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Sustainability

My 85 year old neighbor called me out over last week’s blog. Initially I was crushed because she is always my biggest fan, but once I got past ego, I had to admit that she was right. I dropped a problem in my reader’s laps — disappearing bumble bees —and then just left it there. I offered no solutions, nothing for the reader to follow up on.   This week I intend to change that because there definitely are ways to protect bumblebees and help them become regular visitors in your garden.  

My granddaughter is terrified of bees — especially bumble bees. She comes by it naturally. Her mother is terrified of them too. I think it stems from seeing her baby sister repeatedly stung by a swarm of honeybees while playing on a neighborhood school playground. I’ll admit that it was a traumatic incident, but it happened over 30 years ago, so it’s time to move on! (On a side note- the one who was actually stung isn’t bothered in the least by bees; she considers them her garden friends)

In all of the research I have been doing over the last few weeks, I keep coming back to the same conclusion: the key to a successful urban cutting garden is thoughtful planning before planting. I know that in most cases we talk about careful planning, but for this project the decisions we make before we begin, guide how we proceed. 

As strange as it may seem, I’d like to start the second blog in our soil series thinking about water. Soil is our economic base, but water is our lifeblood. And the reality is that soil and water are directly connected.

One of my neighbors stopped by a few weeks ago to comment on our yard. “Seeing all the flowers in bloom,” she said, “made her feel like spring was right around the corner.” I have to admit that as much as I appreciated and understood her intent, her compliment made me cringe inside. You see, she was seeing my snowdrops, daffodils and crocus all in bloom at the same time. Yes, it made for a color-filled late February bed, but they should have been blooming in succession; that’s what Mother Nature intended.

This roller coaster of a winter has been a nightmare for gardeners here in mid-Missouri. One day, the thermometer reads 16 below zero and you are spreading ice melt so that the mail carrier can make it up the driveway to the mail slot. Then, a mere four days later, it is a balmy 58 degrees and you’re in the yard seriously thinking about getting a jump on your spring gardening chores. Before you begin pulling weeds, spading the garden, doing some trimming or raking up those piles of dead leaves, I have a piece of advice for you. DON’T. Just don’t. The urge to get in some early gardening chores can backfire on you.  At its worst, jumping the landscaping gun can cause real harm to your landscape, or at the very least, you could wind up having to repeat what you’ve already done. Neither is a particularly pleasant outcome. 

January is the month of trends. Just for fun, I googled Trends 2023 and came up with 4,330, 000,000 responses in 58 seconds. There were trends in fashion, in hairstyles, in make-up, in business, technology,real estate, housing design, interior design, food, wine, entertainment…the list went on and on. Twelve clicks later, I found what I was initially looking for, trends in Horticulture. Since there were still 6 million individual pages to peruse, I decided to pick just the top five and see what they had to say. 

My birthday is just around the corner, which means that it is time for our annual Christmas conversation –  should we buy a real tree or an artificial tree this year? I’m not sure why we still have the conversation since for 47 years we’ve come to the same conclusion, but it seems wise to rehash all the pros and cons before we head out to buy the most perfect 7 foot Douglas Fir we can find.