GROWING

BECOMING MOTHER EARTH

If you don't have any perennials in your garden, you need to get some. Now! Evergreens, grass and annuals may be nice and tidy, but they are boring! They look the same all day, every day. I grew up hating what I thought of as "yard work". In fact, it wasn't unusual for my parents to use yard work as a form of punishment (please promise me you will never do that to your kids!) I have vivid memories of my sisters and I having to push our baby buggies around the yard, filling them with those nasty, stinking horse apples that fell off of our bois d'arc trees, and getting that sticky, milky white stuff that oozed from them all over us. It wasn't until Annamarie Mootz moved in next door to us that I discovered the difference between yard work and gardening. Now, that Annamarie was a character, with a capitol "C", and her garden was like nothing I'd ever seen before. It was full of native plants, herbs and perennials. It seemed as if every time I stepped out of the door, she was calling out "Becky! You have got to come over here and see this!" Or smell this, or taste this... Before long, I was hooked. Next thing you know, I'm wearing Birkenstocks, have three compost bins going in the back yard, and have gone back to school to study horticulture. Now I can't resist a daily stroll to check on "everyone" in the garden, just to see what they've been up to since I saw them last, and I almost hate to leave town, for fear of missing something! If you have perennials in your garden, there is always something interesting going on!

If you are new to gardening, here is what I call the lazy (but patient) man's method of creating a new flower bed. If you are not in a big hurry to get your new bed planted, you can let the forces of nature do some of the work for you. Begin by marking off the area where the new bed will go, either with stakes or with some of that day-glo spray paint made for grass. Next, spread a thick layer of newspaper, or a single layer of corrugated cardboard, on top of the grass in the entire area, overlapping edges slightly. If it's windy, weight the paper with rocks to keep it from blowing away. Use only plain newspaper pages, nothing glossy. Dampen the paper lightly with the hose sprayer, then spread it with a three-inch layer of municipal or homemade compost, if you can get it. If not, use a blend of half topsoil and half composted manure. Now comes the hard part. Just sit back and wait - for five or six months. As the newspaper decomposes, it smothers the grass and weeds below, which also decompose, and you end up with a nice bed full of earthworms, without a lot of back-breaking digging! If you start in fall, your bed will be ready for planting by spring, and vice versa. I know it sounds too good to be true, but I've done it at several houses now, and it worked really well.

Because I didn't turn into "Mother Earth" (as my siblings now call me) until I was in my 40's, all of the horrible mistakes I made in the early days, and all of the money I wasted, are still fairly fresh in my memory. Here is what I learned, the hard way:

1. Just because your local nursery sells a plant, that does not guarantee that it will do well in your area. Buy a good gardening book that is written by someone who actually gardens in your part of the country, and follow their recommendations. There is no such thing as a black thumb - just lack of information! Many times I went to the garden center in late April, and bought a bunch of pansies or dianthus, or snap dragons, because the nursery was full of them and they looked gorgeous. Not long after I got them planted, we had our first days with temps in the 90's, and all of the sudden my new plants looked like crap. I thought it was my fault, and I must have a black thumb. Later I learned that all those plants like cool weather and hate heat, and the nursery really should have warned me that they would poop out on me as soon as it got hot. So, be very cautious about buying plants when nurseries are transitioning from one season to the next, and ask lots of questions!

2. Look closely at the maximum size listed on the plant's label. That cute little herb in the four-inch pot may be a four-foot gargantuan before summer is over with, so allow for that in your planning.

3. Most perennials go dormant in the winter, and more or less disappear from the flower bed. Never fear, they will be back! If you mix some evergreen herbs and some small shrubs or ornamental grasses in with your perennials, then your bed won't be completely empty come winter. Best thing is to mark the spot where the dormant perennials are though, so you dont forget about them.

4. If a plant is defined as extremely drought tolerant, that means that most likely, the converse is also true, and it will be extremely in-tolerant of you drowning it with too much water.

5. Be very leery of plants you see advertised in the Sunday advertisement section of your newspaper, and in the myriad of catalogs that will descend upon you as soon as you are identified as a prospective sucker, I mean gardener. If something looks too good to be true, it probably is.