Green Thumb

My Father was a gardener, and  I'm guessing he learned it from his folks, out of necessity.  They were quite poor.  My Grandpa Meys lost a leg hopping a train back around 1920.  He was in his teens.  Work for disabled people back in those days was certainly hard to come by, so Grandpa did what he could, trapped, and I am going to assume gardened.

I am a gardener, and I learned by trial and error.  Heaven help you if you monkeyed around with Dad's gardens, and he certainly wasn't a fan of showing his kids how to do something.  I'm sure we (except for Kate, she hates it) picked up some knowledge just by watching what he was up to.  It's definitely in the blood though, my brother's and I are quite good at it, I must say.

My dad had veggie gardens (mmmm those Belgian peas, best eaten when sneaked) and beautiful flower gardens.  People stopped all the time to see his rose garden.  I'm sure I've written about that before.  He worked hard at it, and was proud of the fruits of his labors.  Rightly so.

I wish I could give more time to my gardens, but man alive, I can't work a full day, come home and deal with household stuff, and then go pick at the garden.  When I cut back my hours in a few years I am going to devote much more time to puttering around.  I love the little garden by the back door.  It's small enough that I can just stop by and pick a weed or two.

The Punisher (someone designed it to be shaped like a punisher skull....... )  garden is a very different story.  My goal is to have it be mostly perennial.  We're getting there.  It's a lot of hard work, on the side of a very steep hill.   It's hard to get a picture that shows the scope of this thing.  I might have an older one taken from the bottom.  Sad to say, the top is the only thing I'm working on this year.  At the moment, my foot just doesn't allow me to be standing on a hill pulling weeds.  Slowly I will get there.  The dogwood bush on the right is going insane, and I will have to take that back a bit in the fall.  I'm excited for the riot of color this will become in the next few weeks!  

Here's the veggie garden.  Tomato and pumpkin (first try and they are coming like gangbusters) are in the farther one, onion and peas are in the smaller middle part, and then beans and cukes in the nearer garden.  We've already been eating green onion, and the peas aren't far off.  I've done some weeding since this pic was taken.  It's never ending.  If I let that garden go for one year you would never know it was even there.  There's my new weed whacker in the shot.  I love it!  Light weight and powerful, perfect size for me.  It was a very exciting find, well, for me anyway.  

I also have a hosta garden under the large tree that you see to the left of the punisher garden.  I will save pics of that for now, as I just built a squirrel feeding station out of logs from the maple we had to cut down, and I think we might be using some of that maple for a border.  

My Dad was also big into trees.  He planted every single one of the twenty or so that were in our yard at one time.  I love them too, but am not great at identifying them.  Oh, we all know the easy ones. Birch, maple, etc.  We have two GIANT trees near the border in front that we finally had an arborist identify.   Turns out they are Balm of Gilead.  ????  What now?  That's a new one for me.  It's related to the aspen and poplar, and that's why we kept going back and forth thinking it was one or the other, but it didn't quite fit.