Garden Sprite

It's been raining off and on today, so no working in the yard for me tonight. Last night I was out for an hour or so, still working on that edging-each-bed task. As I usually do when I go out, I asked Ian if he wanted to help me garden. And as usual, he said No! But then he was outside playing with the dogs as I grubbed around in the dirt, and I seized the opportunity to suck him into a little mom-time.

Step one: get out the scissors and let him chop. The daffodils are turning brown, and need to go, and Ian loves to cut things. We made a treasure hunt of it, looking at all the daffodil clumps and spying the brown heads, and then making sure each head gets snipped off. One would think he would appreciate my holding up the little plant for him to easily snip away, but he'd rather do it all on his own. Who needs Mom?

Step two: let him take stuff apart. He watched me use the dandelion weeder to lever up a few bricks, then he decided to give it a try himself. He liked wedging the weeder under the brick and raising it up for me to pull the brick out. We had a good time looking at all the things under the bricks. I always notice the worms, but he pointed out millipedes and other little bugs that I didn't know. And we looked at the white snaking grass roots, which he didn't think were very interesting but which are my mortal enemies and therefore interesting to me. We were having a great time looking under each brick until he lifted one and a spider went scurrying away. "SPIDER!" he shouted, and dropped that brick super fast and jumped to his feet. That was the end of his brick-picking. He stayed near me talking for a few minutes until Dad called out that his friend Jay invited him to play, and then he was gone.

My little blonde-haired blue-eyed sprite. It's not often I get his help in the garden, but it's one of my very favorite things when it happens. My tricks to pull him in have been scissors, bugs, and water and it looks like those things will work again for at least one more year. I may pick up a book of garden bugs, I bet that will also help reel him in a time or two. I hope that he learns something from the time he spends with me in the garden; and I hope that it grows in him the same kind of affection for plants and green living things that I have; and I hope that when he gets older he will be walking around some neighborhood with some girlfriend, and he will impress her tremendously by knowing the names of all the flowers they see. And then maybe some day he will cherish the memories of chopping off brown daffodil heads and peeking under bricks to see what lives beneath, and maybe he will also grow flowers, and think of me as he does it.

Daffy Bouquets are In The House!

I love fresh flowers in the house. I love seeing them on the table bringing in the feel of the outdoors, and I love smelling their freshness, and the whole natural aura that they bring with them. I love them and even though I have a ton of fresh flowers outside in the yard, I don't usually bring them inside. I cannot tell you why. Maybe I have a fear of ruining the look of the outdoor gardens if I snip a dozen for indoors, which is silly when there are usually a hundred blooms at any given time.

So this year I am paying attention to my dining table like never before, and I plan to have a fresh bouquet on it at all times. This will not be that ambitious, as I have oodles of fresh flowers right outside the door for most of the season, and as I also enjoy picking the flowers and making pretty arrangements. I just need something to encourage myself to do it. And for me, my encouragement this year is taking a picture of each bouquet and posting it, first to Facebook, where hopefully friends will comment and tell me how gorgeous each is and how lucky I am to have such lovely flowers, and secondly here, where I'll have a permanent record of flower bouquets throughout the season that I can look at next winter and remember fondly. A bonus may be that I will notice there are times of the season when the pickings are slim, and then next spring I will plant a few plants to fill in those lean times.

So without further ado (I have no idea what that really means but it always sounds grand), here are my first two bouquets of the season. The picture on the top is the first one I made, mostly as a side-effect from gathering flowers for my neighbor whose husband was turning forty. I didn't get him anything, but certainly for organizing and planning the big party she deserved something cheerful, no? The second arrangement, on the bottom, was really planned to be flowers for my table, and for that particular vase, so it looks much fuller and cuter. Definitely I notice between the two, spaced about a week apart, that the carnation-like daffodils are more abundant a little later in the season, as are the peach colors. The trumpets and the bright yellows were more common earlier in the season.

I could totally have picked earlier bouquets. They would have had to be mainly King Alfreds for the first couple weeks of April, but that would be just fine with me. Those bright yellow trumpets are so welcome after a long winter, I honestly can't think why I didn't pick some and bring them in. I think it will be fun for the rest of the season seeing how the flowers change and what kinds of bouquets can happen each week.

It would be even more fun if I had someone else doing it with me. My sister Patti gardens about an hour north, I wonder if I could talk her into doing the same thing, and sharing the pictures on Facebook so we could see each others creations. That would be kind of neat, because we have different bloom times and different flowers. I'm zone 4 so should have earlier and later blooms in spring and fall, but she has a serious warm zone 5 corner on the back side of the garage, plus she has an immense gorgeous sunroom that she grows plants in all winter. She could totally out-flower me for the year. I'm going to send her an email tomorrow and see if she's up for the game, it should be a lot of fun. Even if she doesn't participate I'm going to have a great time doing it all by myself anyhow. I'm already looking forward to the next bouquet!

Spring Thoughts

In the garden this spring, my first big activity of the year has been to edge the gardens by chopping through the grass on the outside of the brick edging. Jeff has been kind and helped me with this quite a bit. Once the chopping is done, I'm going back and pulling up each brick and pulling out the grass that has grown in the cracks and snuck into official garden space. It's not taking too long, and I'm nearly done. The parts of the yard that are done already look great, and this will be a really good start to the gardening year.

Once that job is done, I want to go back and start doing some actual gardening. Trim the rose bush, dig out a couple shrubs that died over the winter, move a big hosta that gets crowded by the Annabelle, and the tough job of digging up my purple loosestrife and pulling all the crabgrass out before replanting. I want to get some new plants too, so I need to spend some time researching good new perennial options. My problem is that I only have my memories of how the garden looked last year, so it's hard to figure out which colors and bloom times I should get in my new plants.

To help with that in the future, this year I'm on a plan to take pictures of the gardens every two weeks. I've done it twice in April, and already I'm excited about printing them out and putting them in envelopes, and then next winter pulling out the envelopes and laying them out on the floor and seeing how the garden looked throughout the summer and making plans for improving it. Actually, I want to do that already this summer, and use the pictures for planning my bulb planting this fall. Even though I planted about 700 bulbs last fall, I think I could do that again this year. Maybe mix in some tulips this time, and hyacinths, even though I really do love the daffodils.

There is something very consistent and soothing about having all daffodils blooming, with their cheerful yellow and white, and the nice smoothness it lends to the garden to have all the same types of flowers. I planted a good variety of early, mid, and late-season bloomers, and have had flowers blooming now for at least four weeks. The King Alfreds were up first, bright yellow and cheering after the long dull winter. After them has come quite a variety with carnation-like flowers and trumpet flowers and others that are in-between. I'm not sure I did a good job of tracking which variety I planted where, which may be too bad, but so far I love them all so it doesn't really matter. There are a few straggling tulips out there now, but they are definitely few and far between. Orange is the color I think I want out there now, more orange tulips. Note to self, I need to remember that come time to order bulbs!

Welcome to Daffodil Love!

Greetings! Welcome to my blog about gardening. I love gardening. I love thinking about gardening, and reading about gardening, and talking about gardening. I love plants and nature and listening to the crickets and hearing the wind blow in the trees. One of my very favorite things to do ever is to be outside in the evening, as it's getting dark, and to hear the evening insects begin to chirp and the evening birds come out and to watch the light change.

Mostly I love the attitude of gardening, the emotional bonding-with-nature and enjoying-the-peace part of it. Getting down and being one with the earth. There are lots of blogs about gardening, way more than anyone can ever spend time reading, and most of them are about plant species and things like that. I don't usually know the exact species of anything that I plant, and I'm not sure I care. But I like to enjoy my garden and my dogs and my son and the neighbor kids and my husband.

So I want to write about it. I want to type it up and share it because I enjoy it so much, and then I can read this next winter and remember what it was all like, the entire season. I hope to add some pictures, of plants in bloom, of pretty arrangements, of other good things in the garden. Both here at my house, and also at our second home, the Camper. I always think of it like that, with a capital 'C'. The Camper actually is what my son named Daffodil Love when we bought it. I don't remember how that came about, but it's a great name for a Camper and an even better name for a blog. I'm really looking forward to this and think this will be a lot of fun.