My Garden

Let me begin this blog by telling you a little bit about my garden. It is wild...and unkept in many places...and would probably not appeal to everyone. But it is mine and I like it. It fits me and my life. I am not a master gardener and I haven't hired professionals to landscape. It always needs work and I have many plans for it and I want to do so much more.

But the reality is...first and foremost...my finances have not allowed me to spend thousands to landscape. My gardening abilities are very challenged. We live on a rocky ridge of land. I have had to make do with what I could find. It's hotter than hell here in the summer...endless days of 100+ degree heat...but on the other hand it can get down to the single digits in the winter with lots of ice and cold.

Our land has little soil...you dig down two or three inches to find a solid layer of rock. You have to use a pick to dig out a hole just to plant anything. We had to rent a jackhammer to plant a tree once. The soil is very alkaline.

When we moved here this land was raw. No one had lived here...for many many years...or maybe ever. There are pretty trees along the edge of our acreage but it was all grown up with poison oak and brush growing in the thicket of trees. After many hours and several bouts of severe outbreaks of poison oak that lasted at least a month at a time. We were able to clear out the trees and make a neat area for our house. I brought some wood violets that my brother had given me from my previous home. So I started with those and a few rocks that I have collected through the years. I love rocks! I made a little square flowerbed with my wood violets, my rocks, and a few pots of flowering plants.

I continued to collect rocks…most of them from our land. As JR hauled them off….I brought them back. He would take huge rocks and put them in the ditch along the road of our property and he hauled a lot of them up to a very rocky ridge on our property. When he was out of town working I would haul them back and use them to edge along my flowerbeds.

He complained about the flowerbeds telling me he hated flowers and they were just in the way when he wanted to mow. Of course his OCD kicked in and one of his favorite things to do is mow…it’s a close second to vacuuming! It looks like we live on a golf course out here.

It was and still is sometimes a constant source of irritation for the both of us. We have many native plants on our land and I would not mow ever if it were up to me. The wildflowers are gorgeous during the spring! So, I’m always digging up plants out of the pasture to use in my beds.

I would take my truck and some rope and drag the big rocks that he took off back to the house and make big flowerbeds with them. I made flowerbeds around the trees and along the fence and each year would just move out the boundaries a little further to make my beds larger.

I met a neighbor who is a wonderful gardener who just loves perennials and native plants. She has taught me a wealth of knowledge about gardening. We would go and dig up native plants and she would give me starts to lots of her plants.

So over the years…my gardening has evolved and while I don’t have a lot of time to garden I love my flowers!