May Bouquet: Daffodils Again

I've done my third bouquet for the season. This is going to be even more fun now because my sister Patti is also going to join the fun. I talked to her on the phone last Friday, and she was just as excited as I am about doing bouquets throughout the season and posting pictures on Facebook and talking about what is blooming. We also thought that part of our creativity can include the container - vases, bowls, whatever we like, that can keep it fun and interesting.

In that spirit, I have departed this week from the simple glass bowl and have used my blue jug for this bouquet.

The daffodils are still gorgeous, and the blue jug makes the yellows and creamy whites and even the salmony centers just pop. I may have enough daffodils next weekend for one more arrangement, but they are definitely dwindling. Tonight Jeff commented that there are almost no daffodils left in the yard. A clear exaggeration of course - we have at least a hundred blooms out there yet! But he does like to give me grief.

I'm already scoping out the yard for next week's flowers. Lilacs, alliums, and peonies all are looking like good candidates. Lamium is blooming right now, plus violas and brunnera and lungwort and harebell are all still going strong too. After doing this week's arrangement in the big blue jug, I think next week I'll do something smaller and more delicate. A small vase would work well for lots of small spring flowers. And, the fun part of moving away from daffodils is that I can mix and match flowers and add greenery. Daffodils kind of have to stand alone because of their knack for poisoning other plants that share their water.

Of course, I've never really tried that. It might be a fun experiment to put a couple daffs in a vase with something else, and then have another vase with just the something else, and see what happens. Hmmm. I'm always looking for something new and fun and scientific to do with Ian. That would be a good one. I actually have a pineapple top in a flowerpot right now to see if it will grow as everybody says. This will be a good experiment to put next to it. I hope he doesn't complain to all his friends when he gets older about his mom who made him do all these weird garden things. Poor kid. I think he'll survive, and he might even learn something. :)

A Weedy Post

Today I had quite a bit of time to myself to spend outdoors. This is highly unusual and I made the most of it. I was able to finish the big edge-all-the-beds chore, get the compost Jeff had picked up for me out of the garage and onto the flowers, and weed a couple flower gardens and half the vegetable bed.

The vegetable bed is not very difficult to weed. It's probably the easiest bed I have actually, except for one thing: thistles. Big prickly stabby thistles that if left alone long enough will form a solid carpet of agony across the surface of my small vegetable bed. Coincidentally, these same thistles inhabit Ian's rock garden, and not content with inhabiting by ones or twos, they generally try to take the space over and conquer it for their own.

I didn't have thistles when I first moved in. I didn't have them for several years in fact, other than the occasional oddman weed here and there. But then my neighbor-lady put up a finch feeder and filled it with thistle seed. It's supposed to be sterile seed, meaning it can't start a plant, but the year that thistle feeder went up is the year I started having trouble with thistles. And such trouble it has been.

Did you know that thistles can get very large, tall enough to be measure in feet? Did you know that they can draw blood through just about any pair of garden gloves? Did you know that their roots go into the earth for miles and miles and only one thistle out of fifty will actually "come up by the roots"? I have learned these things well. Thistles also have an uncanny gift of camouflage. Many's the time I have just finished weeding and am wandering about enjoying the clean garden feeling when suddenly there it is - a giant looming thistle right in the middle of it all. How did I miss that? I was right there weeding away, there's no way I could have missed it. Yet of course I did, and now even though I have put away my basket and dandelion weeder and gloves I must dive in to pull it out, and end up with thorns in my thumb and a mile of thistle root left in the earth.

The other constant weed in my yard is grass. Jeff is the grass man, and he feeds it and puts various granules guaranteed to prevent crabgrass on it and removes dandelions that dare to grow in it. And he mows carefully, horizontally this week, vertically next, and diagonally the next. He loves his grass so much that even though he never watered it - for some reason that has always been my job - even though he never watered it, we installed one of those in-ground sprinkler systems a couple years ago just to make sure the precious grass was well taken care of. That's all well and good of course, except that this pampered, spoiled grass won't stay put. Not content with all this tender loving care it receives as lawn, it feels the need to invade my gardens as weed. Resulting in things like the big edging task being necessary that I've been doing this spring.

There are a couple other weeds that have prominence here. Nettle, for instance. I don't have much, and I have a sharp eye for recognizing this stuff, but I dislike it intensely. It grows near my Queen of the Prairie, and even though I pull it immediately and it always seems to come out by the root, it always comes back. And invariably it rubs against my inner forearm as I yank it out, cleverly bypassing the barrier of my gloves, and so still manages to make me itchy and uncomfortable.

Crabgrass is an annoyance, but doesn't particularly bother me, probably because I enjoy pulling out those loooong white roots. It's a very satisfying activity, especially if I can get a footlong length out at once.

There is another weed, a viny weed, that grows under the landing to my deck, and it launches itself onto the plants that surround the landing. Every summer I yank tens of feet of this stuff off. It tears so easily that I never get to the root, so it always comes back. It's not hard to deal with, it's just so persistent; I wish it would die and get it over with.

My favorite weed, if there can be such a thing, is surely the dandelion. One plant is big and looks messy, but it takes just a second to pop it out and suddenly everything looks much better. The dandelion weeder is aptly named because it works so well on these; one little lever action and the whole weeds just pops right out of the ground. Minimal effort, lots of reward.

There are other weeds of course that pop up here and there. Notably, the garden plants that "got away", like Gooseneck Loosestrife and Missouri Primrose and Tansy and Purple Phlox and Sweet Annie. Sweet Annie I was actually a little too dedicated against and now I don't have any left. I wonder if I can buy seeds for this? It's a lovely plant, grows about 3 feet high with feathery greenness, but it's big charm is that it smells exactly like Trident gum. Exactly. I mean, a blind smell test would not be able to detect the difference. Plus, it's just about perfect for supplying greenery in arrangements, and in the fall it looks beautiful when put in a pumpkin as a vase.

Hmm. I may have to go online for a little seed-shopping.

But then won't I have the same problem as before when Sweet Annie was coming up everywhere, and it took a two year full scale attack to beat it back? Huh. I'll have to think this through. Otherwise that desirable plant will once again be back on my weed list, and next year this time I'll be complaining about all the Sweet Annie popping up everywhere, and wondering what on earth I was thinking.

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.