playing n the dirt

My husband surprised me at work the other day by sending me a live Bonsai.  This is a plant that has always intrigued me but one that I don’t think I would have ever gotten for myself.  I have lots of house plants, but they are all pretty common. 

With my new Bonsai I will enter into the world of the exotic plants.  I hope this is just the begining of a Bonsai collection.  I understand that they can be almost addictive and that you need one for each room in the house.

For me, September is about the most perfect month of the year, especially in the garden.  The weather is cooling down and most days I can work in the middle of the afternoon.  It is getting darker a little sooner.  This is good, because I feel guilty when I come inside and there is still work to do and it is light outside.

I can pretty much kick back and just pick what is ready to be picked and not worry about the weeds because in a month the frost will kill them anyway.  There will still be about a million fall leaves to deal with and the extra hot day or two and I will still have to plant the green house when all the peppers and tomatos are done.

But for now, welcome sweet September. 

Every gardener needs a few good good tools.  I have a pitch fork and shovel, mostly for turning compost and for making new beds.  I use a small hand held pruiner clippers and trowel for keeping garden beds looking neat and trim. 

The other day I was clipping the grass at the edge of a bed when my clippers broke.  I played with them for a while and figured out what was wrong, but I couldn’t make the little hook stay in place.  I figured I’d be done for the day and try to fix them later.  Two days later I still couldn’t keep them working and the grass really needed to be clipped. 

I finally decided I had three choices.  I could keep trying with broken clippers, I could stop and go to the store and buy a new pair or I could try and find something else to do the job.  I decided to try the kitchen sissors.  They worked.  I was done clipping the grass in no time.  I even got my husband to go to the hardware store and buy me a new pair of clippers.

My friends that don’t garden ask me what I do all winter.  While I do have some other hobbies my main winter hobby is dreaming about what I’ll do in the gardens come spring.  That means I spend a lot of time looking at websites and catologs.

In the coming weeks I’ll be putting together some resource pages that will include many of my favorite places to either purchase quality supplies or just get some gardening infomation and tips.

Slowly but surly the vegetable garden is making a come back to the front yard.  As I think it should.  This year in Boulder, Colorado a gardener and business man leased front yards, tended the gardens and is selling organic produce at the local farmers market.  Good job.

In this time of high food prices and ever smaller water supplies why are we watering front lawns that nobody can eat? 

Thankfully I don’t have a home owners association to deal with, but I do need to make sure it’s not against any city code and then my front yard will be turned into a vegetable garden.  I plan on using raised beds with mulch in between the beds with a nice fence around it all.  I think it will look very beautiful.  It will certainly look as good as any lawn.

I don’t plan on selling my organic produce because then gardening would kind of be like work, but all my family, friends and neighbors will share in the bounty.

For 12 years I’ve looked at the strip of ground between our driveway and our neighbors fence and have wondered what to do with it.  It’s no more than three feet wide but it’s about 60 feet long.  It’s not close to a water supply and has always had lots of goat vine weeds in it.  Over the years I’ve put in a couple of plants, but nothing did very well.

This year I decided to at least try and make some kind of gardend bed out of it.  Actually I made a couple of beds.  Towards the back half I planted blueberry and raspberry bushes and lilics.  At the front I planted daisys, morning glories, magnolias and other dry weather seeds along with some day lilies from the same neighbor.

Before planting I had to prepare the bed.  I used simple organic gardening ideas.  I pulled out as many of the goat vines as I could, turned over the top couple of inches of old clumpy grass and dumped a lot of my own compost on it.  I’ve watered well dragging the hoses from both the front and back yards to reach to whole length.  I had to get more serious with the goat vine using an old organic weed killer, vinger. 

And yes I had success.  Wonderful flowers have come up, spread and bloomed from seed.  I’ve been eating raspberries when I water and the lilics have leafed out.  

This morning is why I garden.  What a beautiful morning it was, about 70 degrees with some nice clouds and almost no breeze.  What do people that don’t garden do on such a great morning?  I did get alot done.  Some weeding in the flower beds, clipped the grass around the blueberry bushes and got the lawns watered.  The best news of all is that there are some very dark clouds to the west of here.  Maybe, just maybe, we’ll get some rain today.

The title says it all.  It has been dry here on the north eastern plains of Colorado for a while and now it is getting hot.  The last few days it has been close to 100 degrees.  So far all the plants are holding up ok, but it is taking about an hour of hand watering a day.  I am really dreading the next water bill.  I probably won’t be holding up as good as the plants are when I get it.

As much as I enjoy my gardens in the day, I really love them at night. After a long day gardening or at work I like to relax on the patio or wonder through the gardens. The gardens have a different feel and look at night, literally. Different bugs and critter come out to eat and mate and different flowers show their glory.

A farmer friend of mine told me a couple of years ago that it is easier to till the soil and pick the crops at night. I guess it’s like Mother Nature offering up her bounties and wonders.

Playing n the dirt is a new blog all about gardening.  Any type of gardening.  Flowers, vegetables, containers, house plants, herds or even the lone chia pet plant.  At heart I am still a six year playing in the dirt.  Only now I have some beautiful flowers and wonderful tasting vegetables when I get done.

Bear with me while I get the blog up and running the way I want.  In the near future (I hope) I will have some great tips on all the different types of gardening.  I’ll include lots of my own picutres and would love seeing yours.  For now this blog is like a new garden.  I have great things in mind, but have just started to plant the seeds.  Please come back often to see the changes and how we have grown.