Unless you’re lucky enough to garden in a place well sheltered from passersby, you’ve probably had to deal with your share of “clever” comments from non-gardeners. One I get quite often is “Hey, when you’re done there, you can come and fix up my yard.” My rote response to that is “Sure, when I’m finished here, I’ll be right over.” Which is to say, of course, “Don’t hold your breath,” because we gardeners know that a garden is never really finished, at least from a maintenance perspective.
“Hello, good evening and welcome to another edition of ‘Blood, Devastation, Death, War and Horror’, and later on we’ll be talking to a man who does gardening.” [Monty Python’s Flying Circus, episode 30]
Sadly, there are very few gardening references in Monty Python episodes and movies, but I treasure each one. The bits about shrubbery and recognizing different types of trees from quite a long way away come to mind fairly frequently, but I don’t often have the opportunity to use this one – until this week.
When I decided to let a few acres of my property go back to meadow nearly a decade ago, I expected the results to look like what I’d been used to seeing before I built my home there, when the land was a hayfield: lots of grasses, a few milkweeds and other summer wildflowers, and some goldenrods in fall. And for the first five years or so, that was pretty much the overall effect, as shown in the July 2006 photo above.
And it’s all Mom’s fault. She has a knack for finding quirky things that she knows I’ll like, and that’s how I ended up getting a cow for Christmas. Not just any cow: a 2-foot-tall recycled metal cow with kind of odd ears and a paint job guaranteed to catch the eye.
This has been the best gardening spring ever in my world. Sure, we’ve had some weird weather – a hot week in early April, and a late freeze in mid-May– but overall, it’s been perfect working weather. And that’s a very good thing, because I mostly neglected my own garden while caring for another over the past two years, and I had a whole lot of work to do here.
