Gardening

As most of you know, my sister (the one for whom this blog was started) is a gardener.  In fact, she's a Master Gardener, which means she's taken classes, has to do some volunteer work, and I don't know what else. 

Obviously, she is very into gardening, and has beautiful gardens all around her house.  At least, I imagine they are beautiful.  We hardly ever get to Moorhead in the summer as we stop when we get to the lake.  So I rarely see her gardens.  But she blogs about them, and takes pictures, and has everything identified and tidy.  One of her gardens used to be a Harry Potter garden.  (She might still have it) - all of the plants in it had wizarding type names.    She has many different gardens in her yard.

My gardening takes a somewhat different approach.    I have reduced the amount of planting that we do quite a bit over the years.  We used to do 12 or 14 hanging baskets.  Now we do 2.  I have 5 large pots on my  patio that is basically where all of my gardening happens.

This is how it works:

Step 1.  Go to the nursery in mid-May.  Walk up and down the aisles and look for things that are tall, things that are short, some decorative green stuff, and buy a bunch of it. 

Step 2.  Take it home and bring it all down to the patio. 

Step 3.  Rip out all of the dead stuff still in the pots from last year, including all of the plant identifying markers that I painstakingly put by each plant when it is planted.  (And then pay no attention to them before Step 1 occurs. - Because of course - I have no idea in the spring what was in each pot last fall.)

Step 4.  Add some dirt if necessary. 

Step 5.  Divvy up all of the stuff that I bought and plop it into all of the pots.  I try to do a tall and a short, and something like a coleus in each pot. 

Step 6.  Wait and see if it worked.

What is truly amazing to me is that even with this haphazard method, it generally turns out pretty nice. 

(The small pot with something green in it is mint.  I keep those separate so that David can put flower booster stuff into the flower pots - I don't think that stuff should go on herbs that you eat.)

My favorite one this year is the one in the middle with the big pink spinny in it.  That tall plan in the back is called a butterfly something or other, and it's really cool.  it has long long stems with flowers at the ends that do sort of look like butterflies. 

Anyway - maybe this year I'll pay more attention in the fall before all of them die so I know what I really like next year.

But probably not :)