what’s your problem?

Posted on August 6, 2012 by paridevita

Dear Gladiolus dalenii:

I have this blog (an ugly word, I know), and a while back I hinted that something really exciting was going to happen in the little garden by the front window. That’s right, the one you’re in.

I was talking about you. You bloomed last year, and you were so spectacular that airplanes flying overhead slowed down to look at you. A huge spike of red-orange and yellow flowers, remember? That’s why I planted you, for flowers. Not just to sit there and look like any number of plants with sword-shaped leaves.

Yes, I know it hasn’t been raining, and the soil you’re growing in is not terrific, but that’s no excuse, because I can see that you’re five times bigger than last year, so–do the math–there should be five times as many flower spikes as last year. Not none, five times as many.

That was Blossom Booster I sprinkled on you the other day. So what if it probably expired in 1973? It’s the thought that counts. And you do get watered. Let’s see some action here.

Yours truly,

the person who can dig you up and give you away if you don’t do what I want.

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progress

Posted on August 5, 2012 by paridevita

This is what happens when you jump to conclusions. First conclusion I jumped to was that I had no more room for plants, until I looked at this space (room for at least fifty), and the second conclusion was that this soil was hard as a rock. I tried digging in the soil here, using a cheap shovel someone left in the front yard some years ago (the tip of the shovel is now concave, which doesn’t happen with the heavier-bladed Bulldog tools), and it was a snap. This had been a garden before, so the top eight inches or so were easy to dig in. I needed to fill the hole with water to get down deeper with the shovel, and the water drained away in just a few minutes.

Some people say that if a hole doesn’t drain in thirty minutes that’s bad; others say two hours, or twelve hours. The soil here is so dry it hardly matters one way or the other. There were no earthworms in the soil I dug out.

I happened to have a nice Vitex agnus-castus that I was going to jam into any space I could find, until it occurred to me that empty spaces have some potential. The vitex won’t become a tree here, which is okay by me. I don’t need any more trees. The Cotoneaster multiflora in the corner has become a tree, but got seriously pruned when the fence went in. I was daydreaming about moving to California the other day, but there, everything becomes a tree. Sometimes living in a less gardening-friendly climate has its advantages.

 

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