Back to the Garden
It’s August and I see that it will be up into the mid-80s by noon. While I would prefer it five degrees cooler, the weather here on the hilltop is actually pretty pleasant and working outside in the garden is tolerable so long as you are judicious in your activity in the midday sun. Mad dogs and Englishmen may not care about the midday sun, but I would rather not risk overdoing it and then regretting my exhaustion. Nonetheless, I do plan on starting some late summer preparations today. My focus will be my wildflower gardens and the transplanting of several shrubs I want to juggle. The wildflower garden to the north is looking particularly dry. It is scheduled to water for 20 minutes three times per week, which is the most aggressive cycle I have programmed. It should be enough watering to keep the flowers blooming, but that patch of ground gets direct sunlight for most of the day and like I said, it seems parched. My solution will be to add a layer of topsoil to this rock-strewn area and throw a few handfuls of wildflower seeds over it before giving it an additional soaking. I had Joventino cut down the dead flower stalks from the earlier season growth, so now is the time to act and thereby have a chance of getting in a flower crop for the Fall.
I am a trial and error gardener if there ever was one. I am as surprised as anyone if my workings of the land bear fruit, or more accurately, bear flowers. Wildflower seeds play into my random approach very nicely since they are a blend of native California annuals, perennials and biennials. They go yellow, orange and purple at various times, but I really don’t know or care which are one-timers or two-timers or forevers. I just throw on another handful of seed whenever the mood strikes me, and so far, that simplistic strategy has worked.
I know I am not supposed to over the seeds with soil since the wild part of the equation does not enjoy that same advantage in germination and I suspect there is a bit of survival struggle which is needed for these lovely, but not rare or unique buds to prosper to their maximum. But the area of the hillside to the north is particularly barren and rock-strewn and it looks like it could use a little soil to give these wildflowers a better chance of setting themselves up.
My neighbor Mike still has my power wheelbarrow since he probably has another ten yards of mulch to spread. My guess is that he is taking a heat-related breather from his daily chore of mulch spreading. That’s OK, I get it. I don’t have any immediate mulching plans, and that is really the only reason to bring out the big guns of the power cart. It will actually be easier to use my Gorilla Cart to get the four or five bags of soil down to Wildflower Garden. It shouldn’t need more than that and it is the sort of job Joventino could finish in fifteen minutes. I will take two hours and do it all more slowly to conserve energy.
I will then repeat the process with another four or five bags on the Wildflower Garden down by the Bison Boulder. That patch has done better with the heat and seems more in need of just added seeding, but I will put more soil down as well in an attempt to define that area as a more inviting bed for Wildflowers set amidst the boulders and the prospering cactus/succulent array I have planted over there. My blending of cacti, succulents, native flowering shrubs and Wildflowers is an approach I have come to embrace with passion. There are more manicured gardens than mine and there are more natural gardens as well. I have found that this blending keeps me more in the watering game than a pure xeriscape landscape might, but I find the splashes of color that come from the native flowering shrubs and the wildflowers are what make my back hillside all the more special and inviting…at least to me.
My back hillside is like my writing, I do it mostly for my own pleasure and understand that is both random and somewhat eclectic (Mike would say whimsical). What I know for sure is that it is all mine and that I take personal pride in it. In fact, in the back of my mind, I know that my cousin Pete, who will be coming here in two weeks, is someone I very much want to show off the garden to. Pete is a more functional gardener than I am. My sense is that he is less a passionate gardener than a get-it-done gardener. But Pete is also an east coast guy who still marvels at the variety and exoticness of the plants out here and I just know he will find my hillside very cool. For some reason, that means a lot to me and my work today is to prepare the grounds for his visit. With the work I commissioned Joventino to do this week, the place looks very well kept and properly maintained, but a few touch-ups around the edges will still help convey the feeling that the garden is lovingly cared for.
In addition to the Wildflower Gardens, I will be going to the nursery today to buy a few new plants. It’s strange, but three significant plants/shrubs/trees that I have bought from the same nursery have not done well. They get as much watering attention as any plants on the property and they all get a blend of sun and shade throughout the day. And yet, none of them is doing better than just barely surviving. I am particularly annoyed by the Crepe Myrtle that won’t flower and the a few shrubs which refuse to bloom and always look unhealthy. The Crepe Myrtle is too large to mess with until and unless I especially must, but the shrubs should be and will be replaced. I will likely try to transplant the shrub I am particularly focused on. Sometimes that alone is enough to get it going in the right direction, but my goal is less about salvaging the underperforming plants than it is about getting something in place that looks and performs better.
That will be plenty of yard work for today and maybe even take me into tomorrow. Given that I start teaching again in two weeks (and with a double course load this semester), that I have an expert assignment to work over the next month, and that we are heading off for Spain and Portugal in a month or so, I want to take on some projects, but not anything that will be left to languish while we are traveling. Even though I really don’t have a terribly busy dance card, when you are scaling back into full retirement, the next six weeks of activity are start to feel like I am making myself pretty busy….and maybe a bit too busy for comfort. I have always been a stretch objective kind of guy and pushing myself has always felt right. But when you start to smell the roses, you want to have more time to spend smelling the roses, if that makes sense.
Nevertheless, I am determined to get back into the garden and on the nursery circuit again. I know enough about gardening to know that nature will very quickly reclaim my improvements if I do not stay on top of them. Retirement does not yet mean for me that I want to not move move forward, i just want to go back into the garden at my own pace.