None? Is that your screen name? sorry to hear you are facing such a surgery and recovery. I hope this brings you the relief and improvement you are hoping for!!

Not sure where you are located. Not understanding why you are thinking you will still be able to garden this year? Are you trying to put a garden in before your surgery? I wonder if you have the mobility to do it and if they advise that?

Great that you can look forward to a normal gardening season next year. While recovering this year and waiting, I'd do a lot of finger pointing with your friends and family and just enjoy their efforts and help them grow into better gardeners while you rest up. :-)

I did enter one, but it probably caught one of my Nones. So to speak. I'll go fix that. Locale is New Jersey, western end, which apparently also didn't make it into the profile. Sigh. Just call it Philadelphia if you want, it's close enough.

Just call me Mr. None. Real name is Jeremy. Jemmy if you like. Just don't call me late for surgery because after a year I'm seriously ready.

In this area, I have from May to June to plant, so no hurry. Surgery is mid-June, so there's plenty of establishment time before then and they tell me I should be home in two days and functional in two weeks--but under restrictions including no gardening until around August 15 when the bones regrow around the implants and I get my superpowers around October.

Yes, I'm mobile enough to manage things beforehand but am having the mulch done this year as moving ten cubic yards is way too much to deal with on a herniated disc that isn't healing and a vertebra that isn't particularly happy with me. We've found my pain tolerance is somewhere between hit with a truck and soaked in burning gasoline, so that's nice and also implies that even having to open me up from the front and access the vertebra that way won't result in a very long recovery.

So I'm leaving the heaviest work to others but still putting in about a quarter of the normal stuff. I'm most interested in putting in large, space-eating plants (like elephant ears or very big dahlia) that chew real estate while not involving much planting effort as I usually put in close to seven hundred plants.

Just because I can tolerate feeling like my leg and back is on fire doesn't mean I enjoy feeling like my leg and back is on fire.

I'm absolutely looking at putting in one swamp mallow in the main garden to eat space and provide nice red blooms in the summer for minimal effort. I have three elephant ears and twelve 3' dahlia on order. Honestly, with that and a couple flats of bigger marigolds, I could probably just call it a season and hit the button to water.

But other suggestions than "yellow and orange marigolds" would certainly be nice.

Okay, Jeremy, it is. ;-) well NJ ... I am in MA. I would think you are warmer than me. I am in zone 6 and you could be either in z6 or z7? Okay so you probably have a couplle of months before your surgery. And you are feeling up to gardening a little. No heavy work, right. Someone is doing your mulch for you. You have prepared beds that don't have to be dug? Are they in full sun? 700 plants you usually put in? That is a lot. You don't grow them from seed do you? Does that include your vegetables? Do you grow herbs too? Or are you talking about annuals? Do you grow perennials?

What do you think about sunflowers? In a year when you really want to sit back and watch a garden grow, plant a whole garden of different varieties of sunflowers! They take up a lot of real estate. They are pretty easy to grow if you can get them started without the squirrels pulling them out. They grow fast, are fascinating to watch. I grew a lot of them one year and everyone in the neighborhood came by to enjoy them. Then in the fall you have the seed that the birds will love you for. And maybe even harvest some for yourself if you get them before the critters.

Dahlias are great, do you have to dig them up and store them over the winter? Have you ever tried growing zinnias with them? Cut and come again all summer to frost. You could find a lot of varieties of Agastache and Salvia to attract Hummingbirds. Some of them can get pretty big.

But maybe your planting area is not in full sun? it would be great if you could post a photo of some of your past gardens so we could get an idea of what you've been growing and what your planting area is like. And do you know what your soil is like? Clay, sandy?

Is that surgery a new technique, regrowing bone? I've never heard of it. I suppose you've tried more conservative treatment already. PT. A year is a long time to be in pain. Having had someone in the family who had to have a little hip surgery, we did discover that your body needs a LOT of good nutrition to recover, especially when you need bone to mend. There are a lot of great books out there on Bones and what you can do to give your body all it needs to recover.

Most everything is full sun; I usually do marigolds, zinnia, ageratum, dahlia, and you-name-it (whatever I'm testing) done from seed or boughten locally. It's zone 7a or more 7b given the year. Figure 8a this year if the weatherman is right. The ground is more silty than sandy around here near the river.

Sunflowers sound nice and I didn't think of that and they're nearly effortless, thank you. I've done them in the past, and worst case, I can see them from the house. Salvia as well to augment the reds and blues as I might as well go for bright colors I can see from the deck and couch.

These are wonderful ideas!

The surgery's pretty old, actually, a vertebral fusion, just with a little fiddling of the vertebra in my case and in a place where the vertebra don't move much anyway. I'm not that old, pretty thin, and ridiculously active even for my age. And yes, the doctor has already given me a list of things to do and things to avoid!

Just a tip on the sunflowers, the year I planted them, from seedlings started indoors, twice the squirrels came along and ripped them all out. Seriously. The next batch I put covers of hardware cloth around them just like overlapping tents and laid on the ground too? I don't think they liked walking on it. i wish I could remember just how I laid them down, but they didn't bother them after that,.

I have a watering system, so I'm good. Touch a button (and I can lift the setup onto the edge so I don't have to bend) and it runs. Pots would actually probably involve more bending and lifting, so I'm actually tabling my pots this year and just planting things I don't have to pay much attention to in them.

I'll be under BLT restrictions. Yeah I know I thought the same thing but it's Bending Lifting and Twisting. The ground level may get a little messy but I'm fine with that this year and I'm allowed to step down vertically. Lifting is limited to 10 pounds. I'll be wearing a back brace for two months to prevent excessive bending or twisting while the bones fuse. And the lifting and bending limitation is only for the first month or so, after which I'll be able to move and lift more.

All this sounds awful but mostly it's just to assure that nothing goes wrong and doesn't involve much discomfort for me.

Best of luck to you, Jeremy, for the surgery and the recovery. I think I would probably take it easy this year and just plan for next year. Making plans, researching and choosing plants is really a lot of fun. That is what I did when I had my second knee replacement at the beginning of September. I did hire someone to prepare the yard for me-had to cover the lawn because I am planting a native garden out front soon. I cannot wait to start planting in May.

I do hope everything goes even better than you hope.

If I wanted to eat up space, I’d plant some squashes and especially pumpkins.… in your zone, you could also plant melons. I’d also want a flower cutting garden, even if just to scatter mixed seed everywhere. :)

I can empathize with the back problems… good luck with your surgery.

Thanks everybody. Post more thought and research, I've cut the garden back to 300 annuals which is about a third. It's not like we can't afford to have it done so people will be doing the cleanout and mulch and most of the work to get it ready.

I'm adding several elephant ears and large dahlia and four new bushes (rose mallow and Rose of Sharon, which I've always liked) to cover space. I chose very long blossoming varieties that I'll be happy to have in the garden for decades to come.

I can crawl and plant and work and don't have to do this quickly, so I can plant and if it takes me all of May that's fine. Nobody's grading me.

Then I can get this out of the way, I can demand to be wheeled to the garden with a julep or something, and recover.

"Then I can get this out of the way, I can demand to be wheeled to the garden with a julep or something, and recover."

Now that's the spirit! (no pun intended :0p)

"I've cut the garden back to 300 annuals which is about a third."

That's a THIRD of your usual!?! You must have one heck of a display! Just thinking about planting the full 900 is enought to make me tired...

Ayup. I retired last year at 56, but prior years it would take me from May 5th or so until May 20th to finish. Every now and again during the summer I'd find somebody meandering through the gardens, looking guilty at being discovered. I don't mind.

This year's going to be bare bones...

hello none

Houzz would not print my response to you. I dont know why and i am too annoyed to try again tonight. Ill just say that in my mid 50s i had C(cervical) 5-6 fusion and it was not fun, especially the stiff gigantic cervical collar. However the results were stellar.

Good luck with your surgery. Do your Physical Therapy religiously. May visions of 900 plants motivate you to recovery!

marie

On the up side, mine is lumbar fusion; L5/S1. It has little motion and I'm actually used to wearing a corset, so the back brace I'll need temporarily won't bother me (it's much more restrictive, but I've already tried it out and it's not a problem).

Er, OK, this is a little strange, but I'm a Victorian cosplayer. Men wore corsets from 1820 to 1840, very commonly, and less commonly from 1750 right through 1900 or so. When I'm going with the full rigout, as I call it, I wear one. Along with the waistcoat, frock coat, cravat, top hat, walking stick (cane right now) and so on. I dress as a dandy or swell--a very stylish person of the era. The other terms are a tad early, but you could use macaroni or tulip, too.

Lower back restriction won't bother me in other words. And yes I fully plan on following the physical therapy no worries there.