The incompetent gardener

The Home and Garden Show is coming up this weekend! It’s always a fun event full of interesting vendors and great food. I always run into lots of folks I know. I usually make a couple of purchases and come away with lots of ideas and a tree sapling that I’m sure to kill.

I want to think of myself as a gardener. Keyword here is “want.” It’s in my genes. My great-grandmother Pepper could make anything grow and flourish. Memaw could stick a toothpick in the ground and it would flower.

I loved the red poppies and rainbow of iris that grew in her yard on East Pleasant Street when I was growing up.

I learned nothing from her. The first time I tried to plant iris, I buried them. You’re not supposed to do that.

I’ve since learned that iris rhizomes just sort of sit on the ground and let their roots down. They’re really not hard to propagate. In fact, when cleaning out my mom’s iris, bits of rhizomes got tossed into the field with the weeds. They took root and grew.

When my husband and I bought our first house, there were lots of iris already there, and I dug beds and put in other flowers. It was a small yard. I managed. I was an ok gardener.

Fast forward a quarter century and I’m a gardening delinquent. With a much bigger yard and far less free time (read “none”), I’m in over my head big time.

If things are ever going to start looking up botanically, one of three things needs to happen:

1. Fairies or elves show up in the night to weed and deadhead.

2. I magically become rich enough to hire actual gardeners.

3. I retire and can dedicate my life to full time lawn and garden care.

A saner person would just let it go and allow the flower beds and vegetable patch to go to grass--or whatever green plants pass for lawn.

The problem is when spring hits I feel a biological need to dig and plant. It’s probably the genes I inherited from Memaw.

In years when the weather cooperates—not this year—I plant lettuce and spinach and radishes in my small, well-shaded vegetable garden.

When May hits, I’ll buy annuals for potting and a handful of new perennials. I put tomato and pepper plants in my shady garden and wish them luck. I eventually get a few tomatoes in September or August.

Once they’re planted, though, its every botanical for itself. My plants are on their own.

While I love the digging and the planting, I hate just about everything else associated with gardening—fertilizing, watering, staking, mulching, weeding, deadheading. Ugh. I take lack of rainfall as an affront.

Weeding is the worst, though! I used to try. Ish. I would start out in the spring determined to keep up. I pulled vines and a million redbud seedlings, but my good intentions were really no more than that: intentions.

Serious, competent weeding never happens in my garden.

Needless to say, most plants do not thrive in my care.

Through my years of inept, neglectful gardening, however, I have discovered that there are some very self-sufficient, independent plants.

I’m happy to report that you can plant hostas in the shade and ignore them. They do beautifully year after year and you can divide them and have more and more hostas. If I were smart, I’d do my whole shady yard in a solid carpet of hostas.

Hostas are winners.

So are coral bells, daylillies, Wild Sweet William, bleeding heart, Solomon’s Seal and sedum. They mind their own business, don’t spread all over the place, thrive when neglected and come back year after year.

They are winners.

You know what’s not a winner? Spiderwort. If someone says they have a nice division of spiderwort they want to give you, that person is not your friend. Unless you’re prepared to have it colonize a large portion of your property and possibly the next county over, just say “No!”

Hopefully you are a more competent gardener than me.

Whether you are a dedicated gardener, a novice wanting to learn or a slacker like me, there are lots of vendors coming to the Home and Garden show who offering gorgeous plants that love our climate, products to help with lawn work and products to beautify your home.

Drop by the high school April 27 and 28 and see what they have to offer. Say “hi!” to all your friends and neighbors and support our local vendors.