Mother nature

Today is bulb day. Mid October, we've had some chill in the air to prepare the dirt for a good winter sleep, and the few bulbs I actually purchased for this year have arrived.

I have been psyched for this for weeks. I have counted on this day to help me ease out of warm summer days and into fallwinter. It seems to me that we only have 3 seasons around here. Spring, Summer, and fallwinter. One day it will be a high of 50 and the next a frigid 22 low from mid Oct to late Feburary.

Although we've had several cool nights and days, today presented with humidity and the promise of August heat. I suspected something was amiss when I first put my glasses on this morning and they fogged. Usually it is my brain that stays in a bit of a fog, but today my glasses decided to give it a try.

I put on my overalls and went downstairs for tea. When I broke a sweat coming down the stairs I wondered "What in the world?"

When I got into the Cabrio, the top automatically opened. I turned on the radio and caught the weather report. "High of 86 today" my radio sweated the news to me.

I couldn't believe it. I'd been sleeping under a blanket for a while now, and suddenly we're stepping into summer again? Was Mother nature P-M-S-ing? or what?

Oh, well, I decided. The heat won't hang around long, I'll bulb anyway.

When I arrived at work, I went downstairs and brought up the two boxes of tulip bulbs and early blooming daffs that have been resting all summer. The early daffs came from a church member who willingly thinned her bed out early summer for me. For the church. I noticed the flowers on her plants were just a tad smaller and delicate than the strong yellow flowers I planted a year ago and I thought the variety would look nice. The members here are generous that way. Many people are when it comes to plant sharing, I have discovered.

I made the trip for compost, loaded up my car with bags of it and put on my garden gloves. I sharpened my hand shovel, popped a piece of super bubble into the old mouth and brought the boxes outside.

My bulb collection has grown allsummer. Most I either dug up or begged for from others' yards,

I decided to plant seasonally starting with early spring bloomers. Windflowers.
I hoped they would be a groundcover of daisy-like blooms that would eventually cover the daff greenery after the blooms had faded.

I pulled out the bags of little black bulbs and set them on the ground where I wanted to plant them all along the front beds of the church.

When I got to the end of the bed I turned around and, with shovel in hand, I headed back to where i started, ready to plant where they lay.

The bulbs were no longer laying on the dirt where I had left them. They were some, back in the bag, some scattered in the box, and a few others rolling around in the grass.

Hmmm,I thought to myself. I scooped a handful of the AWOL bulbs and walked over to the dirt. I pressed my shovel into the rich earth and made a lovely hole, warm, comforting and inviting for any bulb to inhabit.

I dropped a bulb into the hole and it flew right up like Marilyn Monroe's white dress in that scene on the sidewalk. Luckily, I caught it. I tried again, this time placing rather than dropping. The bulb reacted to the hole as two resistant magnets. The little black ball would not, could not, or maybe just refused to go to bed.

The 86 had hit by that time with 100% humidity and I looked like I had just run through the sprinkler. Wishful thinking. Suddenly, I was weary. Hot and bothered. I decided that Mother nature knows better than human nature sometimes, and this was one of those times. I bagged up the bulbs and carried them back inside.

Maybe next week will bring a bulb day again.

The gardening snowball effect- shopping center plant rescue

I was talking tonight with an angel friend of mine and sharing this update with her, and i randomly said, "Maybe this gardening thing is really some sort of therapy for me." She, being wise and NOT ME, said, "Ya think?"

The community garden (CG)benefited greatly from the shopping center haul. I mentioned this upcoming event in a previous blog and I am here to say that the experience has created a snowball effect in my gardening. I am NOT a landscaper. I am a planter. i plant. I weed. I get plants and plant them. That's it. No guarantees. This task of planting hurts my back, but it heals my heart. Yoga helps the back, so it all balances out.


I mentioned an important date. The day the landscapers change out the plants at the shopping center. The day came.

I was at the shopping center at 7am. No landscapers. I ordered breakfast in the restaurant where the manager first told me about the changing of the plants. Still no trucks. There I sat in my work clothes, in wait. Suddenly, one, then two, then several more trucks began to pull into the center parking lot. Men got out. Men pulled plants out of pots. They were at the other end of the lot from where I was, and time was short. I drove over and asked if they were pulling plants today and they said, yes. I asked what would happen to the plants, and they said they were dumping them in the truck and carting them off. I asked if I could have them when they were thrown away and they said, what did I want? I said, caladiums and ferns. They said, with a handfull of irritation in their voices that it would be a while before they got to those. Then,.....then....I said the magic words. "Well, actually, I have a pitchfork in the trunk of my car, I can dig them myself."

You would have thought I was the dentist saying, "No cavities!"

The men finally smiled at me and said with a little bit of caffeinated enthusiasm" Have at it, take what you want! It's less work for us!! Have at it sister!!"

I drove back to the restaurant where the staff was waiting for the trucks, and held up my pitchfork. "He said we could DIG!!" Well, they pulled boxes out of mid air and I shared my pitchfork and, like Edward Scissorhands, we cleaned out those pots in seconds. The manager asked for my information so she could call me in the spring because it was so much fun.

I toured the rest of the center and by 8:30, I had a literal jungle residing in my car. My little VW cabrio had elephant ears hanging out the window, ferns, caladiums, two trees that looked like lantana, and multiple mystery plants stuffed in every spare corner. There were leaves and stems dragging the street like when you close your coat in the car door. It was Fabulous, I tell you. A traveling nursery. With the radio blaring, I sounded like a modern day icecream truck only with plants.

Well, my boss shopped from the car, as did co workers. Several people wondered how I would ever get the dirt out, but i wasn't worried. Even though I had put the goodies in bags, the dirt escaped with fervor. There were inches of dirt in the seat, on the dash, and on the floor. My only concern was knowing my convertible top had a leak, and if we had rain before I could clear out my inventory, well, I admit I was a little concerned about rooting plants in the floorboards of my vehicle. A novel idea, but not one I really wanted to see up close and personal.

In two days' time, the plants were transferred to new dirt. I have maybe a hundred caladium bulbs sleeping on newspaper in my green room. along with a tree hoping to live long enough for me to give it to one of my daughters for Christmas. The rest are in the community garden, my gardenette, and at co workers' houses, and home church friends' houses. Isn't that neat?

The gift that keeps on giving. Dirty, in a good way. Something happened that day, coupled with the growing pleasure of working the community garden, I was finding community through sharing plants, and I was feeding my problem solving hankering by figuring out how to find plants that I needed and connecting the needs of others - a plant switchboard sort of. It became theraputic for me.

Usually, I refer to therapy to therapuke because if you are really doing the hard work therapy requires, it feels puky. But this therapy had no puke in it. Just dirt.