Tag Archives: garden

Mrs. Verniece A. Robin

A mild and lovely 4th ~ which got a thorough summer soaking complete with rolling thunder around 9 o’clock in the evening, thereby ruining patriotic fireworks displays around the metro-area (the show may go on, check your local news agencies for possible events tonight), has become a bright, sunny, wet backyard morning.  The orange-bellied American robin prances around the yard and gardens with great satisfaction, having her fill of an insect-breakfast and refreshing sips from raindrop-covered leaves.

I’d really rather just enjoy the morning,” she gently resists me.  Dropping her eyes and brushing her apron demurely she explains, “I was not prepared to be photographed this morning.”

Oh well.  Ok.

Nonetheless ~ The leaves dance.  The flowers stand fully gratified with the evening’s gift.  The tomatoes swell.  All sparkles.  Everything is clean.  Pretty morning.  Quite nice.

17 Days until Christmas and the Magic Kingdom is Dressed in White

Winter has come to the Magic Kingdom.

Oh I miss the garden of spring, bright green and fairly juicy with surging life, growth visible almost hourly. 

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The garden of summer, strong, tall, spreading and proud established its rightful territory hosting parties for butterflies and bumblebees while birds swooped and circled overhead for entertainment. 

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Comes fall and the autumn colors dazzle and your head spins with the abundance and fruitfulness: ripe maturity and the reward of the work of your hands.  You  gather and enjoy as quickly as you can, more than you’d hoped or dreamed for, more than enough.  What will you do with the excess?  The garden, only months earlier bare soil, became a hypnotic haven overgrown with delicious joy and frolic, intoxicating verdancy, flourishing symbiosis and riotous vitality.

Winter.

Winter.  The winds have blown away the brown crispiness from branches no longer green in a purifying poof.  And just like that – bare, faded, stark and desolate woody shrubs etch their way across the landscape looking for all the world like death in this blustery cold.  I am forced inside where I stand at the window wondering why.  What has happened in the Magic Kingdom?

The snow covers it all.  The snow keeps falling and floating across the Magic garden Kingdom, and has settled decidedly upon each branch and every surface, carefully tucking itself around all shrubs and trees, blanketing the the 4′ x 4′ squares where vegetables once grew abundantly.  There is quiescent hush there now where once the sound of the spade dug deep into earth, the fountains bubbled exuberantly and night fires blazed; children laughed and ran around while little weeds were uprooted and branches were pruned and sugar snap peas were hungrily crunched upon right then and there in the verdant Kingdom.

Covering.

But the snow covers all now and despite my sadness at the loss of earlier, greener days,  the snow serves its true purpose hiding the ground, preventing the heat generated by the earth from escaping.  This blanket of crystal white inhibits the radiant life energy from abandoning the roots of the trees and bushes and plants and they are graced with warmth and protection (often 40-degrees warmer) in the dark, deep soil of winter, regardless of what happens in the visible.  Did you know roots have a life-pulse that continues through even the most frigid conditions?  When the branches above have been frozen in their tracks by sub-zero temperatures, the roots are active and ready to spring into action at any moment, growing and spreading further and deeper even during the resting phase of winter.  The snow covering is grace.  The snow is mercy.  The snow is a safeguard, a secure shelter for the deepest, most important, most delicate and valuable resources and treasures.

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The snow covers it all.  It unifies the the browns and grays and wheat-golds of the deciduous stand-bys.  For this season, this cold and sometimes hope-dwindling time of year, the snow creates a formal gown of beauty for ashes, of gladness for mourning and becomes a garment of praise instead of despair (Is. 61.3).  Sandy-the-Dog runs into the white, kicking up the flakes like dust and hundreds of birds fill the air in shock from where they’d been feasting on berries, but soon realize how harmless she  is and go back to stake their claim.  I laugh at the sight.  Life goes on.  In winter white.

He gives beauty for ashes
Strength for fear
Gladness for mourning
Peace for despair

When sorrow seems to surround you
When suffering hangs heavy over your head
Know that tomorrow brings
Wholeness and healing
God knows your need
Just believe what He said

He gives beauty for ashes
Strength for fear
Gladness for mourning
Peace for despair

Crystal Lewis, Beauty for Ashes

Hidden under a canopy of mercy on a melancholy winter’s day…Jeanie

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NOTE TO SELF:  Spring will come again.  My roots will be more established, stronger.  Have mercy on me, Lord, have mercy…

pictured: The Magic Kingdom (aka my backyard) in September; and now.

September Garden

“But now in September the garden has cooled, and with it my possessiveness.  The sun warms my back instead of beating on my head … The harvest has dwindled, and I have grown apart from the intense midsummer relationship that brought it on.”
–  Robert Finch

Pearl has beautifully cleaned her garden and cleared it away.  My cousins in the midwest, I have heard, have done the same.  But I always struggle to let go, to actually let summer pass into fall.

Early last week I thought the zucchini looked weak and perhaps were nearly “over,” so I watered them once more, gathering an arm-load of fruit, planning to uproot and end their time over the weekend.  The very next day, however, they were alive again with large yellow blooms, shouting their worth and prolonging their stay.

Some of the garden will make it through the cold.

But these cold days and cold, cold nights are going to do all the tender plants in.  Ultimately many of the flowers, including the petunias and nicotiana and zinnias, will make it through this frigid spell and will shine like stars in the universe in October as Monarch butterflies dance around them, captivating my fancy while I should be doing something productive.  And if I cover my tomatoes and peppers, which, of course, I will, they will suffer some, but keep producing – almost until Thanksgiving, the Lord willing and I remember to pay special attention.

Some of the garden won’t make it through the end of the week.

But the cucumbers, the zucchini and the spaghetti squash will likely not make it past this week.  Their tender leaves are taking a hit that will be irrepairable.  I have already pulled  most of the green beans. 

It’s so hard to say good-bye.

But it is hard to let them go.  It is difficult to watch the yard begin to retreat into its winter-ready clothes where once it danced merrily in dazzling color and sizzling heat.  It’s hard to hear the sound of dry, rustling leaves where children once splashed in water to the frog, toad and cricket’s song of the castinets.

The harvest is dwindling.

Today I brought in 2 armfuls of baby zucchini, lemon and English cukes and some other variety of cucumber.  I ate a couple of small beans right there amidst the soil and fading green.  I grabbed some huge, very happy-looking peppers (where a fridge full of their colorful cousins await being used), and I grabbed the reddish tomatoes, which are too soft inside to expose to such cold, but will continue their ripening on the counter and be delectable in the next 2-3 days.

This is the September garden.  It dwindles.

 

Scenes from a Good Summer ~ Nourished by Time in the Garden

Another Ode to Summer, for I shan’t acknowledge an autumn which does not truly begin until the September Equinox, on the 22nd day of this month.  Yes, school is back in session.  Yes,  the nights are cooler, some mornings even crisp.  But I must sing of my love for the summer until the last verse fades softly…

“I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer.  My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music.  It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips.”  ~Violette Leduc, Mad in Pursuit

Black dirt.  Green grass.  Blue sky. 

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Baby pepper plants taking over where lettuces and radishes have been as spring turns into summer.

 

Sunshine in my heart.

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Peppery, edible Nasturtiums.

 

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July 15th was the first red tomato day.  They have been steady ever since.  Snapdragons grow in odd spaces among the rocks and borders.

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Steady, brilliant potentilla blooms yellow all summer long.  Hollyhocks rule the world.

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As many unplanned flowers grow here as the ones I actually placed.  Seeds from year’s past in re-used pots shout “surprise” throughout the long, summer days.

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The self-seeded and stately sunflowers, heliotropers all, each have their own “face,” their own look and personality.  This is the Crowned Prince, not the flashiest or most obvious, but the smartest among them all.  He observes everything happening in the garden, including my bungling attempts at transcendence in soil, and wisely discerns how to bring healing and balance, extending grace where needed, though undeserved.

“Awake, north wind, and come, south wind!  Blow on my garden, that its’ fragrance may spread abroad.  Let my lover come into his garden and taste its choice fruits.”  Song of Solomon 4.16

 

And now?  I dine on fresh produce and cut little bundles of flowers and enjoy the reward of dirt under my nails, and pulling weeds and nurturing seedlings and digging holes and watering young plants and hauling manure and mixing plant food concoctions and enduring the heat of the day and being attacked by mosquitoes and cussed out by mama spiders and pricked by thorns and enthralled by the scent of five types of basil and beguiled  by the perfume as I caress the thuriferous leaves of the rosemary in passing.  I am compensated so far beyond any effort I have invested.   In the garden is food for my soul.

Lily Pad

As I reflect on the garden of 2009, I have realized, OK-wow…I had lilies.

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They are so random and scattered and were absolutely planted here or there with no expectations.  And every single lily, whether the extremely drought resistant mini-daylilies or the exotic Easter and Asian lilies, were purchased on clearance by bulb.  In fact, I got them so cheap they were pretty much purchased with a whatever-happens-happens attitude because I didn’t even know if they’d grow.

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But now, a few years later, I am glad I took the risk and I have throughly enjoyed, considered even, the lilies.

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My lover has gone down to his garden, to the beds of spices, to browse in the gardens and to gather lilies.”  Solomon in the Song of Songs 6.2

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Consider how the lilies grow.  They do not labor or spin.  Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.”  Jesus in Luke 12.27

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Garden Peril

It’s not all glory out there.  The garden can be rough at times.  Just a little fair warning if you think it is all roses and tomatoes.

Hollyhocks can Hurt.

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Yeah, they are splashy, showy and plopped themselves in my garden without my help, initially – easy to grow, little work required.  And they even make great toothpick ballerinas, but geesh: they are stickery.  If you have to tame them at all, cut them back or dig up the little babies they poop all over the darn place, they will attack you head to toe with the most minute little slivers of scratchiness ever.  You can’t see them, no, but you know they are there.  And you have to change clothes to go on.  Mean. 

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Never trust the fluttering, white, cabbage-moth.

They flutter.  “Oh, lookeeee…” the grandbebes cry with glee.  For they think it is a butterfly – a pretty, dancing butterfly.  But no, it is not.  So while they frolic and zoom about, diving and rolling and having their little party in my garden, they best be warned: I don’t trust them.

Do you know why?  Because they will lay eggs from which will come cabbage-white-moth-caterpillars and those little suckers will chew my plants up!  They are trying to take control of my vegetables.  And having not helped one iota in any of the work of my garden, I am not sorry to say I do not welcome them to enjoy the fruit of my labor.  Not at all.

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The grasshoppers (known sinners) want to rule the land.

Oh, sure, they are cute in the spring when they hop around all sweet and innocent-looking.  But they can chew up your plants like nobody’s business, so you should plan your attack early and hard against those boogers.  By this time they fly like some attack-helicopter when I approach and could probably give me a concussion if they actually flew into my head.  The buzz of their wings is annoyingly loud and they, let me just tell you, are not at all godly like their Praying-Mantis cousins.  They are tobacco chewers and spitters, if ever I have seen any,  and have quite an attitude at their little meetings where they are most probably planning plagues!

Mama Spiders are bitchy.  Oops.  I can’t say that.  My mom might read this.

Well.  They are. 

They are building their homes and webs on my plants (eating my bounty), but have no trouble at all telling me where to get off when I water or disrupt them in any fashion.  Lucky for them I consider the work they do of value to my kingdom (and I once read about their very likeable cousin in Charlotte’s Web).  Or they’d be out, I tell you.  Out!

purple-petunias1 guini-020 the purple petunias & Guini in the garden

Danger Lurks.

But I am being careful and aware.  Don’t worry about me.  Just pray for me.  Pray a lot.

In the garden where life is fine (albeit dangerous at times)…Jeanie

NOTE TO SELF:  Clean-up the daylilies, mulch the peppers a little more for these cooler evenings, talk to the tomatoes, thump on the spaghetti squash, train the unruly beans, pick up the pile of spent hibiscus and weed behind the pool.

Jeanie & Julie & Julia

I saw the movie again last night, for the second time, Julie and Julia.  And here is what I know: I will never be Julia Child, for I truly am one of those people who, though loving the fine meal, the meal that takes hours to prepare, will not use her time for that.

But I defy anyone to improve upon my lunch today.

From my garden: tender, young green beans, stir-fried with crushed garlic and barely salted, the savory flavor of them rivaling a fillet mignon.  A purple bell pepper sizzled into submission in extra-virgin olive oil.  Thick, perfectly round slices of zucchini browned to a caramelized sweetness, and seasoned just-so, so delectable it is hard to believe it is not a sin.

Accented by imported Greek Kalamata Olives, which have been soaking in olive oil and red wine vinegar just long enough, and a thick, soft chunk of cave-aged blue cheese cut from a hand-made wedge, which has been cured to its full potential, the blue veining a work of tongue-tingling art (and some sort of chemical reaction to the penicillin they use in its’ creation).

You would be hard-pressed to find a meal anywhere as delicious and beautiful as this for any price.  And done in 10 minutes, start to finish.

Had I added  tomato,   I fear it might have been too much heaven.

Favorite quote from Julie & Julia:  I could blog.  I have thoughts.

Loving the late-summer harvest…Jeanie

NOTE TO SELF:  Get another hobby besides food.

They just show up

I am a planner.

You carefully sketch and design your gardens and borders.  You plan for height and variety, texture and color.  You create walkways and growing areas, a border here, a berm there.

Early spring finds you growing seedlings on the window sill.  It takes such effort and exact science to make the small plants whole and healthy enough to finally be transplanted into the garden where they will grow to bring you joy and food for the season.

But for all the careful planning, for the pages of written plans saying eggplant will go in this square and a Japanese cucumber will go in that square and hmmm, let’s plant Nasturtiums here, there are the unexpected plants for which I did not account, the “volunteers.”

From out of nowhere.

There was a day I’d have pulled them all at first sighting, but now I don’t.  Now I see a Zinnia or a Marigold that has decided to grow in a crevice or between bricks or have just plopped themselves right in the middle of a walkway, and I give them their space.  Now I am glad they have upset my carefully laid plans and have just shown up, out of nowhere ~ a gift, a happy surprise.

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The volunteers, sometimes flowers, sometimes a vegetable of some sort, while often getting a late start compared to the seedlings, ultimately catch up and are stronger and more established than the plants I’ve been coaxing, fawning over, encouraging to grow.  They are just there.  They just showed up, no work or toil.  Just there for the enjoyment.  They are divine blessings – an infusion of favor that I didn’t have to work hard to get, which makes them all the more delightful.  And cherished.

pictured: some “volunteer” zinnias I keep getting to cut and enjoy inside; they just keep producing blooms and I did not do one thing to deserve it…

The Garden Alphabet

I admire poetic people, the ones who can express the deep feelings and thoughts of the soul with a new turn of a word or phrase.  I always wish I could do that, but I can’t.  If I could, I’d have written a thousand songs by now.  As it is, I can dream up the melodies, but I can’t get the words right.

But when I go to the garden in the early morning hours, my observations are downright Dr.-Seuss-like.  And they show up fast.  So today, sometime during the time I played in the dirt and pulled the weeds and watered the plants and argued with the spiders about territory and rights and got chased by wasps and picked the produce and swept the patio and plumped the pillows and drank some lemon water and de-weeded some pathway cracks, I observed this:

The purple petunias are pungent today, heavy and sweet with perfume.

The peppers are plenteous, parading in glory,  papilionaceous and pretty.

And it is not just that I have created 2 great entries for “P” for writing a children’s garden book (oh the dreams I harbor), but that those two things are perfectly and totally true today.  In my garden. 

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images from google because I was just too lazy to take pictures…however, I have a lot more pepper varieties than this!