Dear Mom the flowers look lovely

Dear Mom the flowers look lovely

I have labored all year on my flower garden. It is not complicated. It has three sections. Marigolds in two of them and impatiens in the third. One section just got too much shade this year and the marigolds did not prosper at all. I gave up midsummer and realized I would have to just put bark there next year. Oh well, it was nice while it was lasted and I truly need less to weeding anyway. The other two have done very well.

Early summer you just have these spots of flowers sticking out of the ground. You see more ground than plants unless you have not weeded this week and it hardly looks like a flower garden.

If you fail to weed one week you will find the flowers are actually choked by the weed growth. I have experimented in the past by weeding half the garden and watching while the weeded section actually grows twice as much as the un-weeded section.

I have also experimented with watering. Watering one section only every third day and the other sections every day has a similar effect. The flowers grow twice as fast in the watered section.

So, to mind your garden well weed it two to three times a week for a few months water it every day and you will find as the flowers get bigger you need to weed less and you see far less ground. This, of course, is in addition to adding manure every year and extra peat to hold in the moisture.

So, here it is the Autumn. The flowers look great. I would say they have not looked “great” till about a week ago. The impatiens never filled out like I wanted them too, but then again I must have the wrong expectation for them because I can’t remember a time when my impatiens did fill out like I wanted them to. But the marigolds look great. They are full of blossoms and cover almost all of the space in the garden. I have to trim them back a little where they hang over the sidewalk.

Now I cringe watching the weather hoping the first frost will hold off. I have considered plastic for emergencies if we get a sudden first frost that is too early but why fight nature? In years when I have done this it never seems to work very long anyway.

Just about everything I learned about gardening I learned at your side. I am not as ambitious. I rarely like more than two kinds of flowers, but that is mostly because I like the splashes of color from the curb view. I remember the garden in front of your house looking almost like an herb garden. But it looked loved and well taken care of. In the Winter when the snow was on the ground and last years flowers were encased in ice it was hard to tell they were not once weeds, but they were beautiful in their own right. Still a garden in winter is just a shadow of what it is in late summer.

Gardens are just one of those things you pour your time and attention into and only really reap the benefit for a short time.

Love Mike