So last weekend's beautiful weather had me really excited for my garden. Especially because I'm dying to have it ready before May 10th. I think I was being a little excessive though. Spending nearly $200 on seeds and plants before the last frost may be a little frivolous I suppose. But I can't lie, gardening is my biggest stress relief and if you know how to take of your garden, your plants will flourish before your neighbours come out of hibernation.And of course, what else can I say, I'm extremely impatient.
Anyway, Canadian weather is extremely unpredictable and of course it snowed this week because it's still only April. However, with the big party coming up in May and my much needed gardening therapy in light of exams, I figured, what the heck - It only cost me about $60 bucks to get my hydrangeas, chrysanthemums, my rose bush and dahlia bulbs, which is a small price to pay to get a garden started this early anyhow. So my first thought: I'm a great gardener, why the hell not risk it?
Well, I'm pretty sure if you're a flower lover like me, then you'd be completely heartbroken if your plants died, no matter how easily replaceable they are. I tend to develop an emotional attachment to plants the same way I do for animals, especially to my perennials because I know they're worth the extra care. So after taking a look at the weather forecast for this week, I devoted a lot of extra love and care towards the preservation of my newly planted shrubbery and flowers to protect them from the oncoming frost.
I had a few people ask my why I put whiskey, scotch and sometimes tequila in my flower beds. Well, the answer is - because I actually give a damn to.
I've been gardening for years - since I was about 4 or 5 years old, I was exposed to gardening.
After moving to Brampton, we had a much bigger yard to work with and every year I would help my mom transplant her seedlings because she always had a bunch of plants that she would sow on her own indoors. We usually do the sowing around early to mid march and have seedlings ready to be transplanted between April and May and then after May, we sow directly outside for our late summer bloomers.
I learned a lot of life lessons from my experience with gardening - from sowing and scheduling to preservation techniques and tonics. Well, if there's one thing that stands out of all the things I learned, it's that there's only one way to screw up your garden and that's by failing to love it.
When I was about 12, I planted a buddleja seed and watched it grow from a little sprout with two leaves no bigger than a pinky nail, up to about a two-foot tall baby shrub that same summer. My dog dug it up the year after because she used to kill possum families and dig them around the garden and she just so happened to ruin my buddleja. I was pretty upset, but it wasn't the worst thing in the world because I found out that the seed I planted would eventually turn into an 8-ft-wide shrub. Anyway, that was the first experience I ever really had with creating something from nothing and the whole process of taking care of it and helping it grow was such a revelation to me.
A lot of people don't think very much of it because, after all, plants are just plants to many. However, there's a difference between plants that simply survive and plants that thrive and flourish.
Although plants don't need the help of people to sustain life in their environments, they do need all the right, contributing factors to see their existence into their fullest potential. It's being able to provide that and see the results thereafter that make it worth devoting so much to a garden you love.
I fell in love with gardening before Matheson was even born and I guess that responsibility to your plants and flowers is what allows a person to become great caretakers and loving people. I'm a very impatient person, but gardening does call for a huge sum of patience. I think everything I learned through the love of my garden before Matheson was born actually helped me to be the type of mother that I am.
You develop a sense of wardenship and responsibility over your plants and each plant is like your child (until you actually have a child). But then you learn what's good for the plants and what's bad for them and through experience you learn all the techniques to help them flourish. You only really have once chance to do that with your kids and you can't exactly apply the "trial and error" method to everything you do with your kids, but still, you learn things like what your kid is good at and what he likes and where to focus on developing their skills, much like you learn about the pH levels of soil required by certain plants, or how and when to water them. Do you mist them in the morning or do you flower their roots at night? Do you fertilize with bone meal or blood meal and how frequently do you apply it?
It's actually really great now that Matheson is older and he can help me with the plants. I'm teaching him about how to root from cuttings and how to deadhead certain plants. I'm trying to teach him about weeds and bad bugs (even though he absolutely loves snails) versus good bugs and birds, which he seems to have fun learning about.
Well going back to my rush for the plants this past weekend.While I'm outside working on the garden, Matheson is usually out with me, either riding his bike or helping me plant. With this week's frost however, I had to take the extra precautions to make sure my hydrangeas wouldn't die. It's funny how many people told me not to plant them because the temperature was going to dip - although we didn't anticipate the snow, I've been doing this for years and I know how to take care of my plants in the early spring. So I deadheaded the volatile blooms, gave the roots a dormancy tonic with tequila, hydrogen peroxide, omega-3 oil and ground tea leaves, and wrapped them in burlap sacks and dark bags.
Anyway, now that the weather is nicer outside today, I took a sneak peak at all of them with Matheson to check that they haven't suffered adverse effects from defrosting and noticed that not only did they survive, but they also continued to grow the buds of new blooms and leaves.
It's extremely rewarding when you see the results of your devoted love and care to any living thing, whether it be plant, a pet, and especially your own children.
I guess you could say I'm passing this down to Matheson because after he was pleased to see that our plants were safe and well, he was so excited to get started on sowing the seeds for mid spring.
A lot of people ask me how I have time to do so much work and have so many hobbies while having Matheson, but I think it's very important to involve your children in the safer hobbies you enjoy. He may not have a knack for crafts, but he does enjoy watching and learning, and now that he's showing a great interest in planting with me, I really can't wait to see how amazing our garden will be.
