How to garden without gardening

I have been laid up with a sore knee all spring. For a while I was limping along, but for the last month it's been bad enough I've been on crutches or using a cane but mostly parked on my butt. The vegetable garden has been my priority on the days when I can get around a little, so the perennial gardens have mostly been fending for themselves. It's my annual spring arthritis flare-up, and while it has been something of a pain, it could certainly be a lot worse.



But this isn't about my knee, it's about my garden. Specifically, what happens in a garden when there's no gardener tending it, during the most fertile months of the year.

The plants grow.
The flowers bloom.
The weeds multiply.
The world does not end.

During my enforced sit-on-my-butt days (which feel like they have gone on, and on, and on) I have been keeping myself occupied by knitting and listening to audio books. A few days ago there was a moment in the book when a character, reflecting on a war brewing in the book's imaginary world, mused that there might be nobody to see the peonies bloom the following year, but that they would still bloom.

Isn't that the truth, I thought, and if I needed proof all I had to do was look out the window.



Do the peonies care that I haven't been fussing over them? Nope.

Do the poppies mind that they haven't been staked and are sprawling with abandon over their neighbours? Apparently not.

And it seems I don't even have to plant things in order to have flowers, as evidenced by these volunteer foxglove.

Yes, there are weeds everywhere, and I'm going to pay at some point for letting the annual weeds go to seed, but in the meantime they're acting as a pretty good ground cover which is good because I haven't got around to watering, either. 

There is a humbling lesson in all of that: how much do I really matter? I don't mean that in a self-pitying way. I mean it in a reverential I-am-a-mere-mortal-looking-Mother-Nature-in-her-glorious-face kind of way. When it comes down to it, the idea that I can control what happens in my garden is sort of ridiculous, and I think Mother Nature is being very kind to let me try.

But at the end of the day I am still a gardener, and I'm itching to get in there and start cleaning things up. But even though my knee is slowly starting to feel better I know the worst thing I could do is overtax it. So I'm thinking tomorrow I might set the egg timer for 15 minutes, and see what I can get done. The next day, if all goes well, maybe 20.

But that still leaves me today, one more day, to watch the peonies bloom.

Working smarter and ageing gracefully

There is a property down the road from us that I call The Storybook Farm, because it looks like it has been transplanted straight from a children's book about an English country farm. The buildings are faced with stone, there is a matched set of five black horses in the paddock, the potager garden is full of lavender plants lined up with mathematical precision, and the flower pots lining the drive are always beautifully blooming. It's a lovely place, one that fills me with awe every time I drive past it, and while these people exert more control over their garden than I want to or am capable of, they clearly know what they are doing.

So when our third spring at Mucky Boots came around (in other words the first spring I had my head enough above water to notice) and the middle of April came and went with their garden still full of winter stalks and dead stuff, I thought something must be wrong, and even though I don`t know them, I worried. I shouldn't have, because in short order everything was looking as spiffed up as I had become accustomed to. Maybe they were just a little late getting started, I thought with the tiniest amount of self-satisfaction.

And now, near the end of our fifth spring at Mucky Boots, I think I get it. They really do know what they are doing: it's all about working smarter.

My practice has been to dip into all my garden beds multiple times through the spring explosion. I usually manage to get the winter clean-up done before the fast spring growth starts, but pretty quickly I'm going at the creeping bellflower wherever and whenever it appears, and trying to clean up the spring bulbs as soon as they start looking bedraggled. And weeding, weeding, weeding. I figure each of the many beds in the perennial garden gets six or seven passes before the hot weather hits and growth settles down.

Well, I have learned a thing or two. For example, I have learned that the best way to deal with invasive perennial weeds like the creeping bellflower is not to try digging it up, which only compounds the problem as all those little root filaments birth new plants, but to cut it down once or twice a year and never, ever, let it flower. So now instead of going into attack mode every time I see some, I let it be and do a complete pass through the garden when the quantity of it merits.

Here's another example. We have such masses of spring bulbs here (especially winter aconite, snowdrops and bluebells) that when they start to die back the garden looks a bit shabby. In the past I have cut back individual plants as they reach the point of no return, but now I pretty much wait for the bulk of them to reach that point, then I clear them all out (the exception being when they are smothering other perennials just getting started). That's way less work. It means living with a bit of a mess for a while...



...but it also means I can stress less and enjoy more.

That's especially important given that the Annual Spring Arthritis Flare-Up seems to be a regular fixture in my life - just when there's lots of work to do, and just when I'm excited to be getting down to it, my joints require me to carefully weigh the necessity of each task.

Working smarter, and not being in such a rush to clear out my beds, means I have had more opportunity to enjoy the special beauty of blooms past their prime, like the wonky tulip at the top of the post. Which is also smarter, because none of us is getting younger.  So in a spirit of affection and respect for all the ages in my garden, here are a few blooms ageing gracefully.

 

Looking for the really funny "Gotta love that cupholder" post? I'm so sorry, but because of technical issues I threw up my hands and deleted the post. But it was funny. Really, really funny. I'm still laughing...

Tulip Parade 2013

This is an annual event at Mucky Boots: the cataloguing of the year's entrants in the Tulip Parade. You'd think this would be repetitious, because it's not as if I plant any bulbs. So you'd expect the same tulips, appearing in the same locations as last year. And there is some of that. But there are also many surprises: tulips I swear I have never seen before, or in locations they've never been before. Someone has a sense of humour, and I'm guessing it's Mother Nature.

Tulips are the flowers that make me want to be a painter. An impressionist painter. Because when I step out the door and see the mass of green punctuated with bright splashes of colour from all the tulips, and when I try yet again to capture it on camera and fail yet again to capture what I see, I think the license I could take as a painter might allow me to show you how magical it is.

But for now, here is the Parade.

And because they don't get their own parade and the tulips feel sorry for them, here are some tag-a-long columbines.

Oh, and the tulips have also asked me to include a photo of the anemones my friend Elisabeth gave me last year, because they are newcomers to the garden and the tulips want them to feel welcome.

Lilac

Today is a happy, happy day at Mucky Boots. Yes, the sun is shining, and it's gloriously warm (the thermometer on the porch is reading 29 degrees - in May, no less). But all that is secondary to something I have been waiting for for years: the lilacs are blooming and filling the air with their scent and I can smell them.

Until my sinus surgery last fall I had virtually no sense of smell for years. Years and years. And of all the scents I missed, the only one that made me want to cry was missing the perfume of lilacs blossoming in the spring. Well, it's spring, and they are flowering, and I can't keep my nose out of them for more than ten minutes, making up for all those years of lost sniffing.



Lilacs!

Auction revisited

Yes, those are lamps from street lights for sale. I'm sure all kinds of people went to the auction looking for those.

The annual spring Coombs Farm Auction happened a couple of weekends ago and Kim and I went - we had so much fun the first time we went we decided to make it an annual tradition. (In my family, where we treat traditions with a level of seriousness and commitment most people reserve for their religious beliefs, we believe that if you do something, anything, twice it's a tradition and must be observed faithfully for ever after. Once, if you really have fun.)

If you're a long time reader of the blog and the above photo looks familiar, there's a good reason: the same players were there, bringing the same farm stuff (aka "junk") to be auctioned off by the same family raising money for a children's charity. Here's last year's photo, so you can aompare it to the one above.



Same sign, same guy, slightly different junk. Better weather, though.

This year I didn't try anywhere near as hard to find a diamond in the rough - I just took pictures instead.


Is this junk, or is this junk?


Old rusty barrels.


Dirty and cracked bottles.


Rusty, broken-down Ford tractor.


A fancy cabinet-style incubator with no top and a circuit board full of straw, chicken poop and feathers. It must be functional. For sure.

Don't read this if you're still wearing your snow boots

Fawn lilies

I don't mean to rub it in - I really don't - but spring has officially arrived at Mucky Boots. Glorious, wonderful, miraculous spring. If it hasn't made an appearance yet where you are and you'd rather go have a stiff drink instead of reading this post I understand - I really understand.

But in case you're in the mood for some signs that spring has sprung, here you are.

Bleeding hearts

The first entrant in the annual Tulip Parade

Ribes

Budding lilac

The funny little shrub that always gets in the way when I'm mowing the lawn

If you're needing some consolation you might notice that there are raindrops in every single one of those photos.

That's spring at Mucky Boots.

Tidying the edges

Gather round, children, and listen well because I'm going to pass on a few words of wisdom. Not my own, but words that were gifted to me about the time we moved to Mucky Boots. Words that for some reason stuck in my head and have been proven true over and over in the four years since. Here they are:

Tidy paths and borders and edges make a garden shine.

(Pause for reflection.)

"What does this mean?" I can hear you asking. Well, it's supposed to mean that if I mow the lawn and weed the perennial beds but don't take the string trimmer to the edges then the garden looks sloppy. But it's even better than that. Tidy edges are so powerful that all your beds can be a mess but if the edges and paths are all tidy the garden still looks great.

Messy edges means messy garden. Tidy edges means tidy garden. And it almost doesn't matter what the garden itself looks like. I am inspired to express this with the following equations:

• Messy edges + tidy beds = messy garden. 
• Tidy edges + messy beds = tidy garden. 

As a mathematician I find this perplexing.

So, if I am feeling just a wee bit overwhelmed by the weeds in my perennial beds (it is April, after all) I can start by using the weed whacker along the border, or sweeping the path free of debris and instantly feel better. Not to mention more motivated to keep on with the weeding.

Kim asked me if I was going to use this as a metaphor for life, and I have to say I was tempted. If not for life then at least for housekeeping - as in my house is a mess but if I make my bed I feel instantly in control of the chaos. But I think, for once, this will be just a post about gardening.

There. That's it. Go tidy.

Good morning. Good night.

Good morning.

Good night.

Someone's having fun with the clean up

Welcome spring

Today the CBC was telling us that Canadians all across the country would be greeting the arrival of spring with rotten weather. According to a climatologist with Environment Canada, "If we sent out search parties for spring, we would not find hide nor hair of it. Everyone is in misery, and everyone has a cross to bear." The article went on to say that "every region would be either windy, rainy, wet, snowy, drifty, blowy or there will be a big snow dump to clean up."

Well hello to you, too, Spring.

We got the windy part. Yesterday was wet, with a drenching steady downpour, but the sun came out this morning and then this afternoon it started to blow. Man, did it blow. We don't often get enough wind in our little protected river valley to move the trees, but they were dancing today. At one point I looked out the window to see a shower of twigs and branches blowing down from the sky - a shower that went on, and on, and on.

When it was over our property was covered with tree debris. Little branches...



...big branches...



...and lots and lots o' branches.

It will be a lovely afternoon's work raking all that crap up. But it beats shovelling snow.