Coveting "The Good Life"

I was reading one of my favorite garden blogs (In the Garden Online) this morning where Colleen was lamenting about how she's so ahead of the game that she's able to just sit back and wait to start gathering food from her garden. While I read her list I realized that it mirrors the same list of things I've been agonizing over.

1. This Spirea (pictured right) has the most beautiful little white blooms with a tiny yellow center. I'm likely getting rid of it in a couple of weeks and every day I've stared at it it from my kitchen window thinking I should cut some of the flowers to bring inside. Haven't done it!
2. I've had these lettuce and mustard green plants (pictured below ) in these little cups where they were grown from seed for several weeks waiting to be planted.
3. Mint tea - I'm scared to grow mint on the count of I planted one little ole mint plant years ago at a house I was renting from my grandmother and it took over. To this day when you walk in the back door of that old house, the smell of mint is intoxicating. No-thank-you to invasives!
4. When I step outside I see no thriving eco-system. I just see all the un-done work. The "eco-system" is hanging out in my neighbor's yard (she's a teacher and off for the summer and way ahead of me on gardening) waiting for me to get my act together.
5. My plots are not planted. In fact, my plots are not even built yet! I've got one table full of veggies waiting and a million empty pots that need to be planted. (The sky is falling - the sky is falling!)

This year's garden has really taken a backseat to the other stuff in my personal life. Between the weddings and swine flu's and budget's and community garden fundraising... I either need a time machine, or a bunch of spare gardeners or I may not get to see my kitchen window lined with tomatoes this summer.

Are you on schedule? God knows I hope I'm not the only one...

A Year In The Life Of Vanhoutte Spirea

Meet Vanhoutte Spirea. It's the big ass shrub that came with the house. I had no idea what it was until some helpful gardening bloggers ID'd it for me. As you can see this thing is completely out of control. It's taller than the 6 foot fence and I think I remember that it was like 12 feet wide and protruded from the fence over 7 feet. Carolyn and Carol both told me they felt that it had a nice shape when I first posted about how much I hated it, but that was one of the few things that I totally disagreed with them about. This thing was just too much and it had to go.

I don't know if you've ever seen a Vanhoutte Spirea in bloom but it's breath taking. Every branch is stuffed with beautiful white flowers and that is the one time where I'd agree, the bigger and more out of control the better. But after the blooms are finished, an out of control Spirea is an eye sore in a bare garden like I had at that time.

So I hacked Vanhoutte all the way to the ground (below). I never posted any pictures of it because I knew I'd be scolded by gardening bloggers world wide. I just figured, if it lived that'd be great, and if it didn't I'd be OK with that, too. I did find that the center of the shrub looked completely dead. I don't know the life cycle of a Vanhoutte but I have a feeling this one is towards the end of it. And it took a few weeks but I finally started to see some growth. Thank goodness!

Here it is after it started growing back (below). Isn't that adorable? And much more the size of a shrub I needed for this bed. It turns out that, for multi-stemmed shrubs, you can cut them all the way to the ground and it "rejuvenates" them. Now don't run out and do this to all your out of control shrubs because it won't work on the single stemmed ones. If you kill your shrubs, don't blame me! Mutilating shrubs is risky business.

So then the landscaper made it in to a ball. Bad Landscaper! I had no idea that I needed to specifically tell a landscaper not to make things into balls. Why are they so obsessed with that? Is there anybody who actually asks their landscaper to make their shrubs into balls?

And since Vanhoutte Spirea blooms on old wood, I assumed that it wouldn't bloom this year which kinda pissed me off.

Well here it is this morning (below). I just love this shrub. That it has taken all the abuse thrown it's way over the past year really impresses me. The blooms are nearly as profuse as they normally are, but it is still breathtaking.

It'll always have a place in my garden. And if it ever dies, I'll buy another one. It's the elder in my garden.

"My Whole Yard"

A while back my best friend Shannon asked me to show some pictures of my "whole yard". Well here they are.

Now, I'm sure everybody noticed that my kitchen garden is in a very awkward spot. The reason for this is that nothing had been done in my yard until I decided to plant some veggies. Since I'm a lazy bastard and so inclined to lose interest in things as fast as I begin obsessing about them, I decided I should plant this stuff immediately in front of the patio so that I couldn't ignore it. This also happens to get full sun for most of the day. Well, after I planted here, I decided to do the whole damn yard. Boy, do I regret putting it right there! Not only that but I put down the black fabric so as soon as I pull it up, I'll have a nice big brown spot there that I'll have to fight to get grass to grow. I'm planning to have three 4x4 raised beds next year and I'll move them over to toward the south fence more.

For those of you that remember the out of control Spirea, do you see it over there by the fence? The Rock Star landscaper trimmed it into a ball. UGH! Casualties of war, I guess. I would like to publicly state that I did NOT ask him to do this, nor did I ask him to make the front shrubs look like poodles. I'm not into that! Now I know I should give explicit instructions on that sort of thing.