Oct. 9, 2009 How to borrow this perspective?
 My across the street neighbor's yard is full of reds and pinks right now.
 My gardent patch is a little straggly. Next year I want to use more dahlias. I know I need to prune the rosa rubifolia harder next spring, and really cut the budlea back hard too. The neighborhood cats still like our yard, the catmint is still blooming.
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Aug. 16, 2009 Tenant Garden Angst
My Landlord does not have to let grow flowers here, or let my little boys dig up the shady corner of the side yard where no grass will grow, and leave their grubby toys everywhere.
So when the lawnsman he hired ripped up my scabiosa "blackknight" plants that were just about to bloom, because the leaves were coarse and weedy looking, and that corner of the rose bed's wooden ties have rotted and it is hard to see the lawn/flower bed border, he was within his rights.
But that variety is not available in any nursery around here. I will have to buy seeds again and try another year to see if the deep red blossoms I saw in the catalog will look as cool with the glaucus blue leaves of my rosa rubifolia, as I imagined them three years ago when I bought the seeds. This was the first year I managed to get them to germinate.
 This is a photo from a few years ago in June, before the poppy died, but the rose leaves show up well.
I am so disappointed.
M just gave me a hug, and handed me the box of anniversary chocolates my Mom bought us.
Thanks M, I love you too. |
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May. 18, 2009 Rules of Tenant Gardening
It helps to plant the rose bushes inbetween the sidewalk and the irises: kids tend to snap off the hand height buds and drop them later on down the sidewalk. Thorns kind of stop that.
It is also helpful if the boundary between what is grass and what is not grass is really clear to the guys the landlord hires to mow.
Today an iris was snapped off, because I pruned the rosebush too much, and some daylilies were mowed, because the erosion has covered up the boundary log. This Fall I've got some transplanting to do.
The up side of tenant gardening (if you keep up with the weeding) is: your landlord likes you, and your neighbors think you bought the house!
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Apr. 1, 2009 Weeding (with baby)
There are two major weeds in my flower beds: this rosette of fine leaves and white flowers,
  that later get very tall with exploding seed capsules, and grass.
The grass seed has a symbiotic relationship with my landlord, he spreads it on the lawn, with a roller spreader, some reaches the flower beds ;-) But some of it came in with some pass along iris that I didn't weed when I transplanted it, feeling lazy. That was really, really dumb.
Today K was interested in picking the little white weed flowers, so I weeded the three beds as fast as I could, ripping up the lateral roots of grass whenever I could. The grass sprouts are harder to tell from leaves later on as there are a lot of iris and day lily in that bed - bulbs too, all with strap-like foliage! I also transplanted some Nigella Damescena volunteers from a section that was outside the garden borders, to clumps inside the borders in places that looked bare. My flower beds are mostly self sown volunteers and pereniels, mostly pass-a-longs.
When K got interested in walking around, I began to teach her what was garden, and what was sidewalk and parking lot, picking her up and saying "no," a lot. When the boys got bored of playing conquest (we covered "the new world in turmoil" today in the Story of the World, I'm not sure who was the Naragansett or Iraquois, or if they took turns being colonists, but feet were pounding.) Anyway, once they were bored, I had them watch K. That lasted peacefully about 5 min, so then I gave M a branch with Baptisia seedpods to rattle, and K a rock, B chased both of them away from the sidewalk and road, then DH came home for lunch.
Fortunetly I still had a nail brush from last year. Gardener's hands are not really kitchen worthy!
Does anyone know what my white flowered weed is?
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