It is difficult to get motivated about the flower garden when you look out the window and the whole “backyard” is coming up in wildflowers.
In fact, at the retreat house where I work, which will have its first major bloom on the prairie installed two years ago, the question came up at our last board meeting: “Should we dig up the perennial bed?” Every year we spend a day separating the lilies and cleaning things up, putting in the annuals and mulching. Flower gardens can be so fussy. All gardens can, of course, be fussy, but the tradition of “ornamental” gardens is the worst.
My mantra this year about the vegetable garden is pretty much the same as last year: keep the weeds at bay enough that they don’t harm the produce. When I watch organic farm shows (they’re everywhere now) I’m so happy to see how messy the hipster gardens are.
Of course, I have to do a little better than just keeping the weeds from overwhelming the produce. I keep the raised beds very well weeded. And if I don’t keep ahead of the weeds in the onion-potato-bean plot, it encourages gophers and damaging insects to move in. To that end, I did fuss– laying down paths of landscaping fabric covered with mulch and covering the beans with a light layer of straw. I’ll also get my hula hoe into service. But I know that by July, I’ll get less diligent and let weeds push up around the edges, just pulling the ones in with the large potato vines and bean plants and keeping the others from seeding out. At the end of the season, it will take a tiller to get things back to black dirt.
A few weeks ago Steve fixed the retaining wall on the flower garden, upending some of the perennials. It was about the same time Jeff was going around planting things all over the prairie. He said in an off-hand way, “I stuck a few blazing stars in your garden.” (This is a little issue with Jeff– he has been known to prune trees we didn’t want pruned, etc.) So far my flower garden has been a “prairie-free zone.” But the other day I saw these funny plants coming up in a little pocket where I used to have succulent-type plants.
Jeff said, “Hey, the blazing stars!”
I was about to pull out two other little things, literally two leaved-sprouts I assumed were weeds. “Don’t pull those!” Jeff said. “Those are lupine.” And sure enough, within a week, they’d sprouted the flower-like leaves of lupines. I love lupines, so might move them when they’re bigger into the main part of the flower garden. And I can’t pull up blazing stars, so they’ll no doubt be towering above the first row of alyssum and thyme by July. Why fuss?
