TRUE CONFESSION: I USED TO STALK GAYLA TRAIL ONLINE. Long before I started A Way to Garden, You Grow Girl, founded in 2000, defined “garden blog” for me, and I was a regular lurker there. But Gayla gardens in Canada (not the U.S.), in an urban setting (not a rural one). She is a bold world traveler (I am a big baby). We are nearly two decades apart in age (and I, regretfully, have no tattoos). If we’re so different, then why are we posting simultaneous profiles this week on our sites, and giving away four sets of both our books? Because we’re pretty sure you’ll like meeting the other one—we know we hit it off when we did.
In a series of emails and Skype calls since I began A Way to Garden in 2008, Gayla and I have found so much shared turf:
- We two longtime organic gardeners can get riled up—over topics ranging from the environment, to chemical companies and the “business” of gardening in general, to dyed mulch and more (her most recent rant on offcolor mulch is way down in this post).
- We both overdo it—on plants, work, and a major inclination to cart home lots of rusty buckets and other “vintage” metal stuff from tag sales.
- We both live in the garden offseason crammed into spaces where in many rooms, the plants get a majority of the square footage. (And why not?)
- In addition to the usual tools, you’ll find us both with a camera in the garden, though Gayla is a professional photographer, and I am not.
- And once upon a time, there was the influence of a grandmother (hers, West Indian; mine, a garden-club lady from New York City’s suburbs) who with potatoes grown in pots on a balcony or standard chrysanthemums planted in the ground, respectively, touched our souls.
YOU KNOW WHAT? Let Gayla introduce herself with this interview (then click over to her site to read my corresponding Q&A). Don’t forget to comment first to enter to win both our books–four sets are up for grabs of my memoir “And I Shall Have Some Peace There” and her latest, “Grow Great Grub: Organic Food from Small Spaces,” and then to comment again when you get to Gayla’s. Details follow the interview, at the bottom of this page.
The Q&A With Gayla Trail
1. How long have you been gardening?
I’ve been asked this question many times and am yet to come up with a succinct, radio-friendly answer–there isn’t one! Gardening happened for me in starts and stops, but the drive to do so has been there since I was a little girl.
The first plant I ever grew was parsley in a Styrofoam cup when I was 5. I remember that experience very clearly. For some reason my parents tilled a garden in the backyard of our rental (they were not gardeners) and I planted my parsley there. We moved into a townhouse subdivision that October and there was no garden to speak of for the rest of my childhood. Well, there are other interesting gardens/gardening experiences, but they are tricky to write about here without providing pages and pages of context. I am saving those stories for the Made-for-TV Lifetime movie I am writing about my life…Okay, not really, although I have the material, and then some.
One day when I was about 17 I inexplicably went outside and dug a patch of earth behind the garage of the new rental house we had recently moved into. I had no plan and I can’t recall what compelled me to do so in the first place, except that I just had to–and immediately! Life at home soon became even more tumultuous and I left shortly thereafter. Nothing came of the patch I dug. At 18 I moved to a new city and started growing indoor plants from cuttings given to me by my high school biology teacher. I also tried growing seeds collected from grocery store produce and eventually attempted (unwisely) to grow onions, raspberries, and other edibles in the shady backyard of my apartment building. Needless to say, nothing happened. I grew my first successful vegetable garden while living in an overcrowded student house in university. Then I moved again and left that new garden behind, this time into an apartment with no yard. Oddly enough, that is where I started gardening FOR REAL. I never stopped.
2. Did you learn from someone in particular? If not, how?
Good god no! I wish I had that sort of pedigree. You know, the wise parent or grandparent that gently leads you through the lessons of the garden, and in doing so teaches you meaningful lessons about life. Yadda yadda, happy, happy, whatever. I am self-taught (and self-directed) all the way. I will say, however, that there was my maternal grandmother and her potatoes. She lived in a high rise for seniors and grew potatoes in a bucket on her tiny balcony. She grew plants but never, ever spoke of it. I have no idea how she felt about gardening or why she did it. She wasn’t the sort to have those kinds of conversations. One day I was out playing on the balcony and I noticed this plant with little blue flowers (like the ones on the plants in my rooftop cans, above left). I asked what it was and she told me potatoes. Even though nothing else was said about it, I kept that memory somewhere in the back of my mind and I think of it as the inspiration that led me to try growing on a garden on the roof of my apartment building.
3. How many gardens have you made so far (indoors count)?
Quite a lot, especially if I include indoors. Outdoors I have had the one in university, the roof of my old place (photo above), the space between the sidewalk and the building at my old place, two different community garden plots, a yardshare, and now my new backyard along with the front that I am only just beginning to develop into a new container garden. Indoors, in my current place, I think of different parts of the house as different gardens because the conditions are so vastly divergent. I have an unheated, south-facing covered porch that I am calling “The Greenhouse” for want of a better term, my office window where I have about 40 plants, and numerous others that are scattered throughout. Even when I lived in a cramped apartment, the plants were shifted between windows and growing spaces seasonally, so it was like starting over every four to six months. I don’t think I have had less than 100 plants growing indoors, year-round, since my mid-20s.
4. Any projects or other posts you’d like to share with my readers that sort of introduce you best?
I have three tags on the site that are used to define personal posts that I think offer up some insights into who I am:
- http://www.yougrowgirl.com/tag/personal-history/
- http://www.yougrowgirl.com/tag/scylla-trail/
- http://www.yougrowgirl.com/category/explore/deep-thoughts/
- There is also a section at the bottom of my About page that provides brief outlines of some of my gardens.
5. Do you think of yourself as having a “specialty,” something you know most about, love the most, etc.?
By necessity, my specialty is definitely small-space food gardening (which is what “Grow Great Grub,” left, is about). And I do love growing food. Recently I have found myself moving more and more into weird food: strange plants that are sort of on the cusp of edible. But in reality I consider myself an equal opportunity plant-aholic. I love all plants; I’m just restricted by space. I make do pretty well and grow a frightening number of plants considering how little space I’ve had available to me.
6. What do you think is the greatest misconception about you?
That I have a perfect garden! My gardens suit me, but would they win any awards? Not likely. The trouble with super-small garden spaces is that there is no behind-the-scenes in which to hide the messes. And there are lots of messes. I am so thrilled that I now have a ramshackle shed in which to store the pots, and the scraps of this and that, that I have picked up off of the street but do not yet have a use for. My gardens are also my testing grounds. They are where I try new varieties and push plants to see how they will perform in different conditions. This doesn’t always turn out well for the plant, but it is how I learn so that I can be a better writer. These days, my gardens are more about work than about what I want. Over the years, aesthetics have been pushed out of the way in favor of work-related needs. Last year I was doing the photos for my next book and I managed to cram more greenery onto the roof than you would think possible. It was a bit scary! There was nowhere to entertain or sit for that matter. It didn’t look particularly great because it was just about getting those plants ready for photos.
7. What would you count as your biggest gardening successes?
I’ve grown a lot of different plants in some pretty horrible conditions, but the one that comes to mind first is a simple one: radishes. For years, I simply could not grow a decent radish in a container. They were dry and wooden and just not worth eating. I was pretty proud of myself when I finally worked it out and now I grow a mean radish, if I do say so myself.
Using straw to mulch was another success that I came upon by experimentation and somewhat accidentally. Well, not using it so much as using it as extensively as I now do. I initially started mulching with it in my community garden so that I could cut back on the amount I needed to water, but over time I discovered other benefits and even experimented with burying it into the soil as a cheap, long-term amender. Then I started mulching my containers with it and discovered that it drastically cut back the frequency with which I needed to water through the hottest days of summer. I love straw! This wasn’t anything I read; just little things that I tried and saw results with. I very recently found out about Ruth Stout and discovered that she pioneered a no-work method based on using straw! Why did it take me so long to find her?
My most recent success is a tomato I grew in my office window this winter. It all happened by mistake, as the best results often do. A volunteer tomato came up in one of my houseplant pots and I was so happy to have a tomato plant around to smell through the winter months that I decided to let it go. Amazingly, it did much better than any indoor tomato I have tried to grow before, and I harvested a few really good, fresh and juicy tomatoes in April and May!
8. Any failures you care to confess to? Is there a plant that just eludes you one way or another, that is your undoing?
Failures are constant and probably too numerous to list. I am always trying new plants or pushing plants to grow in different conditions, so failure is par for the course. Failure also depends on location. I’m starting out in a new space this year so I expect a lot of failure along the way as I come into contact with a new cast of pest characters. New gardens also tend to be more susceptible to pestilence since they suffer from a lack of diversity. My new space was pretty much a monoculture. There is a distinct lack of beneficials in the space right now. I am not new to gardening with squirrels but the community here are driving me INSANE in new ways. They dig hundreds of holes everyday and are eating the centers out of my sempervivums! It is my first year here so I don’t yet fully understand the growing conditions and the microclimates. I only have so much time so my focus is on building the beds and soil this year. I figure a lot of plants will be moved next year as I get more time to devote to that end of things and as I come to a better understanding of the space.
9. Do you ever “hit the wall” with gardening, and want to throw in the trowel?
I will say that by mid-summer, when there is a heatwave, I can grow pretty tired of hauling buckets out to keep containers hydrated. This year, for the first time since the mid-90s, I have access to an outdoor water source! No hauling buckets!
My biggest hitting the wall this year is more about not having time to garden than it is about becoming overwhelmed by the garden itself. The trouble with being a garden writer is that it can get in the way of actually gardening. Spring is our high season. I was losing my mind for a while there, looking out at the garden everyday, but knowing that I HAD to go back to my desk and work on my book, answer people’s questions, etc. It is such a necessary part of my life now that I can feel myself suffocating when things get too far out of balance and I don’t have the time to do it. The irony is that having time to garden, experiment, and interact with plants is also essential to my job. My writing is better when I have time to re-fill the well with new experiences and discoveries.
10. Quick One Word Questions:
1. Favorite edible plant? Tomatoes. Followed closely by basil.
2. Favorite non-edible? Arisaema triphyllum.
3. Gardening: hobby, art, job, political act? All and more. It is a requirement for life, like breathing or eating. It keeps me sane and grounded. It brings me back to myself and connects me to something that is bigger than me. It is where I experience wonder, which is about as religious as I get. (Oops. That’s more than one word!)
4. Favorite season? Spring. Although this spring was lousy. So this year it will be summer.
5. Favorite plant fragrance? Tomato, although I recently went to Thailand and have to say that ylang-ylang (Cananga odorata) is pretty fantastic and even better than the essential oil!
6. Favorite gardening film or garden in a film? It’s neither about gardening or gardens; however, the landscapes in “Days of Heaven” are the best. There is also a scene in “Ratcatcher” where the main character (a kid) travels through an open field to explore a new subdivision that is just being built that reminds me of my childhood living next to brown fields behind The Towers/Food City Plaza.
How to Win 1 of 4 Sets of Books
GAYLA AND I HAVE FOUR SETS of our latest books to give away: Gayla’s “Grow Great Grub: Organic Food from Small Spaces,” and my memoir, “And I Shall Have Some Peace There,” about moving to my garden away from the city rat race. To enter, you have to comment here AND on Gayla’s blog, answering the question, “Do you ever hit the wall in gardening?” just as she and I answered it in our twin interviews here and on her site.
Remember: You double your chances to win by entering on both blogs–just copy and paste the same comment both places, below and at Gayla’s interview with me. And one more thing: If you’re feeling shy, and just want to say “Count me in” or “I want to win,” that’s OK; we will honor your entry anyhow. We understand. But do that in both places.
Four winners, two from each site, will be chosen at random using random [dot] org’s tool after entries close at midnight Tuesday, June 7. Each will receive our two books. Good luck to all!
Where to Find Gayla
- You Grow Girl on Facebook
- Buy “Grow Great Grub” now
(All photos courtesy Gayla Trail.)
Definitely! This Spring I filled 20 toilet paper tubes with homemade potting soil, and scarified and seeded 20 little lupine seeds. They all germinated but within two weeks slugs had eaten every seedling but one! The one that’s left is pathetic and pretty much a goner. So frustrated and completely unsure how to start over!
I have yet to hit a wall. I came close this year when snails & slugs killed two of my young plants. Sluggo to the rescue.
I hit a wall every summer here in Oklahoma when the 100′s and no rain hit!
But, I never stop gardening. I was a Yankee transplant 31 years ago and am
still enjoying my yard therapy!
I hit the wall with gardening when it comes to the initial spring planting. I was in a bad accident so I have a bad back. I can tend the garden pretty easily once all the vegetables are planted, but boy, all that bending over really wears me out. It’s all worth it in the end, because the fresh produce later in the season is so rewarding.
Yes!
Last year, I got so discouraged when some sort of blight struck my tomato plants in early August. I grow my food in pots on my balcony so I knew I had to act fast to have any hope of saving any of my plants. Unfortunately, it was not to be. Every single plant got infected and withered away seemingly overnight. Plus all the soil in my pots was now infected with blight! Unlike Margaret, I’m NOT a very patient person…but I am resourceful – and on a budget. Throwing away all my potting soil was just not an option so I changed directions and switched to herbs and greens. The blight doesn’t affect them one whit. The funny thing is, I don’t actually miss my tomatoes. My gardens are much easier to maintain. I love the creativity of planting and harvesting my own salad mixes. (I’ve got a hot weather plan for when the cool weather crops fizzle out.) Also, harvesting is done continually so there isn’t that huge rush in August/September to “get everything in.” Oh, and while I had to tear out every single one of my tomato plants by the roots, I did manage to rescue all of the tomatoes. They were still green so I put them inside paper bags until they reddened, then I froze them. I’m still eating them today.
I hit a wall this year. I’d been growing edibles in my front and back yards at my own house for three years – I built all the raised bed boxes, I did all the digging and planting and weeding and harvesting myself. I just moved in with my husband this spring. He had a garden he built himself last year, but didn’t do anything to maintain it after the summer – TONS of weeds. Plus we moved all my raised bed boxes over and had to kill off the grass underneath and fill them with dirt. Which meant we were starting everything all over. The only plants I brought over were the garlic, onion and horseradish I’d planted in buckets. My husband hates the buckets, but I can’t “unplant” them until we plant everything else and I can see where there’s room. Oh, and we don’t have the same days off, so we are hardly ever able to work together, and he doesn’t do much of any yardwork without me at least nearby (and he works until 7:30pm anyway). Plus it’s been raining nearly solid since November with only a few days of sun here and there. Usually on days I work. And the backyard is full of English ivy and blackberry bushes because he paid no attention to it whatsoever for the last two years.
This is while I’ve been unpacking and moving my two indoor-only girl cats in with his three indoor-outdoor boy cats. Oh, and his mother lives with us too. Don’t ask about that one.
Yeah. I’ve hit a bit of a wall. I’m slowly climbing over it, but the wall is there nonetheless.
I’ve “hit the wall” last year with my front yard. I’ve been trying to build it into a no non-sense, drought tolerant perennial garden for the past 8+ years. Now certain foliage have taken over and others have died off (like my irises & bee balm) after all these years. :( I hate pulling the overgrown out and not find a new place (no more room even propagated to the neighbor’s yard) to plant them. Not sure what I’ll do but I definitely need to give some of the plants some breathing room.
I hit the wall after I ruptured a disc in my back. The burgundy iceberg roses on my driveway had just finished blooming. There wasn’t much I could do except shake out all the petals and pretend that I had just hosted a wedding at my house.
My doctor suggested I give up gardening, but I just can’t seem to stop. Now I garden in slow motion.
Sometimes climbing “walls” are what makes gardening so great. Last year I had a tremendous garden vegetable and flower garden, not to mention borders and island b very mucheds. My wall is having to move it to our new house. Not all my old plants fit into my new garden ..not that I can’t actually fit them (although there is that too) but they seem out of place. It’s a different setting quieter and woodsy compared to our current urban site with screaming sun. Also if I’d had more time I would have dug a seperate bed for the tomatoes, but frankly I’m enjoying them next to my lady’s mantle quite nicely, thank you.
I start my seeds and plants in January. I hit the wall every summer when I realise spring is gone and summer has rolled in. Summer means my plants are entering their last phase!
I, too, am just starting to use more straw – this is worth trying – for me it is less weeds, less watering and more time enjoying the beauty of growing.
We had a summer a few years back when it rained ONCE. Just once, for ten minutes. And since it regularly gets in the upper 90s here, I had to get up every morning and water the garden for an hour just to keep the plants alive. I’d grumble and complain and whine about how much I didn’t want to get up at the crack of dawn, but a funny thing happened each morning…as soon as I was outside in the (relatively) cool air, a feeling of peace and of purpose would come over me and I’d come to enjoy those moments of solitude before I started my day.
It helped that the mosquitos were still asleep.
have I ever hit the gardening wall? every year! It’s starts each winter as I read book after book, magazine after magazine, catalog after catalog and attempt to make plans only to be overwhelmed by the process of actually starting a project. I am a planner but the actual to-do overwhelms me as I want things to look like what I read and see in print or on the web. This year I have broken through the wall! Raised beds made, top soil/compost mix in, plants in the ground…Yeah! Is it coincidence that I have completed tasks the same year that I begin reading Margaret Roach and A Way to Garden? I think not. Now I have You Grow Girl on the blog roll and watch out everyone I’m ready to Grow Local, Patch by Patch.
I used to hit the wall in mid summer when I was trapped in a cubicle and didn’t have enough time to keep things going. I made the leap into gardening full time 4 years ago, so now each season has its own challenges, but I never feel like throwing in the towel!
Like Gayla, I usually hit a wall around mid summer also. I just get so tired and frustrated with all the work of dealing with heat, bugs, critters, watering, weeding, and time constraints that I just want to give up, but then I’ll see that first perfect beefsteak tomato, and I fall in love all over again….
In Minnesota we garden like crazy and then secretly are relieved when the winter comes and in reality we have hit our annual wall and can relax for a few months.
Heat waves make it tough to keep up on all of the gardening tasks. Too much time needed for watering makes it very hard to get to the weeds.
do I ever hit the wall with gardening? Regularly! :)
i hit a wall this morning when I went out to admire my newly planted vegetable garden and found it eaten. . . . . . . tomatoes,eggplants and peppers are all gone. Rabbits? Pack rats? I’m afraid to go out there tomorrow morning for fear even more will go missing. Sigh. . . . this is such a complete bummer!!!!!!!!!
My wall appeared when I returned to work full time. With this life change, my garden became a jungle. It took an amazing garden tour with a friend to finally provide the inspiration to garden again, even if I can’t maintain the garden the way I did before going back to work.
I hit the wall every time I over order or bring home too many plants because I’ve underestimated the time it was going to take to dig out that darn centipede grass, then spend a sleepless night because I’m so excited about all my new plants and all these great garden ideas keep popping into my head. I am happiest playing in the dirt and spending time with my plant companions.
Ouch! This wall hurts. Patience IS a virtue. (Whoever came up with all those witty sayings so long ago keeps proving to be such a damn know-it-all!!!) What women you two are. So inspirational… thanks!
“Do you ever hit the wall in gardening?”
Gardening is like a marathon for me. When I hit the wall and think I just don’t want to do any more, I push myself through. There’s so much that needs to get done in the gardens and only so much time. The reward is the natural high from the wildlife enjoying the landscape to my family eating the harvest. Makes it all worth the pain!
The more I garden by my lonesome, the more likely I am to hit a wall. Garden with people, and it feels like there exists no wall!
The wall hit me three years ago when we bought this 50 year old house that was neglected inside and out. Some of my neighbors told us shortly after we moved in that the previous owner had a toilet on the front lawn for months!! The biggest shame is somewhere along the way one of the owners of this home was really into plants, tress and shrubs and you can see what is left and how hard it has suffered by neglect over the years. I recently noticed a wonderful sweet/spicy smelling aroma coming from a small little shrub or stick with white flowers on it and ran into the house to Google what it was and found that it’s a Korean spice viburnum!! The property is loaded with poison ivy, so bad that we may be the only people with a poison ivy tree that stands about 3-4 feet. We recently had a 50 years old double oak tree fall on our driveway, smashed both cars. This incident pushed me forward to learn more about the trees in my yard and also to find a great arborist who routinely prunes them now. But I must confess that if we didn’t have any walls to climb we would never know what we are capable of doing. I don’t mind these kind of walls in my life and I will continue to learn how to climb over them and smell the flowers along the way.
My biggest wall is transplanting – I live in Colorado and all it takes is an hour of accidental sun (instead of shade) and the seedlings dry up completely. It has happened more than once.
We have a tiny urban yard and have spent the past two years redoing everything from planters to parking strip, bricked pathway, raised beds, ground cover, espaliered apples. Even with such a small space the amount of work can be overwhelming, physically and financially. And, now that it’s nearly “done” there are things that you realized or wish you’d done differently…but then again, when I sit in our city park bench (that I refinished) with a glass of wine in hand, it all seems worth it.
ha ha ha, I’ve only hit walls, when it comes to gardening. I’ve killed all my house plants within a month some within a week thanks to over love of watering .
I’ve decided to win over that curse this year. I am going to learn gardening one plant at a time.
The wall appears for me after the seeds have been started, transplanted and plants are growing but not yet ready to be harvested. This is the work phase where pests appear and must be removed, where weather becomes fickle, and some things work and others don’t. I long for the harvest!
Hitting the wall for me has been mostly related to physical constraints. Back problems have increasingly made it difficult to bend over for any length of time, particularly in hot, humid weather. There were times when I’d just suddenly end up gasping in pain, and would have to stop weeding, or deadheading, or whatever. Raised beds were becoming my friend, but I had back surgery last fall that has helped tremendously. I’m looking forward to playing in the dirt this season with less, or no, pain.
I hit a wall when my seedlings die…
Months and months of caring for them indoors, only to have some crazy wind decapitate them. Grrr!
Every week I hit the wall! We just moved out of Manhattan in December to an acre and a quarter of chipmunk-infested almost-forest with a small house in the middle of it. Since the snow stopped, it’s been a never-ending battle just to keep things from deteriorating — I’m still cleaning up last fall’s leaves! But every Friday, as soon as I get my gardening boots and gloves on and head outside, I find a new flower that’s coming up and needs identifying, or that the seedlings I started indoors in April have doubled in size, and I lose myself again . . .
Brassicas. I’ve tried them in several different gardens in two different zones and I just can’t get them to grow. Drives me crazy, because I love to eat them.
My garden has many walls to hit! Examples? Purchased too many bulbs in the closeout sales that need to be planted. Started all those seedlings that now need to be planted. Got behind on the weeding because Life Happened. Too much hand watering to be pleasant. My gardening life cycles between Irrational Exuberance and Cold Reality.
I’d love to win your books!
When the tomatoes fail.
When I moved to this house, 12 years ago, I tried growing tomatoes in 12 different places and never got a single flower on any plant.. There just isn’t enough sun. I hit the gardening wall for a few years. Then I was lucky enough to get a community garden plot.
I have to agree with others…SPRING. This year I was so overwhelmed by the cold weather and not being able to get into the garden, the feeling of being buried in work was put off for a while. That, in and of itself, was a problem. Now that the weather has warmed, it is hot and we are racing to get things in the garden. I waited so long to get into the work, I have nearly lost the motivation to do it. My faith and knowing what harvest is to come (hopefully) keeps me outdoors in the sun on these super hot days. Knowing others feel the same way makes a huge difference. I am not alone! Happy gardening to all!
No walls yet as I just started gardening again after many years of working as a RN and not gardening at all.
I hit the wall the summer, two years ago, when blight and rain meant a small salad with two tiny tomatoes, a few fava beans, onion and lettuce made two small salads. No more tomatoes or favas. The blight was responsible for no more tomatoes; the woodchuck had eaten nearly all the favas and vegetables. A tall deer fence with a shorter heavy fence dug in around has helped me gain hope.
This summer seeing garlic, favas and edamame thriving makes each weekend, of still part time gardening, delightful.
We have decided to sell our house of 34 years. We will be demolishing a very old cottage on the ocean and building a small, sustainable home on the lot. I have gardened in both locations for several years but this year I just walk around both properties at a loss as to where to start or what to do. Some of the old established plants at my home should be moved but the land on the ocean will be a disaster zone during construction. The plants at the ‘cottage’ must be moved out of the way. I’m sad and overwhelmed. I would say I’ve definitely ‘hit a wall’.
I’m just getting started-can’t wait to hit the wall. Just glad to finally have the time and space. Thanks for your help!
I hit the wall earlier than usual this year. Normally it occurs when the heat of the summer threatens to kill off my harvest every day and I am tempted to just give in one day. This year, I started sowing seeds about a month earlier than usual because I wanted to experiment with the new zone I live in. By early May things were roaring in the garden and I had to leave town for two 5-day stretches. When I got back from my second trip, the peas had pulled down their supports, the salad table had fried to a crisp, the tomatoes were wild with suckers and not obeying the confines of their cages, the leaf miners and flea beetles and turnip root maggots had established a clear presence, and my last few radishes had gone to seed. Weeds were a mile high and thick like a lawn, coming up through the mulch around my raised beds. I just about turned everything under rather than deal with the aftermath!
I hit the wall at least once a year — so many garden plans, so little time! I tend to move a bunch of perennial plants around in early spring and then I don’t have as much time as I would like to water them and tend them through a first season. And now this year in Maryland, we had several 90 degree days in early May which didn’t help! I’ve tried to keep up with each transplant but I did a survey last night and several of my plant divisions are not looking hopeful. There’s always next year!
The wall I’ve had to climb is finding new ways to care for my gardens since having my knees replaced 4 years ago and this year dealing with a chronic back issue. Since I can no longer kneel I have had to find alternative ways to do my weeding. For several years I have been using Round-up which can be really tricky, expensive and not really wildlife friendly. I’ve recently found 2 fantastic tools that have helped me immensely. One is the scuffle hoe which easily removes small and shallow weeds. The other is the Fiskars weed puller which easily pulls dandelions and other weeds out of the ground, roots intact. I am so happy to have climbed over this wall to the other side.
Darn woodchuck ate my whole garden last summer!
A few years ago I was arrested by endless drought & frequent scourges of insects & disease. My alarmed partner in marriage & gardening stepped up while I took a couple of years off from rabid garden-making.
For the past 2 seasons, a 40 hr/wk job in the sun also curbed my enthusiasm but a new job in a small garden center with trees! & shade! has me back in the garden at home in spare time. If all the weeds are pulled in the shade & it gets too hot for gardening in the sun, I go to the beach for awhile with a gardening mag or book and a sunhat.
Currently it is finding my Guinea hen nests in an inpenetrable “wall” of multiflora rose surrounding my yard. Now, if these wonderful creatures would simply lay their eggs in my vegetable garden – right next to where they dig their dusting holes, I could have my cake (no noxious bugs on my cabbage) and eat it too (more babies and good-eating eggs).
I haven’t really hit a ‘wall’ but come closest in the late summer heat when things look droopy and keep crying for water,,,the saving grace is the fact that I am also enjoying the produce and colors so I can’t really say i am at the ‘wall’! Would love to read both of your books…and I also wish I had a tatoo (always too big a chicken!)
I hit the wall trying to (stupidly) grow cool-season plants in South Florida as a teenager. I stopped gardening for three years after bolting lettuces, dried out peas, and directly-planted flower seeds that never sprouted and I nutured quick-growing weeds in their stead. Now, I’m a little older, getting myself back in the dirt, and relocated to a place with more than one season.