My Garden

clematis growing with my roses

My first garden I made at the side of the house we were renting the first year I was married. We rented the back two rooms with a small bathroom. It was cozy inside with a window full of indoor plants. I made a small vegetable garden and grew a few plants of squash, cabbage, beans and tomato. Our summer suppers were great and very tasty. Every place we lived in I tried to grow a garden. In Arizona I didn't understand the growing season and planted some buckets on the balcony with flowers, gladiolas mostly. They came up quickly and just as quickly baked brown in the 100 plus summer temps. One year my mom sent me some hollyhock seeds collected from her garden. We were living in Houston at the time. I planted them and they came up in a beautiful leafy green mound, but didn't bloom. I later learned they are biennials, taking two years of growing to bloom. Hollyhocks are a favorite for me, a reminder of my mother.

I have been growing gardens, mostly flower gardens for a few decades now, you do accumulate knowledge year by year. Each garden, each part of the world's growing climate unique with pros and cons. Growing roses in Maryland with a family of deer in the neighborhood was a challenge and usually disappointing. My first vegetable garden in Kansas grew absolutely nothing, not even a weed. Yet I am excited about each spring, each time a plant comes back, when the leaves are beginning to grow on a stem, then maturing into flowers. The bees, butterflies, even wasps, birds that come to invade and live in my garden. A little tiny world in a square of white fence there is so much going on. Gardeners have to be optimistic and intrepid.

My front garden faces south with a large pine tree giving it shade some of the afternoon and late afternoon an ornamental pear tree giving shade. I have pots of miniature roses, large blue flowered catmint, violas, and blousy pansies, there are lilies too that will bloom in June.

My back garden is on the north side. It receives sun in the spring and summer and is in total shade fall and winter. I can watch the movement of the sun as its light climbs down the fence starting in March, it now is halfway across the patio. After the summer solstice the sun travels back so by September the garden is again in shade. This north garden is filled with flowers that I love and like all gardens it changes year to year. Roses grow larger and taller, and you prune and trim and replace, a garden is seldom stagnant.

I used to have bird feeders on the back patio, but the mice were getting to be too much, so I moved them to the front pine tree, and it seems I like it better. Less mess and mice in the back and I still get the benefit of birds in the front.

Mr. Lincoln rose

Yesterday I placed a praying mantis egg sack in a rose tree. It will hatch out 200 praying mantis. They will be very small; the sack is only about 2" around. I noticed a couple of lady bugs on the rose bushes a couple of days ago, I wished them to enjoy the feasting. This morning, I saw a yellow vireo eating away on the aphids. I don't like to spray poison. I have done it but very seldom. A garden is not a flat environment but multi-faceted, spraying doesn't get rid of bugs it just makes everything toxic.

This is it for today, thank you for stopping by, see you next time.

Leah