Beginnings

I remember exactly when I became a gardener!  Finally, we had a yard after living in an apartment for the first seven years of my life.  At about the age of eight I began to ask my mother if I could have a part of the yard and could I have money to buy some seeds.  This was not a large piece of property, just thirty feet wide, a typical city lot.  I dug out a small area towards the back and planted corn and carrots in an area around the catch basin (this was an old house which had this type of sewer to catch all of the grease from the kitchen sink).  My aunt and uncle lived upstairs (two flat) and she was my mentor gardener.  We crawled around the yard together on our knees, digging, planting and pruning.

My first harvest yeilded only about three ears of corn, but the carrots were a bumper crop, and my dad said they were the best he had ever tasted!

Are My Rhododendrons Here To Stay?

The snow has finally melted off the rhododendrons that are to the side of my front door under my dining room windows.  I have replaced each one of them once and one of them twice.  They are sheltered by a stone wall with a limestone ledge in front of them, so they are protected.  My husband wants to put a concrete porch there and pull out the rhododendrons and the ferns and hostas which grow beneath.  Each time he would mention this I would protest that a porch would be too small and the beautiful flowers in the spring were worth another try.

I turned off the sprinkler system beneath this area, fed them religiously with an acid fertilizer and kept the watering to a minimum.  They have a shallow root system, and do not like to be wet.  They look better than any other winter, of course it is January!  Their little leaves are not shriveled from the cold, and I am certainly going to keep hoping they survive or I am afraid the "cement boot" will win!

Favorite Gardening Magazine

We took a longer car trip today, so I needed some reading material to endure riding in the car two hours to destination and two back.  I reached into my magazine rack on the way out and came up with two of my favorite gardening magazines.  They were both issues of fine Gardening, http://www.finegardening.com/.  I have never thought too much about them except that they are a little pricey for a magazine.  But, when I really started to think about it, they are one of least expensive things that I buy for a great deal of enjoyment.

The pictures are beautiful of real people's plantings, executed on high quality glossy paper.  They are filled with so much information, designs, plants by region and tips from gardeners throughout the country.  I use them like a reference or a cookbook never discarding an issue but referring to them over and over throughout the years. 


  

An Early Spring In My Closet

I had put off way too long organizing my receipts to be filed away in my closet file cabinets.  So, I pulled up my little bench seat and began going through what looked like an overwhelming task.  I used four wire file baskets to sort, and soon I started to come upon my receipts from last fall for all of the bulbs I ordered. 

It seemed like such a long time ago that I was so excited thinking of what my landscaping would look like with all of these beautiful bulbs.  Muscari Armeniacum Saffier, Narcissus Itzim, Narcissus Rijnvelds Early Sensation, were part of my order to Scheepers.  I do remember planting many bulbs this fall, however, I am not too great about putting markers down because I do know the names of most of my bulbs and perennials.

Wow, I went a little crazy this year trying to be different.  I will probably have to look these names up on the internet this year to identify them in the spring!

Rabbits!

Until I let my dog out this morning, I had almost forgotten about the rabbits!  Reggie shot like a bullet out the door in pursuit of the rabbit he saw by the bird feeder.  Needless to say, he is never as fast as that bunny.  I cannot believe I had forgotten about the damage the rabbits bestowed on my daughter's garden last spring, summer and fall.  All of her hosta was chewed to the ground, coneflowers, phlox, ferns and even the rose bushes.

She has a dog, but obviously this did not deter her brood of rabbits.  We sprayed liquid repellants, spread dog hair, even resorted to laying plastic snakes throughout the garden!  We eventually ordered plants from http://www.highcountrygardens.com/ known for it's rabbit and deer resistant plants.  Those rascals seemed to like these even more, chewing them relentlessly until the cold weather hit.  Maybe, the plants will come back since a speck of green was still visible as the snow began to fly.

Well, we are not giving up!  High Country Gardens just sent me an email advising to ring your garden with lavender to keep rabbits out.  Don't they remember that Peter Rabbit's cousin Benjamin Bunny's father (old Mr. Banjamin Bunny) smoked rabbit tobacco (better known as lavendar)?