Green Thumb

My ex was not a gardener.

We had three acres in the country and while I looked at the yard and saw the potential for huge flower beds and outdoor entertainment space, he saw only a vast expanse of grass to be mown and gravel to be kept weed free.

With all of the beautifying to be done on my own I had to develop a method to keep chores like weeding and watering to a minimum while continuing to expand the existing beds and borders.

The first thing that I learned was to prepare any beds the right way the first time.

The previous owner had planted bermuda grass (which spreads by runners like crab grass) so any new beds had to be carefully dug and every visible scrap of grass removed. This was time consuming and tedious but by doing it in the spring before the grass really began to grow and then edging the beds periodically most of the weeds could be removed before they became a problem.

The second thing I learned was to plant the beds thickly enough that the plants I desired would shade out the plants I designated as weeds. This meant with a new bed (because I had a tight budget) that the perennials I planted were interspersed with thick growing annuals like marigolds and poppies for the first year of the bed.

In the second year I generally didn’t plant any annuals but relied on the mild winters to allow the annuals to reseed themselves. This would cause them to come back a bit thinner than the previous year and give the perennials more room to grow.

Generally by the third year I could ignore the beds except for a spring weeding and regular edging during the summer.

Most importantly I learned to only grow varieties that could withstand a drought of several weeks. This was very important because we had a private well that was rather shallow and we couldn’t water frequently without running the risk of a dry well.

Anything that couldn’t survive the summer on rainfall alone wasn’t replanted the following year.

The result?

I was able to add flower bed after flower bed without going nuts trying to keep up with the maintenance. My yard was beautiful and I got a great deal of pleasure from sitting on the front porch watching the birds and butterflies enjoy my flowers.

The five or six hours a week that I spent on the yard were not spent catching up on maintenance but on making my yard a better habitat for humans and wildlife alike!