Tag Archives: Garden

Help for Gardening Addicts

Gardening addicts. Never leave them alone at a garden center or nursery, where obliging, devious personnel help them take out a second mortgage to buy the last bougainvillea. This, though the tropical lovelies prefer Argentina over Indiana.

Younger junkies fall victim to buying binges after watching HGTV. However, gardening addiction does its worst damage in women of a certain age.

They should know better than to trust this mad urge to nurture. Most spent decades caring for little humans. They’ve repressed memories of endless feedings — and the waterings with which baby sprouts responded. These women dealt daily with mountains of fertilizer. Eventually wising up, they limited the number of nurturees they’d cultivate.

However, spring gardening regenerates the madness. While spouses are playing golf, the women load up with 35 flats of annuals, 37 bags of potting soil and barrels of pansies, adding just one more hanging basket here. Another there. How can they ignore wilted tomato seedlings? With their TLC, the weaklings will flourish.

Addicts.

With symptoms listed below, I hope to alert family and friends of this malady.

Signs of Gardening Addiction

Early Level

Switching from a regular cart to one the size of a brontosaurus.
Bragging to strangers about how many green beans she grew last year.
Fibbing about extra trips to garden centers.
Claiming kids/grandkids are responsible for dirt in the car.

Second Level

Bragging to strangers about how many zucchinis they forced on friends last year.
Buying seeds by the pound on the Internet.
Claiming proud ownership of 234 flowerpots stacked in the garage.
Delighting in the $1,000 tiller her husband gave her for their anniversary.

Okay, so I filled the brontosaurus-sized cart. If Hubby hadn’t been present, I might have filled five.

Third Level

Hijacking a brontosaurus cart at gunpoint.
Shoplifting bags of manure.
Buying seeds by the barrel.
Claiming proud ownership of 9,781 flowerpots stacked in the garage.
Organizing neighborhood kids for a dandelion-blowing party at a rival’s gardens.

Final Level

Buying an authentic Sweet Juliet Rose. The original plant sold for $15.8 million.

I am proud to inform readers, as well as my spouse, that today, I didn’t brag to a single stranger about green beans or zucchini. I bypassed needy tomato seedlings. I kept my regular cart and made a single purchase.

“Only one?” Hubby blinks in disbelief.

“Only one,” I assure him.

“A rosebush.”

These plants just had to go home with me. Who could resist?

Your Extraordinary Ordinary: Are you a gardening addict?

OMG, It’s Monday! Prayer: Picky About Provision?

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O Lord, I’m thankful that You bless Your people with food. Though, um, we didn’t expect yellow tomatoes. Lots of them. I imagine the children of Israel didn’t expect manna, either. Tons of it. OMG, I suppose if those desert wanderers learned to eat Manna Surprise, I guess I can learn to eat yellow spaghetti sauce.

Not Tiptoeing through the Tulips

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Whether wide open, singing to a glorious, sunny sky or pursing lip-petals in a demure pout, tulips are delightful harbingers of spring.

Only in others’ yards.

My tulips, the teenagers of the flower world, refuse to get out of bed. I sacrificed knees and back to lavish exotic foods on them. Yet, they only lift a limp leaf or two.

Bloom? Too much trouble. Besides, why should they be bound by my expectations?

Each spring, I waited again. Again.

“Hey,” I yelled, “you’re supposed to be perennials!”

I stumbled over a “Do Not Disturb” sign erected by the tulip that had drawn the short straw.

One greenhouse declared tulips will faithfully bloom every spring … if I relocate to the Turkish Himalayas foothills. The fussy lovelies crave their native habitat’s hot, dry summers and extreme winters. Dutch growers have devoted 400 years to discovering ways to imitate these conditions. They have learned, as Mary Beth Breckenridge in the Chicago Tribune once suggested, to “think like a bulb.”

With all due respect to the Netherlands, I’d rather retain IQ points, thank you very much.

Only once have my tulips bloomed more than one season. Even then, contrary red ones, planted to border pink tulips, bloomed two weeks early. They formed a lovely circle … around dirt.

At least, the tardy pink tulips created a clump of color. For two days. Then, strong winds blew them flat.

Image by Carina Hofmeister from Pixabay.

Still, hopelessly in love with gardeners’ photos, I again fertilized and hoed. On my knees, I planted more bulbs.

The next morning, I peered outside at my perfect flower bed … only to meet squirrels’ chittery scorn. My efforts had supplied a Golden Corral buffet for little thieves.

Something inside me snapped. I dashed outside, yelling and swinging a hoe like a Mr. McGregor samurai. “Hi-yah!”

The squirrels escaped unhurt, laughing.

Rush hour drivers zooming past also enjoyed the show.

Why did they laugh? Just because I still wore my nightgown …

Once, though, I outwitted the squirrels, planting bulbs in a different bed. The following spring, these bloomed in glorious display.

For two days. Then deer devoured every last one.

Will I ever tiptoe through my own tulips?

Sure.

When I talk Hubby into moving to the Himalayas.

Your Extraordinary Ordinary: Do your tulips bloom every year?

That Between-Holidays Feeling

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The calendar gap spanning Halloween and Thanksgiving gives me that between-holidays feeling.

Many, craving Christmas, skip it.

Me? I want to slow down. With no more scary skulls, spider webs and zombies, why not continue the fun of pumpkins, cute scarecrows and gorgeous leaves?

Another cause for celebration: colder weather brings comfort food — though the official Comfort Food Day is December 5. Do holiday authorities really think I’ll wait that long for chicken and noodles?

Fortunately, this influx of calorie-rich food is accompanied by baggy sweaters, lifesavers until New Year’s resolutions ruin everything.

Not all between-holiday positives are unhealthy. Though the growing season is finished, carrots, still residing in our garden, will bless our table. Tomatoes and peppers rescued from frost glow in golden and red splendor before patio doors. Why my parents ripened garden produce on paper grocery sacks, I don’t know. But following suit recalls their love of autumn and determination not to let food go to waste.

Rescue efforts during this between season include the migration of shivering, potted plants from porches to places inside. For plant lovers like me — and my longsuffering husband — this can prove challenging:

Me: I can’t let this begonia freeze. It started blooming again. My zinnias. My herbs —

Husband: How many pots have you brought in?

Me: So far, only 37.

Hubby: Where will you put them? What will we do with them at Thanksgiving? You know Tate [our toddler grandson] loves plants.

Me: Let’s hide them in our room.

Hubby: (resignedly) Gives a whole new meaning to “flower bed,” right?

Sadly, this between season doesn’t preclude yardwork. Not only should I trim perennials and compost withered annuals, but thousands of leaves wait to pounce on us. No raking deadlines are etched in stone, but this must be accomplished by Thanksgiving, right?

As should major indoor cleaning. My chaotic office — drafted as a “spare bedroom” during the holidays — couldn’t provide overnight accommodations for a visiting chihuahua. Our neglected home dictates a major cleanup. However, we have six grandsons, ages 3 to 15. Given Thanksgiving and Christmas family gatherings, why would anyone possessing a brain cell perform such an exercise in futility?

Wait.

I, too, have shifted to pondering the holiday season. Thoughts of cooking, shopping and wrapping cram my mind like too many ornaments on a gaudy Christmas tree.

Friends who are aliens already have completed shopping and wrapping. They’ve designed and frozen perfect cookies for Santa — plus enough for the entire state of Indiana.

But I still sip pumpkin spice lattes when I can find them. Savor that rare, soon-to-vanish feeling of having some money.

Let’s enjoy between-holidays feelings while we can.

Your Extraordinary Ordinary: Are you in a hurry for Christmas?

Our House, a Museum?

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When my family visited Grandma and Grandpa, no staged historical setup could rival their living museum.

Neither learned to drive. When they left their tiny town — a rarity — they took a Greyhound bus.

Grandpa plowed with a horse named John. Grandma wore sunbonnets while gardening and bringing cows home. The animals obligingly produced creamy milk my grandparents churned, plunging the dasher up-down, up-down. I could barely raise it, but Grandma helped me shape butter in a wooden mold etched with flowers.

They drew water from a well. Its iciness felt good on steamy days when we bathed in washtubs.

Grandma and Grandpa didn’t own a television. We grandkids barely survived a week without “Gilligan’s Island,” almost forgetting the words to the theme song (gasp)!

To our dismay, our grandparents’ diet centered on their garden’s produce — collards, okra, and black-eyed peas. At night, smothered in featherbeds on sweaty, 90-degree nights, we wondered if we’d live to see the light of day.

I decided I would never grow that old. My house would never become a museum.

Fast-forward several decades. Our grandson stares at our phone. “You have a landline?”

His tone implies, do you also wear a bustle?

“Yes,” I said, “but we own smartphones, too.”

When I demonstrate I can turn mine on, he looks relieved. Still — “What’s that curly thing on your landline?”

“A cord. All phones used to have them.” I chuckle. “Does look like a Slinky.”

“What’s a Slinky?”

While Hubby and I possess reasonably current laptops and tablet, our grandchildren, accustomed to über-fast technology, consider them fossils, incapable of supporting all-important video games. One child even asks where we dug them up.

We attempt board games instead, playing our own Trivial Pursuit. The teens didn’t know a thing about Betty Ford, leisure suits or other crucial 1970s facts.

Even our children consider us relics. Why? Just because we drive a 10-year-old sedan. Because I play a piano powered up only by my fingers. That not only stacks of CDs and DVDs clutter our home, but cassette tapes I rewind with a pencil point because boom boxes’ features have died. We even own a turntable and vinyl records.

Our kids try to update us. Now proud owners of a Keurig^® coffee maker, Hubby and I claim to be cool.

In return, we attempt to give them perspective: “Hey, we possess items older than we are.”

Grandma and Grandpa Oglesbee, my dad’s parents.

When they stare in disbelief, we point to Great-grandma Norris’s china and silverware. Great-grandma Phillips’s wedding chest. Great-uncle Clarence’s World War II flag with 48 stars.

They are visiting a museum for free, too.

That’s what grandparents are for, right?

Your Extraordinary Ordinary: What relics resided in your grandparents’ home — besides them?