Gardening

My friend Laurel is the one who inspired me to take a more active interest in gardening. She loves it so much she even planted her subdivision's common area with trees and cactus. Her free time is spent on her knees digging and planting. My free time is spent more with stitching but I still love the results I get when I focus on gardening.

I wish I had more time to devote to it as the results are worthwhile. especially in a climate where it's difficult to keep things growing and anything green is cherished. I love pots of flowers, lots of seeds and plenty of water. I love birdhouses and garden ornaments. I like the surprise of throwing out seeds and discovering what pops up. It's like a treasure hunt to find an unexpected beautiful flower. This is the time of year when we are weeding and cleaning out the flower beds. I'm getting ready to plant seeds now in October as the autumn and winter rains are great for the wildflowers I like. I especially love poppies and found some different poppy seeds when we were in Switzerland, ones I've never seen before and I'm hoping they'll work here in the desert too. As I said, a treasure hunt and I look forward to hopefully finding my Swiss poppies blooming in my garden someday soon.
Before we built our pool, we built a small pond with water lilies, water hyacinth, horsetail, cattail and fish. I loved it especially since it attracted colorful dragonflies but it had to come out when the pool went in. I think it inspired my friend Nancy to build her own pond and I was happy to give her all our waterlilies and now I can still see them when I visit her.
Gardening is such a sharing experience, I have some Nile River plants that Nancy had in her garden and they are so easy to pluck a stalk or two off and plant in the dirt and soon there is another plant. Hers eventually died off and she now has them back after plucking stalks from my plants and taking them back home to plant again in her garden. Geraniums are wonderful for the same reason, pull a leaf and part of the branch off and stick it in the dirt and you soon have another whole plant. I also love sharing seeds. When my flowers go to seed I pull all the seeds off and put them in a big jar and they are ready to give away or ready for me to plant again the next season. I'm sure many of my zinnias are the great-great-great-great etc grandchildren of my original zinnias.

Gardening is always a work in progress. I've never gotten expert enough that I'm happy with the results in all areas of the garden. Some years one spot is barren and another is boldly blooming. Other years it's the opposite. Every year the garden landscape changes especially since I throw out so many seeds, I'm never sure what is going to sprout. This year I thought I'd have a zillion zinnias like I do every year but they seemed to poop out on me and I only got a handful. But I keep on trying, keep on spreading seeds and digging holes and planting pots. I love color and I'll continue to garden and be pleasantly surprised with anything that blooms.