G is for garden
Posted: April 8th, 2013 | Author: Lori Paximadis | Filed under: Blogging from A to Z Challenge 2013, life | 2 Comments »Gardening is one of my great joys. My mom was always a gardener, and I must have picked it up from her, although I wasn’t always very good about helping her in the yard when I was younger.
I started with the one postcollege rental house I had on California Avenue in Columbus; the backyard was pretty scruffy, so I turned part of it into a vegetable garden. I grew carrots and beans and peppers, among other things I don’t remember now. In Honolulu, I turned part of both yards there into herb gardens with some flowers.
I started going really crazy with the first house I bought when I moved back to Ohio; I enlarged beds and created new ones, and in the almost five years I was in that house, the gardens filled out quite nicely.
In this house, we have even more gardening space, although much of it is shady, which is different from what I’m used to, and we have tons of deer and chipmunks and other hungry critters, which I haven’t had to deal with much before. It takes a lot of experimenting to find out what they will usually leave alone (lavender, iris, peonies, hellebores, trailing arbutus, creeping thyme, daffodils, tall daisies, coreopsis, lariope, bee balm, lamb’s ear) and what won’t last much more than a day (tulips, crocus, little daisies, solomon’s seal, and a million other attempts).
The photo above is one of my hellebores, the first one to bloom this year, and they’re quickly becoming favorites. I ordered some last year from a mail order place, but they were quite small and will take several years to get up to the size I want them to be, so I decided this year I would simply buy fewer but bigger ones to help fill in the garden outside my office window. I love full gardens, plants that flow together in a natural-looking way, rather than single plants spaced out with open ground between them.
In the summer, I usually spend the equivalent of a full day each week working in the gardens, although that’s usually spread out over the entire week. It’s probably a little more than that earlier in the year too, with mulching and planting and all that.
Do you have a garden?
Have you found something lovely the deer mostly leave alone?Â
Do you prefer full, cottage-like garens, or more formal, spaced out gardens?Â
No garden for me…live in the hot desert and too much work but yours looks and sound pretty. Happy A-Z Challenge
Your garden sounds lovely with all those flowers. We have an allotment growing vegetables but last year was pretty bad with produce from a mixture of being too busy to get down there, very rainy all year, and we, too, have deer who liked all our apples and pears from our trees. Some of the other allotmenteers are a bit cross with those deer.