We gardener types find peace and serenity during mild periods at the end of the season by spending a few minutes chopping up struggling vines, untangling and pulling down, and cutting out all the aphid infected plants and disposing them, shoving the piles of waste into shopping bags too small for them and snipping and chopping and cutting to bits to fit snip snip snip cut cut snippy snip cut slash cut snip snip snip snip cut SLASH CUT SLASH SLASH SLASH shove push cram cut cut snip snip snip until it all fits. Aaaah
Ooooooouuum.
Serenity now.
Vacuuuuuuuum the debris and call it a day.
The original plan was save the vine seeds for next year, they're rampant, so two packets were labeled to separate them. The vines so intense, the tangle such a mess, and the seeds so sparse it was hardly worth the trouble. Better to just buy seeds again and get what I want, now that I know what these things do. So all these valuable and useful seeds are wasted. Turns out I'd rather make quick work of cleanup and start over next year. That whole serenity thing is well overrated.
9 comments:
'Putting the garden to bed.' What fun. One of my favorite summer jobs is pruning and deadheading. Very satisfying.
This may be the year I properly mulch all of Mom's flower beds...here's hoping.
wan-nit beautiful today?!
dead-heading is therapy - absolutely.
I take care of a friends potted plants on weekends in the summer. After I water, I dead-head everything. Why is that so satisfying?
My viticulture experiment this year was largely unsuccessful. I have a 3 year old healthy vine (seedless Concord) and got all of about 2 clusters of fruit. The plant grew like crazy this summer but put all its energy into making leaves and not fruit. I'm learning that the key is to constantly prune it to discourage leafing. If anybody knows of a good book on this topic, please recommend.
April, I think part of it is the satisfaction of neatening the plant. Geraniums are so easy, the flower stalk snaps right off. And then the flowers keep on an on.
Chick, you probably know, being a chemist, but you may need a fertilizer ratio that encourages fruiting, as opposed to leaf production. Or maybe it just takes time for the plant to grow and establish, and then you'll have too many grapes! Gonna make wine?
Deborah, I would prefer to make jam and to just have the fruit for eating. What grapes I got were very sweet and tasty.
Nice. What hybrid are they? I'm considering growing Catauba(?) at my mom's because they're so beautiful.
Where I grew up in Ohio the neighbor had some very thick-skinned sour grapes. We would squeeze the grape from the skin, and then have to spit out the seeds. Great memory.
Last year, I grew a Cosmo flower from seed. I started a bunch, but only one made it to be the giant bushy flower plant. They are beautiful. I had a variety with hot pink flowers. This year, I planted a lot and did them right- and was also pleasantly surprised to find the one last year had seeded itself in about a dozen places. I dug them up and made a nice border around the garden.
There was one volunteer Cosmo by the garden gate- it got the most sun in the middle of the yard. I had to whack a couple branches off it to get by (which I just stuck right into the compost and they bounced back). The flower was over six feet tall, full of ready-to-pop buds. Any day it would happen. THEN>>> The 'hurricane'. All we got was rain, and lots of wind. Going to the garden the day after, the perfect large Cosmo had been cut down by the wind.
I stuck it in the compost, but it will never achieve the glory it could have had... The rest are still nice, though.
I grew the pink/white mix of cosmos a long time ago. Very pretty. I want to try the orange one day. I'm a sucker for orange.
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