The big spring flush is over, the summer drought has begun, and it's time to clean up the garden. I was busy for a month visiting other gardeners and seeing their creations and hosting visitors to our own garden, and when I finally ushered the last guests out the door and looked around me, I was pretty appalled at what I saw. What a mess: 400-500 roses and hundreds of other plants all most urgently in need of liberation from bindweed, Bermuda grass, and other plant pests, and of layers of hay mulch to follow. Also summer came early this year. It was quite hot in May and it hasn't rained to speak of since the beginning of that month, and many recently planted plants are really dry. We water with a single hose, largely to keep watering to a minimum. So, for the last week and a half, my husband and I have been going out in the early morning to spend two or three hours weeding, watering, and mulching before it gets hot.
Now, the gratitude part. I've been making some satisfying discoveries while cleaning up. First, some garden areas that looked awful are proving to be not so difficult to weed. These are parts of the garden that I've thoroughly weeded and heavily mulched over the last couple of years, and it seems to be working in getting rid of weeds. Bermuda grass has trouble getting through a heavy mulch; and bindweed, about which I've seriously wondered whether there's any way but pesticides to eliminate it, can be shaded out: it doesn't like growing under shrub roses. Ha! I think it's possible to have a largely weed-free garden. Naturally this comes at the price of a lot of work, but on the whole I don't mind that. I intend to plant a lot more small plants in the garden: aromatic or gray-leaved plants like catmint, thyme, lavender, sage, anthemis; tall bearded irises; spring-flowering bulbs; and some larger shrubs to anchor the beds visually and protect everything else with their shade and leaf drop.
Last year we used something like thirty tons of hay to mulch the garden. I'm amazed myself when I write that, but it made a difference. The ground is cool where the old mulch is still thick, and there's a thin layer of humus underneath. There's one corner where we're trying to get trees and shrubs started to act as a windbreak. Trees don't want to grow there, the ground is so terrible. But I think it's getting better. I remember a few years ago when we tried planting seedling trees there: it was a job to find any soil amongst the stones. This winter when we planted smokebushes and lilacs there we didn't have any difficulty digging holes. The soil has improved: there IS soil there now. It's still a bad spot; I don't know whether the lilacs will make it, but I think the smokebushes probably will. And there are a couple of tiny trees growing.
Other things I'm grateful for:
Just to have a garden, my garden, in this place; and health and my husband's willing help and enough money to buy plants and knowledge to propagate others.
I live in a place that has dry warm summers and yet gets an average of 40" of rainfall a year. This is miraculous. And our winters are mild.
I'm grateful that, although the roses are done and many of them got burned to a crisp anyway because May was so hot, there's still plenty to look at in the garden: the lavender's in bloom and looks wonderful, and the common tawny orange daylily is flowering--it's about the only daylily I like, and it goes great with the lavender. This is also the flowering season of Kniphofia, red-hot poker, of which I have an orange-flowered variety I'm fond of, and of mullein, as stately and elegant a plant as a gardener could ask for. It's a weed and seeds itself around a little in the garden, and is greatly appreciated as long as it's not threatening anything delicate and rare. I don't grow a lot of herbaceous perennials, they tend to get swamped in my garden, but summer's flowers are very welcome, moments of liveliness that stand out against the mature foliage of the trees and shrubs.
I'm grateful it rained so much from mid-fall to mid-spring, so I'm not worried that we'll run out of water this year.
I'm grateful for any and all shade we have: our wisteria pergola, the big bay laurel, other trees.
What are you grateful for?
Melissa
bebemarie
ingrid_vc so. CA zone 9
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