Peg Kerr's Journal

Just as I did last week, I stuffed this week's collage with color, as this is about the garden I put in this week. Each year I tell myself, "I'm going to scale it back!" and usually I don't.

Well, it is a little smaller. I did not plant my big City Picker planters. I will still put kale and Swiss chard in one. I limited myself on tomatoes to just two plants in smaller pots. I have about given up because the squirrels get so many of the tomatoes and the ones left are usually afflicted with blossom rot. But as I do every year, I have put geraniums by the front door, herb pots on the back porch, a hanging pot of lobelia by the back door, and petunias in the four planters on the back patio.

The lilacs are blooming (Rob planted that bush over thirty years ago), as well as the bleeding hearts, and bunnies sit in the yard every day.

It is a lot of work, and I always grumble about the work and the cost. But I am always so happy when I get it done.

Description: Background: a riot of colors from flowers. Lower left: a crouching bunny. Lower right: a terra cotta pot planted with basil and a tomato plant. Center: a row of herb pots. Upper third: a white planter planted with multicolored petunias

Garden



Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

I spent waaaaaayyy too much time on this collage, and I'm not entirely satisfied with it, but my technical chops couldn't quite match the scope of my inner vision. Oh, well.

Now that my foundation has been fixed, I have fulfilled a four-year dream and planted a perennial garden on the south side of my house. My sister Betsy came over to help me get the plants in the ground.



I'm a bit gobsmacked at the amount of money I've spent, but I'm pleased with it and hopeful about how it will look in the next year or two.

I'd intend to inset closeups of the various flowers in the garden within the picture of the garden itself. Didn't quite work after a long time I decided to quit messing with it and just post something simpler.

Image source: A garden of perennial plants and flowers planted at the side of a house with blue paint and white trim. In the four corners, yellow-petaled flowers form a frame. Overlaid text in yellow reads 'The Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye.'

Perennials



Click here to see the 2023 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2022 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2021 52 Card Project gallery.

The weather has turned. Taxes are done. I have had my birthday. All of these are my annual signal that it is time to start thinking about gardening.

My garden was a big success last year: I had a few herb pots on the back stoop:



I had petunias in container boxes on the back patio:



I planted two City Pickers (enclosed garden beds with wheels). One was planted with a variety of greens so I could wander out into my backyard and pick the ingredients for a salad for lunch:



The other was planted with tomatoes and basil and it absolutely thrived. I was still picking tomatoes in October. Here it is when it was just planted:



and a month later:




All this success went to my head, and so I'm tackling my backyard with even greater energy and ambition this year. This year I plan to have three City Pickers, with trellises. I have planted two of them with twenty different plants of spring greens, cucumbers, pole beans, and I'll plant the third with tomatoes and basil again. Besides the boxes of petunias, I am setting out more garden pots on my patio and planting them with bee-friendly flowers. I will plant bee balm in the strip by the garage. I had planted a bulb garden last fall which is coming up beautifully, and since I'm getting more involved in cooking with herbs, I've enlarged the herb garden in pots on my back stoop. I bought potato bags and am planning on growing potatoes for the first time, and hey, why not try other root vegetables: beets, carrots, onions, too? In short, I'm going nuts.

This card turned out a little different than I originally envisioned when I started. I had taken pictures of the City Pickers and the herb pots and planned to include those. But I started with a semi-transparent picture of the cover of my garden journal for the background and layered over that the flowers that are included in the bee-friendly mix. I liked the look of that, so I just put in a few more layers, emphasizing delicacy, and at the last moment, overlaid that with the first page of my gardening journal. I like the result.

Gardening

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Click here to read about the 52 card project and see the year's gallery.

(The icon on this entry, of course, is from Lord of the Rings, from a passage about the thoughts of Sam Gamgee, master gardener.)

I've been doing a better job than I expected of watering and tending my gardens this year. The tomatoes I've planted in the containers in the back patio are thriving, and quite a lot of fruit is set. I'm even managing to remember to fertilize them once a week.

I've been thinking about doing a boulevard garden, so I've been paying attention to other people's gardens as I drive around my neighborhood. Today, I was driving back from an errand and saw a man outside watering a perfectly gorgeous one, and impulsively, I stopped the car and got out and asked him about it.

He called his wife in from the backyard, and she was pleased to answer my questions. In fact, hearing my admiration, she offered to show me her back yard and the plantings there, and she spent about a half hour answering my questions.

I was awestruck by the haven they'd created back there. They didn't have a speck of grass; it was all flowers and vegetables. They had created a pergola which they had covered with wisteria, and it was the most charming little seating area imaginable. There was a fountain and bird feeders and a patio with a table and chairs, under a magnolia tree.

She gave me her phone number, and she said she'd be happy to split some of her perennials once I figured out what I might want. I came away with my brain teeming with ideas and plans. Don't know if I'll put them into action. But it was lovely to see the possibilities.

Bee balm. Echinecea. Coreopsis. Daisies. Cornflowers. Roses. Lavender. Delphiniums. Lupine. Phlox.

Beauty.

It's awesome to have a totally clear day outside for my birthday. Free birthday coffee from Caribou for the win.

Chris Stewart in another racism accusations kerfluffle. Surprised? Not. Judging from experience, I'm much more inclined to believe Tim Cadotte.

The reunion for the Mexico mission group is this coming Sunday, which is the same day as the May Day parade. I'm wildly irritated about this; I don't want to miss the parade, but the girls don't want to miss the reunion, which would mean driving to Minnetonka.

I have been forced to hand over the cell phone to Rob, who needs it for his job with the census, so Mom, if you try to call it to reach me, you'll reach him instead. It is making me remarkably twitchy to be without it.

The Tonks and the Auror's EP "Tonks for the Memories" has given me hope again for the Wizard Rock EP of the Month Club.

Tonight we have a simultaneous Girl Scout meeting, karate class and school meeting for parents. I suppose I'm supposed to get dinner in there somewhere, too, only I have no idea where.

I need a book to read.

I am starting to get a very very tiny itch to write original fiction again. I'm not sure what, if anything, will come of it.

My lawn looks just terrible, and I have zero incentive to do anything with the garden this year. Lack of money, time, motivation. My sister assures me that gardening gets easier when the kids get a bit older. Until then, avert your eyes when passing my house. Sorry.

Bete noir flourless chocolate cake for lunch, also for the win. It's my birthday. Bite me.

I'm not going to start riding my bike May 1, because of the knee problems. I am feeling a great deal of guilt over this. But my knee hurts every time I do something as innocent as hiking it up to cross my legs.

Sometimes grace is all about just going on with your life, despite everything. There may be pride there, too. I've been taught to extol one and be suspicious of the other, but I suppose it doesn't matter as long as the result is the same. Right?

About a half hour after I posted my last entry, my neighbor across the alley appeared at my back door with his five year old son. "Dylan has something he has to say to you," he said solemnly.

Yes, Dylan did, although it was obvious that he didn't want to say it. He looked a little to one side, as if he wanted to be anywhere but where he was, and but manfully 'fessed up. He mumbled, "I'm the one who did it." I had been really mad, but it was hard to wreck all the vengeance I had been nursing in my wrathful bosum for the previous half hour on a little sunburned snub-nosed boy, who couldn't even bring himself to meet my eye. "Well, it was awfully disappointing," I told him. "I had really looked forward to eating those watermelons."

After he apologized, it was determined that Dylan would use his allowance to buy us a watermelon, and he would do some yard work for us on Saturday. I told Dylan that under the circumstances, I would accept his apology. "I'm sorry, too," his dad mouthed to me as they turned to go. And I could tell he was. I thought the dad handled it well.

I have no idea how Dylan's father found out, but it was probably through my next door neighbor, who happened to be in her yard when I discovered the theft and heard my lamentations, and she put two and two together and told Dylan's dad. . I didn't ask Dylan, because I didn't think to until after he had left, but I'll probably ask on Saturday: why did he do it? The melons weren't even ripe. But the answer is obvious. He's just a little kid, and little kids have zero impulse control. They Do Not Think. I'll bet he grabbed the melons to lob them as bombs at other kids he was chasing through our yard.

Anyway, I'm glad to know what happened. It makes me feel a tad bit better to know it wasn't some stranger being malicious, it was just a young kid who was failing to use his brain for anything other than keeping his skull bones apart.

*Sigh* Still, watermelon from the store, bought with a little boy's allowance, won't taste the same as watermelon out of my garden.

cosmos, dianthus, asters, marigolds, baby's breath, zinnias, cornflowers, cosmos, scabiosa, sedum, nasturtium, snap dragons, monarda (bee balm), four varieties of tomato, basil, strawberries, bell pepper plants, astilbe, impatiens

Four gardens are now in. I even cut half of the lawn.

[Falls over. Thud.]

but I've pulled out five huge Hefty bags of weeds from two of the gardens. Go me.

Thinking about the blurb I've promised to write. Thinking about blurbs in general. What about a blurb makes a book attractive to the targeted market? The identity of the author who is saying "it's good"? The only truism I can think of is that I've noticed that a real turn off for me when I read is a blurb is when the author says, "The best thing since Tolkien." (Somebody did this on the Pullman trilogy, btw.) First of all, just accept it: nobody's as good as Tolkien. And if they are good in their own way, they're going to be good in an entirely different way, and the comparison just seems nonsensical. When I read that on a book, it strikes me that the blurber is just lazy.

I remember reading in a review of the LOTR:FOTR movie and being very struck by a critic remarking that Tolkien to the field of fantasy is like Mount Fuji is to the craft of Japanese landscape painting: it's always there. You're either seeing something on the mountain slopes, or the mountain is there in the distance, or you don't see it at all because you're standing on it.

I think it's a combination of the identity of the person writing the blurb and what they say about it. I know that some writers "dilute" their value as a blurber by blurbing so many books, saying on all them "it's great!" until you just can't believe them any more. (I think that kind of happened with Steven King, although I'm not sure--I don't read any horror and so am not familiar with marketing in that field).

For those so inclined, send in the blurb on a wonderful book you found, where the blurb made you pick it up. What was it about the blurb that snagged your attention?

Cheers,
Peg

I have gotten off to a really bad start this year.

I didn't plant any spring vegetables at all--no peas, no lettuce. Just couldn't seem to get around to it. The strawberry patch, after producing faithfully for eight years, died entirely away. Two of the four asparagus plants I planted last year came up, but the stems were too small to be of any use--I understand it really takes several years for asparagus to really establish itself. Working overtime to try to bring in more money, too depressed, too broke, too distracted (by LiveJournal, among other things) meant I just couldn't get out and get stuff planted. My plant order came in, and all the basil and the bush beans died before I got them into the ground. Thirty dollars wasted. I have two trays of impatiens I need to plant in the front garden, but I've just been watering them sporadically for almost a month without planting them. I made the mistake of planting daffodil bulbs in that bed, but it's too shady for them to do very well, and so they just send up sickly green leaves without blooming, and I keep waiting for them to bloom before moving the impatiens in. So the impatiens still isn't in.

The garage garden is a mess of weeds. I have about half the seeds left from last year for a Burpee-designed cutting garden that I'm planning to put in there, although I haven't weeded/sown the flowers yet.

The pink garden on the south side of the house (which Fiona calls her garden, although that doesn't mean she ever really works on it) is very puzzling. I planted a mixture of seeds (annuals and perennials) last year in three rows of graduated heights: short, medium, tall. I got them in rather late, so not all the seeds got a chance to bloom. The zinnias, cosmos, dianthus and lavatera did come in, and were very successful. The sweet william looked rather discouraged. Never saw any results, however, from the poppies, candytuft, sidalcea or erigeron I planted at all. I haven't nearly as much experience with flowers as I do with vegetables, and so although I can recognize where I planted the speedwell, the echinechea, primroses (frighteningly muscular) and the other-pink-thing that I got at Karen's (minnehaha) plant swap last year, I look at all the other stuff coming up there this year and wonder: are those perennials from last year that I should leave alone? Or are they weeds?

Anyway, I went to Bachman's this afternoon and got two geraniums for the two pots bracketing the front door. I got four tomato plants which I stuck in the vegetable garden; not sure I will plant any other vegetables this year (unless I want to drop another thirty dollars on basil--I LOVE homemade pesto). I got a six pack of pink petunias, which I stuck in the pink garden. And I got a mess of pink seeds (cosmos, amaranth, foxglove), and two packets from different companies, titled simply: pink garden. Stuff that's pink. Alyssum, candytuft, cleome, gypsophilia, larkspur, malope, phlox, silene, statice, vinca, zinnia, love in a mist, calendula, clarkia . . . . 8" to 4'. Now I won't even have plants graduated by height. I just blindly scattered seeds on the ground and flung about a half inch of topsoil over it all. I can just imagine what Sam Gamgee would say about such haphazard planting methods. Will water it and watch. What will come up?

(Am listening to October Project again. Rob gave this album a truly Minnesota compliment: "It's the least offensive thing that you've been listening to lately." My husband is not Into Music.)

Cheers,
Peg