My Way of Living + Time

More lessons my garden has taught me
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Even though I worked in garden centers for ages, and had my own container garden for 17 years, there are still many things to learn about having a ground centered garden. Each day my garden teaches me something I didn’t know. What have you learned from your garden? 1. I am learning to live with my brown front lawn, in fact I rebelliously take pride in being one of the few water wise dead lawn home owners around here. I thought we lived in the country, why on earth do we need to have perfectly manicured green lawns?

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2. The dollar store Dahlia I got for 2 bucks is the nicest plant in my garden. It’s bigger than the more expensive dahlia’s I got at the nursery, guess where I am shopping next spring.

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[This shot is a little bug eaten, but then again every thing is by now.] 3. A weed will grow anywhere, yes anywhere, and no it’s not just a flower that hasn’t learnt to grow in rows, or any cute sayings like that.

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4. Plant more seeds, and plant them earlier, even if it was still freezing cold, and we still had patches of snow in April. Start them indoors if I have to.

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5. Plants need water, even if it rained every second day in June, I didn’t give them enough. They need a lot of water, in fact some need too much water, they will be weeded out. 6. If the rose didn’t bloom in the spring, it’s never going to bloom all summer. Get the pruning shears give it a hack job, and move it to the back of the bed. Planting bananas at the base did not make it bloom either, maybe I am just not a rose whisperer.

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7. Don’t bother to plant anything under the Fir trees, nothing will grow there, and if it does, the bugs will eat it up. Get a dry shade groundcover that looks green from a distance, and suck it up buttercup. 8. The best for last, I now have Tagettes, [French marigolds] blooming, grown from seed taken from bedding plants planted in May. Who knew that you could do that? Talk about double dipping, and it’s free. I don’t know if they were hybrids or not, the tag is gone, but who cares they were free. I am learning lessons from my garden as it grows, any lessons that your garden has taught you? Growing…

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More lessons my garden has taught me + Time