Gardening by Mistake

“If I cannot be an example, at least I can serve as a warning.”

That’s my garden.

Long story short: I bit off more than I could chew, and at the worst possible time (right before the birth of my son. What was I thinking?). Ever since then, I’ve been holding on to the tail of the tiger, so to speak.

This year I’ve made a lot of progress toward the permanent reclamation of the garden, although it’s still clearly a work in progress. In past years, the weeds have gotten so far ahead of me that when I’ve finally made it out there to do one of my “Sherman marching through Georgia” weeding sessions, I’ve half expected the neighbors to come out and applaud, saying “It’s about time!”

So, the garden is far better now than it’s been, but there is still a long way to go. I still have 30 plants sitting, waiting to be planted, for crying out loud. The weeds are growing even when I’m not out there so I’m falling behind again. This week has been what I think of as “triage gardening.” Simply put: I focus my attention and efforts on those areas in the greatest need. I suppose that the practical outcome of that is that little of my garden looks really great because before I get to that point, I’m off working on another looming disaster area. This weekend was the border along the front yard. Never mind the bed in front of the house. I just pretend that I can’t see it, and no one else can, either!

Today my triage gardening got sidetracked. Or, I just made it worse. It’s the gardening equivalent to routing a bunch of emergency patients to a hospital emergency room which is already overwhelmed. Last year we had a really, really soggy early summer and I couldn’t get my plants grown from seed into my garden. It was either too soaking wet, or I had no one to watch the kids while I was out there. I ended up planting many of those plants at my parents’ house. Mom had some new flower beds in need of plants. One of the things that got planted there were my salvia ‘Purple Volcano.’ She got all of them. I had intended for them to be in the border in the front yard. The plan, which may still happen some golden year in the future, was to plant hundreds of those around the roses (that border is 55 feet long and about 4 feet wide, so it literally needs hundreds of something) and then, in front of those, some pink prunella. I thought that maroon foliage of the salvia would be stunning behind the roses and that the pink prunella blooms would also be set off. I had some fescue ‘Elijah Blue” I was going to mix in there, too. Well, all of that ended up at Mom’s. Mom, I think, doesn’t particularly care for either the fescue or the salvia. Mom isn’t interested in the process of gardening. She just likes the end product of a mass of flowers. Still, she had some new beds and tight budget, so she took what I had. It did end up looking quite nice, I thought. The salvia have just gone crazy there. I took a look about 2 weeks ago and was surprised to see that the salvia had babies everywhere. Oh boy! And some of the large salvia were crowded together. I told Mom I was going to come swipe some to put in my border bed.

Then I got to thinking: unlike years past, Mom hadn’t been able to plant her vinca this year. She’s been mind-blowingly busy. I know it’s bothered her. And the vinca did look really great against the maroon ‘Purple Volcano’ plants last year. So, I decided this week to take care of both items in one trip. I chose today because it was (relatively) cool and overcast and it’s supposed to rain heavily by tomorrow morning. I waited until I knew Mom would be at work and then headed over. I removed many dozens of baby salvia plants. I didn’t try to keep them all; some were just too small to be worthwhile. I removed 3 established plants, as well, that were crowding into other salvia plants. I brought all these home. Then I set about planting the vinca in her beds. I had one momentary setback when I realized I’d forgotten that Mom laid down some hardware cloth to keep the squirrels from digging up her bulbs. That’s when I remembered that that was one of the reasons Mom hadn’t planted anything this spring: she didn’t have the time to dig that cloth up. I’m lazy and hadn’t bargained on the time or effort that was going to take, so I just planted on top of that. In most areas it was deep enough. If it wasn’t, I skipped those spots. Once, the area was almost deep enough, so I just whacked off the tip of the roots of that plant and popped it in. Once established, the roots can certainly grow past the hardware cloth, so that’s no problem. I just wish Mom didn’t like the annuals so much. Plant once, grow forever is my philosophy, so I plant perennials. (It’s not that I don’t understand and appreciate the floriferousness of annuals, however, and if my gardens are ever fully established, I might start sprinkling some annuals in to bloom in the periods that the perennials don’t bloom much in).

So, now I have I don’t know how many baby salvia to plant. I’m back to triage gardening again. Before I can go back to the weeding part of my routine (let alone planting those 30 perennials still waiting), I now have to do something with these plants. I planted the 3 large plants as soon as I got home. The sun was out by then and the rain a seeming fantasy, so the small plants will have to wait until this evening. Of course, before I can plant all of those, I need to do more weeding in that border. I got a fair amount done before the sun beating down on me drove me inside.