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!

Adding to the Universe...Midnight thoughts

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and look at the night sky. The stars and moon seem to sing to you in the deep dark velvet blue sky and look at the shadows and plat of white and light that is my garden. I say my prayers then and in those quiet moments when you find yourself alone. We so seldom find ourselves alone any more. Even when we are in the house alone there is the phone, TV and computer constantly going off, begging us to talk trash, play games and spend more money! I think that's why I like gardening so much. You get to turn off the day and the electronics (if your wise.) Spend some quality time with yourself.  I am not alone. I am alone with myself!

Turn on some soothing music, kneel down and think about how the universe really works for you. Peace and balance come after a few hours in the sun and you take that cool drink while you inspect what you've done. People say I don't always answer my phone and sometimes I can't be reached...it could be important! I think to myself as human beings we've gone from solitary farmers, artists and makers of things to people who answer the phone. The dead will still be dead, the disaster will still be a disaster...and little Timmi will still be a brat if I wait to answer your call. What's important to you is not always important to me and I swear some people talk just so they know they are still alive. 

You get so little time to just breath and stand in the sun. When I am sad I go to the garden. When I am happy you'll find me there too. I am straining to make a place where you can walk, think and be. That's what a garden is to me. 

A garden is not something to make curb appeal... that means the things there mean so little to you and you'd sell it in a heart beat. It's not something to show off (although you can do that). I don't want to pick my plants because they would impress the neighbors. Although I sometimes find them staring at my riot of color and shaking their heads. A garden is something special to me. My grandmother's and Aunt Alice's peonies. The iris from my great grandmothers yard. Plants my husband bought me because I trained him not to buy me cut flowers I'd rather have live!

There is nothing better than standing in the middle of your own garden looking at the plants you grew and feeling that sense of accomplishment...and feeling the need to pull weeds instead of answer your phone! How much of ourselves have we lost by becoming the Tech-nation? 

While you are out browsing and consuming wander out and buy a few plants. Turn off everything as you plant them. Focus on making them grow and listen to some good tunes...breath and feel your life  change (if you stick with it) and yes become obsessed  with growing something and adding to the universe instead of taking.  Now I think it's time for me to go back to bed. 

Immortality Iris....The story of forever.

I am a plant addict. There, I said it. No intervention needed! 

I love the smell of freshly cut grass, deep down to the brown, red & black earth and the feel of it between my fingers. I love hearing stories about plants. There is lore and fact, and sometimes they intermingle. I love sitting out in my garden, listening to the birds sing; viewing it as art, like, a great masterpiece, and the work yet undone. 

The story of iris flowers began when Egypt conquered Syria, King Thutmose III of Egypt was a gardener and a warrior as well. He assured that the iris flower would be on his monuments, Temple of Amon at Karnak, as well as in the gardens of Egypt, they all bear the iris design, and are the symbol for life renewed. 

The white iris was created by Dr. Lloyd Zurbrigg, circa 1991,  which is known today as the Immortality Iris, which blooms in the Spring and in the Fall, which is unusual for an iris. It's has been called a true remembrance of this remarkable man.  I love to think of it as a little chunk of his own immortality.

Read more:

  {This photo was taken two weeks later}

I have been promised the re-blooming will go on for perhaps as long as 6 weeks! 

History of the Iris Flower | Garden Guides

Click this link for more! 

And this is just the beginning...My Not So Secret Garden