Digging Perennials

One of the things I've bothered to live for is gardening.  I love it passionately.  I'm not exactly a professional, but I get some pretty results and some tasty ones -- as long as I remember to water.  Just yesterday I harvested about a quart of plum tomatoes off my balcony pots with many more on the way, donated some rotten strawberries to the squirrels, and dug a few small carrots out of the tomato pot ('cause Carrots Love Tomatoes, you know). 

A long time ago, I wrote a post on the Lady Amp Message Board about gardening and rubber boots, which I will revisit here soon.  When June, the proprietess, turned my post into an article on her site (which seems to disappear from time to time due to some kind of chronic domain registration issue), she remarked that she hadn't realized it was possible for an above-knee amputee to garden.  Sorry, June, but I snorted when I read that.  I hadn't realized that anybody didn't realize that we can pretty much do whatever we want to.  It's just a matter of figuring it all out.

To prove this point, here are some photos of me gardening.  I tried to take them myself, but I am not fast enough yet to get in place that far away before the little timer switch on my old Contax RTS goes off, so I had to have my sweetie come out and actually flick the shutter.

In these photos, I'm filling an empty corner of our new yard with some ornamental perennials particularly beloved by bees and butterflies.  The soil in the corner I'm digging is very tightly woven with tough tree and shrub roots, who knows how old.  The first time I tried to dig in this corner, I didn't have the strength to hack through them with the shovel.  A month or two passed.  Then something happened at work, some aspect of our wretched benefits pissed me off so intensely that I came home from an early morning store meeting and just started hacking furiously at the dirt.  It was very therapeutic.  I got a lot planted.  I went to the store and bought more plants, and in they went, too.  And then I went back for two more.

By the time these shots were taken, I was down to the last thing I put in that day, a beautiful campanula.  Coming down from my rage over bad insurance and what I'd have to do to keep it, and gliding instead into a state of endorphin-inspired calm and triumph, I for some reason remembered June's remark and decided to record not only the fact that an above-knee amputee can garden, but exactly how.

The bees and butterflies came later.

Comments

[Darlene]

My hat's off to you! (Although I don't wear either a straw hat or a baseball cap--actually, I don't wear any when I'm gardening, but in the winter I wear one of those knit caps that you can pull down over your ears.)

I'm trying so hard to figure out what kind of plant that is with the yellow flowers--a melon? Pumpkin? Potatoes? Help! They sure are beautiful though.

[Sara]

Thanks, Darlene.

Of course, nothing in the first two photos with this post is actually a perennial, in spite of the post's title, and you guessed partially correctly. If you position your cursor over each photo and wait a moment, you should see a descriptive tag, but meanwhile, that gigantic pot contained one each of the following: sugar pumpkin, delicata squash, sweet marketmore cucumber, and some kind of zucchini, all of which I guided up, through and over a large tomato cage and the trellis fencing off my balcony. It was an experiment to see how much a pot could produce, and the answer is a lot of flowers, one three-inch-thick pumpkin, one normal-sized delicata squash, about a dozen lovely cucumbers, and no zucchini whatsoever. Oh, well; I'll know better next year. :)

And actually, pumpkins I planted in the ground didn't do well, either, this year. Not enough rain. Kind of ironic since our streets here in the northeast are flooded now.

Cheers!

[Darlene]

What a great idea, to have tags on the photos! Can't for the life of me figure out how you did that, though.

As for your experiment, I think the results were amazing, considering the variety and amount you were able to sustain in that confined space. Hate to admit it, but it reminds me of my front yard. Such a variety of plants squeezed in, and since so many are seasonal, as soon as the spring ones disappear, they're replaced by summer ones, etc., so there's that many more actually planted than you can see at any one time.

And of course every year I say I have all the kinds I want, but then I see an alluring plant I don't have or hear about a new one's attributes and want it to join my plant menagerie...then there are the ones I get as gifts... And then there are the "weeds" I love; butter & eggs, Asiatic day lillies; while others are trying to get rid of theirs, I plant and nuture them. But don't worry, I don't nurture dandelions.^__^