The Verdant Gardener

Well, I'm starting this not knowing what in the world I'm doing! I just know I've got a lot to say, and this seems to be the best way to do it. I'm a fairly new gardener on the Kansas/Missouri border, although I'm NOT a fairly new person. I've been around almost 50 years, and I'm just now getting around to doing things that I want to do. Maybe I am a fairly new person after all! I have three kids--two in college and one in 5th grade, and my husband of 26 years is a landscape architect. We're both first-borns, so we are responsible, meticulous and perfectionistic in our decision-making process, meaning we research and mull things to death! That's why, even though we've lived in this house 11 years and I've drooled and oogled over gardening books/catalogs the entire time, I've only just begun the process. I'm a Master Gardener in my head and heart, but I feel amateurish and unsure when I walk through the garden center doors. Perhaps part of that is my husband's profession. He believes there must be a PLAN before you PLANT. And, like the cobbler's children who have no shoes, his landscape is the last one to get a plan! So I'm moving forward alone, with trepidation and without direction, determined to turn our yard into the envy of...someone.

I probably also should note that my profession is writing and editing--I think I'm freelancing now, but more on that in another blog. I have edited a newsletter for a large gardening organization in Kansas City for 16 years. A lot of what I've learned about gardening has come from that connection, which brings up a good point--you learn a lot about things when you get involved and interact with others who know about those things (you're wondering why I wasn't a philosophy major in college)! Seriously, though, I want to learn from others, so I'm trying to get myself out there in the world a bit more. You should too.

It's finally raining and my single planting bed is thanking God because it knows I've given up on watering! This summer's been incredibly dry and hot, and our lawn looks like one big shredded wheat biscuit. I was watering more than once a day, but finally decided my hormones--which are challenged at this point in my life--don't like the heat. I decided to forgo 103 degree waterings, so the plants pretty much have been sucking wind.

Even before global warming--that's a Kansas/Missouri summer for you. July and August have a lot of humid, 100+ degree days, and we're always short on rain. Think prairie. Parched prairie. Our winters can have several days below zero and snow- and ice storms (though they're tending to get milder--global warming?) in December to March. We still get freeze warnings in April and early May. Nearly every spring, early bloomers, like magnolias, are zapped by frost. But if you don't have things planted by Mother's Day (mid-May), you've almost waited too long. So we have a very small window of time to get our act together (between damaging hail storms and tornado threats), hit the garden center and get it all planted! Even then, you're not out of the woods yet! Oh, no! In fact, you'd swear you're deep in the woods as you wrestle your new seedlings from the mouths of our biggest plant perils--bunnies, squirrels and deer. Many gardens here in May look like fortresses of wood-and-chicken-wire cages or plastic-mesh tents covering the tender plants beneath--definitely not a garden's finest moments.

But gardens here are resplendent in June, and that one month is the prize, the plum, for which all Kansas City gardeners toil. If you don't throw in the trowel in August, which is the most disgusting month ever invented, you may have a second chance at the "ahhhh" factor in September to early October. Then the freezes begin. It's a vicious cycle that sometimes makes me wonder why anyone here even bothers, but that month of June is the zenith, and, like the pain of childbirth, we tend to forget the rest.