Grow Your Own!

Used to be everyone grew a few tomatoes and cucumbers for the summer. You get a big 5 gallon bucket and set it in the sun or on a porch. Every house had a few flowers to pick and bring in. Neighbors traded vegetables at weekends. Americans have become addicted to whats easy and fast. They don't even go to the trouble to know neighbors!  Our addiction to cell phones, television and video games has destroyed our need for other people.  We don't go to a ballgame we watch it from home and eat snacks! We don't pay attention to each other we'd rather LOL them on our phones If you go to a coffee house you'll notice it's silent now because people are too busy doing social media instead of being social! Now the Fourth of July is upon us I issue this challenge...
Here is a list of what you'll need...2 five gallon buckets, a bag of miracle grow garden soil, some gravel and a drill. Drill 5 holes in the bottom of the bucket put in about three inches of gravel. Then add the soil. Now go to and buy some of those big tomato and cucumber plants and out them into your buckets! Now put them out in the light and feel your life get better!

Happy Fourth of July Everyone!

Sappy until the end. (won't change, don't want to)

When J and I first decided to move into "our first apartment" not my apartment or his apartment but our apartment I took a cutting from the Gardenia bush that grew outside. It was four feet wide and almost as tall as me. We almost killed it a number of times in it's pot until years later we decided to plant it in "our back yard at our house. It bloomed today and looks better than it ever has. Love you J here's our first plant together thriving.

 

and now for this mornings blooms!

Plots, Pans and Garbage Pails

I have been plotting for most of the spring to get these iris into something other than a bright blue Kiddie pool. They were given to me by a lady who bought them and then found out her ground was mostly tree roots. We managed to get them home and drag them under the grape arbor...then we collapsed for the sheer weight of moving them! I have made plots and put things in pans, garbage pails but never a kiddie pool! I choose to dig when it's damp for red clay because though it is heavy as crap and dense you can dig and it holds it's shape like a clay pot...you just have to make sure you make a way for the water to get out or it'll drown your plants. Just like a pot with no hole in the bottom!
I have this thing about iris...they seduce me every time I see one. J and I have bought Denim blue, Damask purples, Immortality white, as well as inherited palest apricot from my grandmothers.  Now we are searching for a black iris called Old Black Magic which is a re blooming iris! So here are the pics of whats blooming for the week...Blessings and prayers!

Life Began in a Garden

As you grow you start rethinking things. I like to think of gardening as an art form. It is painting with plants, therapy with soil! Gardening is a very forgiving medium of art.  You can have failure after failure and begin with a clean canvas every time. Dig it up plant something else, somewhere else. Get plants from all your family and become the historian.  Some people like a garden that's one color and minimum ornamentation, some like masses of color and structures. I happen to like color! ALL of it! I haven't yet met a plant I didn't fall in love with. It adds to your life in so many ways. I have learned to talk to people! Did you know I have not met a gardener who didn't like talking about what they did how they did it? They are the most caring and sharing people I have ever met! Want to start a conversation ask someone about a flower or plant and see their eyes light up!
I have also learned that we need to be good stewards of this small earth. Little things matter! That everything you do has repercussions. Want to teach a child to be responsible? Begin in the garden! 

Getting Wild in the Garden! Cultivation & Cultivars, know your native plants!

My name is Edna and I am a Wild Gardener. 

Wild gardening to me means you mix in as many native plants as you do cultivars. According to Wiki, "a cultivar is a plant or grouping of plants selected for desirable characteristics that can be maintained by propagation." They usually don't belong in the area, humans have replaced native plants with cultivars. Wild gardening is to preserve the native wild landscape and nature. I have golden rod, milkweed and dead nettles growing in my flower beds. The dead nettles are also being used as ground cover and as a natural fertilizer called green manure. {More on green manure later!}

milkweed plants

Make room in your garden for some native species, for those plants that support the natural order around you. Some butterflies and animals have died out because we chose to interrupt nature and plant our own cultivars. They had nowhere to go and nothing they could eat. Most people remember how many butterflies we had in our youth, now they are a rare sight, mostly because we,  in our ignorance, did away with their habitat and food sources by drying up ponds and planting grass. 

Where do you think all the frogs, dragonflies have gone? 

Don't think of native plants and grass as weeds or dry up a natural pond in your yard, embrace the natural surroundings, and find a way to incorporate into your garden.  Natural plants need a place to call home, butterflies need a home to make a family. 
Plant some native milkweed, let the bees have their goldenrod, then lean back and enjoy the sounds of nature. 

{garden photos by me, please share with links}