I’m looking out the window at the garden. As it always does this time of year, it looks bleak and bare. But what a difference from last year! Then the entire south fence of the backyard was taken up by an unusable grape vine that had grown from the roots of a winter-killed graft, and the ripe seedless grapes had been replaced by slightly bitter grapes that were loaded with seed–as many as eight in one small grape. That fence is bare now; next year my asparagus will grow along the fenceline, interspersed with tomatoes because asparagus and tomatoes are good for each other.
The back (west) fenceline, which was a wilderness of weeds and old stumps, is cleared, mowed, tilled, and amended with rich compost and topsoil. Next year it will be host to the four green seedless grapevines that will be delivered next week. Our handyman, Manny Lopez, who is a genius of the first water, will personally plant them, because by the time they arrive I’ll be in the hospital to have my right knee replaced.
The north fenceline contained nothing but weed trees–elms that the previous owner had intended for firewood. We don’t use the wood stove, and for us they have been a nuisance for 20 years. They have been dug up, pulled out, cut down, poisoned, and still they come back. Manny went and rented a stump grinder and ground all the stumps to sawdust and used the sawdust to smother weeds on the north fenceline beside the house. The north fenceline in the backyard is where the three red grapevines will go. Then there’s a small, narrow, walkway, and on the other side of the walkway are the raspberries and blackberries. The raspberries have already gone in, and we will plant the blackberries in the spring, from a nursery bed that we’ll plant the seeds in just before the snow.
The two apple trees (green and red) have been pruned, as have the apricot and plum trees. Most exciting was the transfer of fifteen rose bushes from our daughter’s yard, where some of them have been growing for forty years, to our yard. Becky and Spencer are enlarging their house, and there was no longer a place for the roses, to say nothing of the fact that Becky is expecting her third child and doesn’t have the time or energy to take care of roses. To our astonishment, all of them survived, although Johnnie, who did our rock gardens, had to rent a fork lift to get them out of the ground and onto his truck. They’re mostly along the north fenceline on the side away from the house. One of them is in Alicia’s garden.
Where last year we had a collection of weeds and a little bit of grass, we now have ten raised beds. Nine of them are the same size, but one is much larger. We call it Alicia’s garden. Our youngest daughter is buried in Kansas, and because of our invalid status, it is impossible for us to visit her grave. So we decided to create a cenotaph to her in our backyard. We ordered a bronze plaque, and Manny built a pyramid of tile to attach it to. Behind it is a windmill that Alicia liked, and it is loaded with flowers she liked. Because she was born in Texas, we put yellow roses at each of the four corners of the bed. Three of them survived and have been blooming like mad. The fourth died, but one of the roses Becky gave us was a peace rose, which is yellow and pink. So we replaced the dead bush with the peace rose, which is growing like mad but will not bloom until next year.
East of the backyard fence, on the south side of the house, we have xeriscaped. Here in Utah, xeriscaping is becoming very popular. Between the gate to the backyard and the front sidewalk, we have nothing but rock garden–not the kind that is a pile of rocks with soil tucked into the interspaces to grow small plants, but the kind that is heavy vinyl, covered with sand, covered with pebbles, covered with rocks, with the occasional boulder here and there.
In the front yard, most of the grass has been replaced with the same kind of rock garden, and the grandchildren–we’re expecting another one in the spring–love to play on the boulders.
The north side of the front yard, on the other side of the driveway, is a large raised bed. This year we planted everything from daisies and petunias to dahlias and gladiolas, and then stood back and watched them grow. Most of them have had it, but one single-flowered chrysanthemum that I grew from seed, and one multiflowered chrysanthemum that I also grew from seed, are still blooming madly, as are the two small mums that I bought at the grocery store in October.
I still have to move the daylilies–fifteen assorted and thirty Stella d’Oro–to the large mound of planting soil in the front yard south of the driveway. It is an integral part of our xeriscape, and I am carefully putting there only plants that Peter Lassig, who designed a very low-maintenance for our neighborhood library’s yard, put in it. Peter is the retired chief gardener for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and has been all over the world gardening and studying gardens, so if he says something will grow in xeriscape conditions, it will. So I have echinacea, yarrow, and daylilies there. I have also planted some hyacinths and grape hyacinths, because I already know how they act in our yard.
Soon I’ll have to take the two fig trees and the bay tree indoors for the winter, because they can’t survive a Utah winter. They should have grown a lot more this summer than they did, and we found out why they didn’t when Manny decided to move them to smaller pots to go inside. Damian, the teenager I hired to do weeding and some of the planting, had put them in the large pots still in their growing pots! So we’re pulling them out of the growing plots, and I suspect that by this time next year they’ll be five feet tall and have to be hauled into the “barn” as we call my garden room by two or three people.
What else? There’s a whole list of plants that I can sow just before the first heavy snow, and they should come up in the spring and begin to bloom during the summer. They include poppies (supposedly somniferum, but I don’t think they really are), perennial hollyhocks, perennial foxglove, and I’ve temporarily misplaced the rest of the list. Those three are the most important anyway, and I think the list is with the seeds.
In the barn, where I’ll do the physical therapy after my knee replacement, I’ll be starting rosa rugosa, asparagus, and several other plants, besides what I grow in the collection of Aerogardens I bought last year. They are available from Amazon and at their own website, for about the same price. Last year we had them in the living room, but we have given the “window desk” where we had them to DI (Deseret Industries, Utah’s version of Goodwill) and so they have to stay in the barn. Some utter idiot built an elaborate barbecue grill inside the barn, and of course, the first time he fired it up he burned the rafters and almost set the house on fire. We cannot possibly use it as a barbecue, so it is the stand for a lot of plants. My husband, T, doesn’t like plants in the house, but the barn is my territory, and I can have all the plants I can squeeze in. Speaking of which, I have to water today.
So what book am I going to talk about? What else but the Rodale Ultimate Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening. It is available on Amazon in trade paperback and on Kindle, and being the nut I am, I bought both. It is a complete encyclopedia of gardening, as well as of organic gardening, where you can learn how to plant what and where it will grow. What else is there to say about it? I will get very specific later, when I’m talking about other books, but about this one, all I can say is, whatever your question, there is a very good chance that you can find the answer here.
See you tomorrow.
