Promises

We have made it to mid June already. I think we just had a perfect spring weather-wise at home in the garden and business-wise at Garden Works. We did get a lot of rain, mainly in the evenings so it didn’t stop us from getting any work done in our garden beds. April and May’s temperatures were a little topsy-turvy and it’s taking it until now to really stabilize into the 70s at night. I think the instability and the temperatures caused some unusual things to happen, at least new to me.

Coral vine, one of my favorite perennial vines, is already showing some blooms which is very unusual. Coral vine doesn’t usually bloom until mid September. This year we added some wire arches to the bedding plant area so we could grow vines for people to see the blooms and hopefully want more of those vines at their own garden. Our arches in the bedding plant area are being covered with Coral Vine, Blue Pea vine, Black Eyed Susie Vine, and Thumbergia blue skies. They’re starting to take over and they’re starting to bloom now, so it should be really gorgeous by July 1. Upfront where we sell our Asian pottery we set up lots of pots with other kinds of vines in them so they can start covering our walkways up there and people can see what hardy vines look like in full bloom. We’ve been meaning to do that for years and we finally got around to it, we hope it helps people have some vision when it comes to different vines that we love around here.

Today is the day that John and Luke back at the growing operation will be planting our famous 3 gallon giant Chrysanthemums. The mums should be ready to start bringing up for sale around late August. We filled up 100’s of 3 gallon pots with soil and a little Osmocote so when the cuttings come in we will put enough cuttings in each pot to make a nice round show of mum blooms. The fall chrysanthemums are usually ready around the same time that pumpkins start to arrive and we will officially be in the fall season. It’s hard to believe we’re already getting planted up for fall. Those poor plants are going to sit back here in this heat that is coming our way on a black weed fabric for about three months, cooking. Somehow they managed to live through that and become as beautiful as they do just in time for the season. Back home in our garden we have generally gone into survival

mode.

Every afternoon Mimi and I will pick an area and do some deadheading. I really believe that deadheading is the answer to a healthy garden. When those flowers begin to go to seed that is the beginning of the end for that plant. If a gardener continues to cut the seed heads off before they can mature on the plant, then the plant continues to bloom in order to produce seeds in order to survive. If left on their own, the plant will use so much energy producing seeds that it eventually kills the mother plant, she will have done her thing and made seeds for the next succession. We are still experimenting with our snapdragons and foxgloves just for the fun of it. The snapdragons are doing really well as we are only cutting back those that have gone completely to seed and have no blooms left on them. The fox gloves are still blooming and the plants look really healthy.

The blooms are beginning to wane a little bit which we expected. We really want to see if we can get some giant Fox gloves through the summer just for bragging rights really. I think up north they have better luck using Foxgloves as a biannual. Lately we’ve been snipping the dead heads off of cosmos, Buddleias, Tithonia almost daily and anything else that has finished blooms on them are getting cleaned off at an appropriate time. The plants look so healthy as they are not using up any extra energy while they’re getting stressed in all of this heat that they’re experiencing for the first time. I have really enjoyed my two year-old Mullein

plants with their 6 foot tall yellow blooms. When I get home in the afternoons, the blooms look like they’re finished, but when I wake up in the mornings, yellow blooms are fresh and there are bees all around gathering pollen. I just cut the Mullein stalks down yesterday because they were blocking the view of my Castorbean trees that are coming up just behind them. Our Shasta daisies are producing blooms like crazy and have needed to be cut back a few times already.

Last weekend we hosted a baby shower for Max and Madeline at our house. The family members who came to celebrate for this event made flower arrangements with flowers cut from our yard and also some that we purchased from a cut -you’re—own-flower farm in Canton called Twelve2Farms. There are apparently more cut your own flower farms in our area than I was aware of. Our daughter Mia, who helped put this event together found them online and made the call. What a wonderful life that would be to live on a cut flower farm and have people come out and pick what they want. This article will come out just before Father’s Day weekend. We have begun celebrating those kinds of holidays with things that we both want for the garden. We save up the big things for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and birthdays instead of going out to buy some junk that neither one of us really wants. We get new things with wheels on them or edging or pallets of rocks, whatever we’re needing at the moment. For us it’s just so much easier to make a happy moment by giving each other what they really want.

Last year for Father’s Day Mimi gave me a drone so we could have some aerial shots of the yard as it progresses. We still have not gotten around to purchasing that drone, but we plan to get on it this year! It took me 3 years to get one of Mimi’s Christmas presents done. That year I promised her that we would get the power lines that ran above our yard, drooping sadly in some places, taken down and buried. There were a few obstacles that prevented us from moving on it real fast. One of the obstacles was the price of the start to finish. I might have checked on that minor detail before I made the promise but that just wouldn’t be my style. Once we got over the sticker shock we realized that it just had to happen in order for us to be able to move forward we got it together. It is easy enough to get Entergy out there to take the poles down and to trench the lines. The electricians have to be there the same day with a new meter base set for underground wiring. We were out of electricity for less than 2 hours so it all worked out but it took some coordinating to make that all happen in the same few hours.

Of course the trenching went through my irrigation main lines, my lighting wires, my yard sound system wires and my solenoid valve wires. We had to get Humpty Dumpty put together again in a short amount of time so all of those things would be back to use by the time the garden tour happened. It was a little stressful but so worth it. It makes me wish that power lines were underground when I look around our highways and in peoples yards. Those lines can be pretty unsightly and they aren’t any fun when we get our ice storms, I guess it’s too late and too expensive to change that where it is already done. I believe (hope) the newer developments are leaning towards more underground utilities.

Mimi and I don’t always have the gifts wrapped up under a tree but we give each other the promise to get it done when the time is right. Last night we finally figured out where our greenhouse/ work shed will go. We found a place that is slightly hidden, sunny enough in the winter months, near electricity and water, close enough to the hub of the garden to be convenient and has easy access for a truck and trailer. There were a lot of prerequisites to find a home for a place to store our tools and overwinter some pots and start our own seedlings and cuttings. We aren’t in a hurry to build this, as it is for when we retire, but it is good to know where we will need to leave an area big enough for our future plans. We now have an area that we can’t garden while we develope the plan.

Last Saturday Mimi and I were walking around in circles with a flat of flowers in each of our hands looking for places to add a dash of new color to the yard when we realized that we are officially out of space for more. That is something we’ve never said before. We started marking off a huge area where I will start filling up with great soil. We are creating a giant bed that will run the length of our back yard that will give us more layers of heights and colors. This bed needs to happen sooner than later because it will be directly behind where the greenhouse will be going so the timing is perfect, plus we are out of space for more. We are already bumping some our smaller potted plants into 3 gallon pots so they will be healthy and ready to move into their new space this fall. I hope the weekend goes great for all while we celebrate Father’s Day with our fathers or the memories of our fathers who are no longer with us. Hopefully remembering to try to look into the price of any promised gifts for the Holliday before making any promises. Way less awkward.