find that, and it is definitely very new footing. God allowed a very different plan than what I could have ever imagined, and some of my efforts have shifted to new things. I’m not sure how much I will share about that. Still praying.

For all who have gone through loss, you know it is not linear. There are a lot of ups and downs, and they can be very unpredictable. But I am confident God’s plan is good, and I am listening and working what He shares. Another hint – Often we only get direction for our part, not the whole plan 😉 Faith.

So, back to the gardens – The townhome garden reno was very influenced by my Mom’s passing. I was already feeling a need to refresh those garden areas, spiff them up a bit, but with my Mom’s passing, and having spent so much intense time in prayer sitting looking at the garden in its old configuration, I knew it had to substantially change. Emotional triggers are real, and I did not want to encourage them come next spring. I knew I needed a new “go forward” look for where I spend so much time. And I went about it.

I had a number of ideas for dividing and transplanting. I ended up pulling out the entire path and doing a renovation of the look. I went slowly. The plan changed daily. And I love the new townhome garden look! It takes previous looks and melds them with what I like best, plus where I want to head next (focusing my future work on historic daylilies and self-seed daylilies and returning a bit more to the hostaville I had in the past).

And now we are half-way through October.

The hostas are starting to put on a show.

The shamrocks that the squirrels were having fun with are now moved closer to the house. They will stay there until we consistently have nights under 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Then they will come in for the winter.

Sandy’s corner is moving closer to cutback time.

The Autumn Red daylilies are also moving toward cutback time.

And the Sedum are wrapping up their magnificent fall color morph.

We have quite a bit of fall left, but the color show is definitely winding down.

Next year will be very different. The gardens are different. My efforts are different. And my focus is slightly different now too. But I feel good about the plan, and we will see how it goes.

I will leave you with this: My Mom knew I had earmarked some daylilies to “name” for specific people. I did not tell her I had done a daylily cross in 2025 with her in mind, and that it made a lot of seed. A lot. I also did not tell her only one seed of that cross went to seedling. That “1” message seemed to be a theme with the 2025 harvested seeds, but I knew it was probably just for me. Maybe like “slow down” lol. Maybe “It only takes one”. Anyway, that cross I made with my Mom in mind, with only one seedling from all of those seeds, is in my garden doing very well. And the pod parent was way overdue for a move. It does not escape me that I moved it to a much better place the day before my Mom passed.

Now, do not think I am saying my Mom is in those daylilies. I definitely do not believe people become plants.

Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him. Hebrews 9: 27-28

I don’t even talk to my Mom. I pray to God and thank Him for my Mom.

I am excited, however, to see the first blooms from that daylily cross I made with Mom in mind.

And so, as I consider the past few months, what always comes to mind is that God has His plan, and it may be very different from our plan. We can accept that He is in control and watch and cooperate with His work. And we have the opportunity to choose wisely. If God tells us to do things, we can do that confidently, absolutely with love, but also boldly. He will provide.

For now, for this fall season, I am giving myself a lot of grace. Enjoying friendships, old and new. And enjoying the beauty of our Minnesota nature.

This is a picture I took, up by our land in Northern Minnesota. I finally got back up there. It was hard because the last time I was up there was when our sweet dog Darby was still with us. No, we are not getting another dog. I have a plethora of grand-dogs and friends with dogs. And God is saying No to us having another dog. He’s got things for us to do. He’ll let us know bit by bit 🙂

Be Blessed!

Any perennial gardener will tell you that we are an interesting bunch this time of year. We are raring to go, but the weather teaches us patience. I am soooo there these past few months. And compounding that is a not so little journey I have been on to get ready to retire.

So this story goes back a few years. I have known I needed a plan to successfully retire for quite a few years. I have watched various female family members “fail” at retirement, and return to work. I didn’t want to have that scenario, so I started to consider options. I started to look at my bucket list. We had done the camper on land up north. But to do a garden up north we needed a well. That was tbd. Our getaway, but potentially a retirement location to build out. If I could handle not being in a neighborhood. We had also renovated a little house in a mining town off Lake Superior. I could have turned the whole back yard into a garden and spent winters on lots of seed projects. It also had a neighborhood. All of that would have been a success from my viewpoint but my husband was very unhappy. Not with the location, but with the house. After we sold that house, I needed to do more definition of the items on my bucket list. I kind of stalled out there. More like gave up for a while. But eventually I got back into gear and came up with next steps.

I had started to volunteer garden for a local historic cemetery. I knew I could stay very content from the beginning of May to the end of October, gardening between the townhouse and the historic cemetery. I had bumped up against my energy limit last fall while planting all those new daylilies and divisions, but I knew that was a big season finale. With everything planted and the historic cemetery garden switched over from rock to mulch, I knew 2025 and forward were right-sized – enough challenge but not too much either. Where the problem came in was November through April. I simply didn’t have room for big seed projects, and I needed something to do in our long cold winters, preferably with a neighborhood or some type of consistent socialization.

Now admittedly, I am not a spring chicken with unlimited energy, and I also have some health stuff. But our house is pretty clutter free, so it stays pretty easy to clean, and the garage only takes a day in spring and a day in fall to get into maintenance shape. There is just not enough to keep me busy November – April in retirement. But I came up with a plan for that too. I would work toward going back to contracting, and look for 6 month contracts November through April, when I was ready, and see how that went.

Simultaneously, as part of my volunteering, I had a plan to do posts for our local historical society to keep me busy this past winter and to bring more proactive attention to the historic cemetery. Between contracting and writing, I knew I could keep a good level of challenge. And, of course, normal life has normal family and friend activities. All was in hand.

What I did not expect was the level of historical research I got interested in. I wrote a few high level, season appropriate posts and then I started on a deep dive. And that, my friends, was how the Mahala project was born. That project has kept me very busy, through the deep of winter, past a layoff I suspected was coming but may have shortened my runway to retirement, and now almost a month into spring. The research is now done, and I need to start writing. And I need to get what I hope are the “Mahala” seeds to go to seedling and, hopefully bloom. But before I plant those 28 seeds there is a second baby shower to attend for our third grandson, and then Easter. And it would help if I could get the shamrocks outside so I can have that indoor space for seed planting, but it needs to be consistently 40 degrees Fahrenheit at night before that can happen. Oh, bother 😘

I am applying for jobs that really look super interesting, as they come up, but my guess is this is either retirement time, or a winter contract will pop up in due time. We shall see. There is a lot that is out of my hands.

Yesterday was cool. All that got done, garden-wise, was a walk over at the historic cemetery. My husband showed me some new things in the woods – a buck rub,

and I noticed a bird has a very nice nest in a tree along the edge of the adjacent corn field.

I also noticed the old garden has turned into a food plot for the deer lol

More to come.

My trusty side kick is here to spur me on. I guess when you are a centenarian in dog years you can nap on a pillow, on blankets, on a recliner 😂

Category: Life update

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