Gardening 101

Still working on the flowerbeds. Whose idea was this anyway? We have a wedding to attend in April, and I don't want my hands to look like they've been digging in the dirt and shoveling mulch. I've gone through three pairs of gloves already.... the fabric ones developed a hole, the cotton ones kept getting wet with the hose, and I cut off the tip of the thumb on the plastic ones (thankfully, my thumb is intact, but that particular glove is history).

I've decided that gardening isn't all that bad. I'm allergic to fire ant bites, so I have to be careful where I step.... and this entire state sits on top of fire ant mounds, no matter how much ant spray you use. I often wonder how in the world kids run around in bare feet..... on the grass.... and not get swallowed up by every fire ant in Texas.

With inspiration from neighbor A, whose Bluebonnet Gathering we went to last week, I have been decorating our flowerbeds.  A's backyard had a full-sized wooden wagon.... but I didn't want to spend hundreds of dollars for a wagon that would sit in our yard and make a more-than-comfortable lounging space for our outside cat Gatsby. (I can see him now, all stretched out in the back of a wagon, expecting me to provide a blanket for his naps and a western-design food bowl filled with Meow Mix.)

On my weekly visits to the local thrift store (which is like going to an indoor garage sale), I found the perfect substitute for a huge wagon......... a wicker and metal baby buggy.  And it was just $20, not hundreds of dollars. Very vintage, with the wicker being in considerably good condition, but the metal is all rusty. I don't intend to polish it up because it's just sitting in the flowerbed by the back steps, somewhat protected by the sun because of the breezeway that connects the house to the garage.  Without a doubt, that buggy was the treasure of the week, and it gives that flowerbed the pizazz it needed.

I pulled decorative garden items out of my space at the antique shop..... I now have a wooden chicken nesting in a hollow spot in the mesquite tree, there's a wooden angel in the flowerbed around the back deck, a wrought iron miniature bicycle propped up between the purple and white petunias, yellow butterflies attached to one of the posts around the deck, and there are metal lanterns scattered here and there on tree stumps and metal tables. Cute to the max, and it was fun to do.  I've decided that the key to enjoyable gardening is twofold: Stay out of the fire ant mounds, and decorate the garden as you would decorate the house.

I pinched some spent blooms off of the petunias this afternoon.... with a little luck, new blooms will appear before too long.  With even more luck, grasshoppers and rabbits won't be feasting on all these flowers and plants we've so carefully arranged in the newly-mulched flowerbeds. Now wouldn't that be the pits..... to walk out there one morning and find an army of fat grasshoppers that have consumed the petunias and marigolds.......

Chickens would eat those grasshoppers in a heartbeat..... but when you have chickens, you can't have pretty flowerbeds because they scratch in the mulch to get down to the dirt as they look for worms and bugs.  But if I had chickens, and no pretty flowerbeds, I wouldn't have three broken nails and chipped nail polish.