Nevermind

A few articles back I spoke about the way that Mimi and I give each other gifts for the big gift giving holidays. I mentioned in that article that it took two or three years for her to receive one of the gifts that I promised. I had promised to get all of our power lines and power poles taken down and buried so we would have a clear sky to look through from our yard. I talked about Mimi promising me a drone for one of the birthdays or Father’s Day or something. I spoke too soon! The week that that article was coming out, Mimi walked in the door with a big smile on her face holding a big box for Allen. She had finally decided on the drone and made the purchase and it was right there in my hands. I was glad to see it, but I will have to laugh when we read that article together later that week since I told on her.

I live in fear of gadgets that require any kind of technological finesse. Apparently technology does not like me very much. It seems like no matter what I want to do with a computer or a gadget or a phone somebody else wants me to know a password and some other stuff that I just don’t know. When I’m on my own without Mimi there as a safety net I can figure it out. When I was on our big trip to Africa with my mother, I was looking like a serious techie compared to her. Somehow everything I tried on that trip worked just like it should and I got around on my gadgets like someone who knew what they were doing. As soon as I got home, and Mimi was in the house with me at the same time all of my gadgets started acting up again to a point that I would have to ask Mimi for a bail out. I know it frustrates her and I hate asking.

This drone seemed like it would be the ultimate bad situation in gadgetry for me. I had it in my head that I wouldn’t even be able to get it to sync with my phone much less go up in the air and fly around at 30 mph without hitting a tree or a building or winding up in my neighbors swimming pool. I figured the smartest thing I could do is to bring the drone into work with me one day and let Luke, one of our growers at the greenhouses, try to help this old dude out. Luke is a big hunter and trains dogs like nobody’s business. I knew he had some experience with drones from some of his past experiences with farming in the Delta, I think he almost took a job as one who flies drones over properties for engineering purposes. I also have witnessed when Luke is training new employees to do some work back at the greenhouses. He is very good at training people to a point that it doesn’t intimidate them and they get the idea very quickly of what it is they are supposed to do and not do. That’s the kind of help I was gonna need with this and that’s the kind of help I got.

Luke took a long look at the drone and the packaging. I did know enough to have all the batteries charged and ready to go the night before in case we found time to do this. We talked it over for a little bit. He showed me how to work the knobs and which knob makes it go up and down in which knob makes it go left and right and how to make turns. His guidance was of the nature that speaks to me. He didn’t treat me like the total dummy that I am and he explained everything so that I could understand it although he could see that I was nervous he made me calm. We walked out to the mum field where we had already planted the fall chrysanthemums. We went there because there is no shade structure above it, which would allow us to go straight up with the drone and then make our decision from there. He handed the controls to me and I laughed, I handed the controls back to him and said I would like to see what it looks like flying around before I have my shot at seeing it possibly for the first time and the last time caught in a nearby tree.

I was feeling like Charlie Brown with his kite living in fear of that kite eating tree. The drone sat squarely on the ground until he pressed the on button and it raised up 4 feet and looked us both in the eye like a robot. The drone just sits there and waits until you give it its next command. Luke then took the drone straight up into the air and flew left and flew right and flew over the bedding plant area, where there were some employees and some shoppers there who were wondering what in the world that was all about. He pressed the home button and the drone came flying right back above us and slowly landed in the exact spot that we started on. We could see what the drone was seeing on my phone screen. We could make the camera shoot pictures from straight up or straight down or from an angle and we made some videos of the garden center.

I could think of 100 reasons to use the drone at work as we change things around here seasonally. Now that he had returned the drone it was my turn to give it a shot. I turned it on, the drone went up 4 feet and stared at me waiting on its next command. I moved it up. I moved it to the left and right into a bald Cypress tree where the top of the tree received a pruning. The little drone somehow fought its way out of the branches without breaking a propeller and without crashing. I relaxed and got it back in the air and flew back over the bedding plan area where I could see Andrew working. I flew right over his head for a little while, I could tell that he could hear it, but he didn’t know exactly what it was until I lowered it down closer to his head. He knew I had gotten the drone so he figured out what it was and played along as he acted like he was getting attacked by bees. I took a picture of that. I got a little braver and went up a little higher and left the Garden Works property and flew around Highway 51 way up high. There are some powerlines around so I got a little worried and pressed the home button when I lost sight of the drone. Before long, the drone sound came to us and then it came back into vision, got right above us and came straight down and landed on the exact spot we started on.

I had luke there as a safety net so I was still a little bit nervous about going home to act smart in front of Mimi, I would be on my own. We walked into the backyard where we have some openings with no trees right above them. I had just a little bit of trouble finding my way, but in just a few minutes, the drone was up at 4 feet looking both of us dead in the eye waiting on its next command. I really wanted this to go well since Mimi was watching and I think I did pretty good. I flew the drone straight up and we took some pictures and videos of the property around us. I could even see the buildings on Highland colony Parkway, which is not far from my house as the crow flies and gave us an interesting perspective as to how close we really are to everything in town. The next afternoon Mimi asked if I would get the drone back out and take some specific pictures and videos of the yard. I thought “oh boy, here we go“, I knew she had some new beds on her mind, and this was going to be the beginning of that. We got on the side of the yard where our greenhouse is going to go one day and took photos of the stretch that will become our new beds in the next coming weeks since we have officially run out of space which really can’t happen in our yard. Mimi got out her rolling measuring wheel that has famously measured all our new beds in our yard. I’m finding out when I get a little better with this drone that it will actually show the measurements and the top of of the ground that we are going to plant on so we can get our drainage right.

We are envisioning this bed to be a classic perennial bed with large groupings of the same plant repeated over and over from the beginning to the end of the bed. We have recently bumped into some of our favorite perennials that get 6 to 8 feet tall and require a lot of space width wise. We are anxious to have these plants and give them enough room to do what they’re supposed to do. This bed will be very intentional with the plants that we find for it since we have had a lot of practice and done a lot of research and development with plants. We have developed some favorites that would work great for this plan. Through my seeding process I have realized that there are plants that do very well in nursery containers. And by doing well, I mean they can be in a 4 inch pot and bloom and perform in a pot so that people will buy them and take them home. There are lots of plants that are just too aggressive to even start in a 4 inch pot that you will probably never find for sale at a garden center. Tithonia is a perfect example of that plant. Tithonia is better known as a Mexican sunflower, a reseeding annual. They will get to be 6 to 8 feet tall before they even begin blooming. That is a hard plant to display at a garden center because it needs staking along the way.

Tithonia probably has the most beautiful bloom of any garden plant that I know of. We love to use bright orange in our yard and there is no brighter orange than that of a Mexican sunflower. I have Tithonia blooming in our flower bed at Garden Works on both ends, if you drive by you will see them on the side of the veterinarian next-door to us and on the end near the entrance of our garden center. They are bright orange. Tithonia need to be deadheaded quite frequently as they produce so many blooms. It helps them to use the energy where it’s needed most by not letting them go to see production until you’re about ready to let them go sometime in October. Another good example of a plant that’s hard to find at a garden center for the same reason is Amaranth. There is a whole world of amaranth out there. I have been experimenting with all the colors and shapes that it comes in and I’m having very little luck selling it as a bedding plant although it creates color longer than just about any annual and gives spectacular blooms for cut flowers. That’s another one that you can see on our highway run near our entrance to the nursery.

Amaranth comes in blood red, green blooms, yellow upright or dreadlocks style blooms. I will never forget the plant that started the amaranth thing for me that Mimi and I saw at the Denver botanical garden one summer. The amaranth that caught us is one called Perfecta. Perfecta gets about 8 feet tall with a thick stem with multicolored leaves that look a lot like a tie-dye T-shirt that you find in one of your old drawers from days gone by. I have produced some perfectas at home and they are knockout. Most people know what Rudbekia Maximus looks like but it’s very hard to find because it’s another one that blooms at about 8 feet tall. We have lots of it growing at home and we do allow some of those to go to seed so we can have more babies the following spring. We now have enough to work with so they will fit nicely into this giant bed that we’re building specifically for those hard to find and those plants that need a little elbow room.

Joe pye weed is another one that blooms at around six or 7 feet tall that we will fit into this new bed. We plan to mass each of these in large groupings surrounded by plants that are appropriate in size and color. We will also be thinking about bloom times so that there is always a little something happening out there no matter the time of year. I would imagine that some annuals will find their way into this bed just like punctuation marks in a sentence. Some of them will be exclamation points And some of them will be periods and some will probably be question marks. Now that we have measured the beds and taken plenty of drone pictures at different times of the day, so we’ll know where the shade and sun spots are. It will be time to start moving on this. My first move will be to remove the grass that is there and use it somewhere where I need some to fill in some spaces. Then I will start bringing home a dump trailer every day that I come home from work with a great soil mix that I have started putting together up here at the nursery. It’s a combination of leftover soils and mulches that we have sold over the years. Every year I do a big cleanup of that area and all of the leftover composted soils wind up in a big pile that I have allowed to “cook” for three or four years.

I will probably add quite a bit of mushroom compost to the top layer of this bed and let it rest until fall. In the meantime we will be collecting some of the plants that we want or I will be seeding those that I would like to plant before winter to let their roots vernalize and be ready for our next spring show. We have gotten very good about staking our plants that require staking. I honestly don’t know how people live without some good stakes to keep those plants from falling over on everything else. We have made some of our own using bean poles and jute, but I really like those that are made for staking plants that have the rings in them and are sturdy enough to do their job. We will be growing some large floral snapdragons that will require some good staking for sure and some of these other plants are going to need our help to keep them from doing what they do.

When our Jerusalem artichokes sprout they look like they could hold themselves up until they give that big bloom push and they doubled in size almost overnight to 10 or 12 feet tall. They have beautiful yellow daisy like flowers on them that last a good long time in the fall. They look a lot like swamp sunflowers, but they are a little bit sturdier. We are mentally running out of space in this bed already, the more I talk about the plants that are going in there the more I realize will be out of space before we know it. I have more sections of the yard that are waiting for us to turn our heads or drones that way, but we are learning to take it one area at a time as best we can.

This area that we are headed towards next is already irrigated. I will just have to raise some of the heads so they can get everything nice and wet when the time comes. I have to say that Luke saved the day by being such a good guide, I have always thought that if he wanted to go into the guiding business, he would be one of the best. It seems that people that are good at training dogs are also very good at training old people. I’m proof of that. I hope to get a few loads of my sweet soil home as weather allows me to pull a heavy trailer through my access gate on that side before next Thursday when we leave to go to the West Coast of Canada to learn about some more plants that we can possibly use in our garden at home.