Sometimes you don’t have a lot of time or resources to do what you want. Life happens and postpones things. You just can’t make up your mind. Mistakes can be made even by experienced gardeners that cause setbacks as well.
Most of what we have done last year and so far this year hasn’t felt like enough even though I’d be a dunce not to acknowledge what has changed and acknowledge we really couldn’t do much more with the time and resources we had to spare. Continue reading “Let your garden grow”
Despite knowing that Gardner has many wetlands, ponds and waterways, because we don’t really see any of it from even the upper story of our home, you wouldn’t consider our home sited terribly near any of them. Yet if you look at one map that shows various water features, there’s quite a bit in our portion of the Greater Gardner Area, especially wetlands to the south and west.
As I noted before, I did finally attend a local Conservation Commission meeting, and in doing so found myself volunteering to help share some plants with a homeowner that inadvertently removed plants he didn’t know he shouldn’t because part of his land was in a protected flood zone. Not a “you’ll flood every year” sort of flood zone, but what’s known here as a Q3 “100 year flood” zone. You’d think there’d be some law stating sellers of homes should make sure buyers know about that sort of thing…I guess it’s more expected that folks will inform themselves about such. I remember after I heard about one legendary Gardner flood, and soon found myself well acquainted with the OLIVER map which helped us strike a few homes off our house search possibles. Continue reading “Follow up of attending my first Conservation Commission meeting.”
Courtesy Notice: This is another of my long rambling posts.
The short answer: handy reference because my memory isn’t perfect.
The long one with history and how I arrived at my present record keeping status:
As I’ve mentioned before, last year was our first year here at Beebe, and I knew things would be a bit nuts. (Beebe is what we call our house–it’s a beekeeper surname reference since we like bees even though we don’t have the name in our ancestry that we know of, and don’t actively keep them other than try to provide plenty of food to encourage them to be here.) Continue reading “Why I like keeping garden records”
Today, as I am yanking up my latest nemesis–purple loosestrife–I see a tiny blob of red. “Huh,” I think to myself, “That’s new.”
Strawberries. Three tiny ones on a plant buried in the front yard sloped portion’s masses of wildflowers and grasses. Then I find another plant close by, also with red budding berries. Continue reading “strawberries everywhere followup part 2”
The gardens I grew up in and near were in southern NJ, on a barrier island where if you dug too deep, you’d hit soggy brimed soil. The property was one block from the bay, two from the ocean, on the northernmost part of the island which was narrow there compared to most of the island.
Despite that, my maternal grandparents had thriving gardens full of ornamentals as well as food crops, though we didn’t have a lot of tall trees. Continue reading “Learning to work with a new climate”
That’s when we bought our first new old house, and let’s just say there were challenges outside.
Yep, outside.
Still, some good came out of it that had been there all along.
At some point someone was an avid gardener, and despite years of neglect, a wealth remained.
Even if it was choking to death in overgrowth.
More stories to come.
Stay tuned.
