Brown Thumb Gardening by Nancy L. Eady

As I mentioned before, I have a brown thumb, primarily since those pesky plants demand regular watering.  And yet, this year at least, I managed not only to place colorful flowers and plants in front of our house, but also to keep them alive since April, verging on record territory for me. 

So how have I done it?  Through a good nursery, research, technology, serendipity and one bad habit. 

The nursery that I like to use is about 45 minutes away and called The Potting Shed.  (In a small town, almost everything is about 45 minutes away.) 

The Reiger begonias (the pots with the red flowers) and the caladiums (the plants with the colorful leaves) came from The Potting Shed and have done remarkably well. 

Research involved figuring out where to put what plants, since our front yard has limited shade areas.  The begonias and the caladiums love shade.  Too much sun kills them.  Yet other flowers such as the zinnias and the geraniums love sun.

Zinnias

Geraniums - between the two rosebushes

The technology we’ve used is both biological and mechanical.  The biological technology consists of the rose bushes you see in these pictures.  These are called “Knock Out Roses” (I think), perfect for people like me because all they need to thrive is to be left alone.  I can do that quite well. 

The mechanical technology is nothing earth-shattering—a set of plastic sprinkler heads that connect in a line and hook to a garden hose on a timer.  But the contraption keeps the plants watered and happy.

Serendipity raised its head when we discovered that a calla lily had been reborn in a pot we cast aside a year ago.  Calla lilies are elegant.  And they must cling stubbornly to life for this one to come back. 

Calla Lily

And the bad habit?  The one flaw in the watering plan is that it can’t cover the two plants by the front door.  There’s no way to get the hose over there without stretching it across the driveway or entryway, and it looks bad.  However, every day when I leave work, I stop by the local Zaxby’s and get a drink for the drive home.  They always put a lot of ice in the drink, and I finish it long before I reach the house.  So when I reach the house, I pour the ice into the two plants by the door and throw my cup away.  You wouldn’t think it would be enough, but they like it. 

Front Porch Plant - No Clue What Is Is

The only thing I regret is that the landscaping in the front of the house doesn’t provide me with an area to sit and read.  I guess that will be a project for the back yard next year.

So fellow brown-thumbers of the world, take heart!  With a little planning, even we can maintain beautiful landscaping. 

Midsummer

Because I have just sold my old home of 45 years and am housebound in my new one with no garden or landscaping (until I'm back on my feet next year) and, thus, am homesick for midsummer flowers, butterflies, bees, and birds, here is a post from several summers ago.

Midsummer

It’s the summer solstice. The sun is beating down, and air conditioners up and down my block are grumbling as they try to cool things down inside their homes and cause periodic brownouts. Hummingbirds and butterflies visit my Rose of Sharons by the back door and the scarlet bee balm flowers in the back raingarden. In that raingarden, huge clusters of white blossoms cover the three-foot-tall native hydrangea. In the front yard, purple coneflowers, butterfly bush, native and hybrid day lilies, sage, peppermint, and lemon balm are all blooming, and the honeybees, bumblebees and more butterflies flit from flower to flower, as if at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Crimson geraniums and ruby begonias sit on the front porch and steps while zinnias bloom in rainbow shades in the basement window-well boxes, visited by wasps and yellow jackets, also important pollinators, though hardly my favorites.

I don’t know how this happened. It should be just barely spring, but somehow it’s that hot, full, lazy buzzing time already. It’s been in the 90s and 100s for weeks. We’re in a drought and long for a good rain, but clouds bypass us. We’ve used all the collected water in our rain barrels on the soft potted plants—geraniums, begonias, and zinnias—but even the hardy, drought-resistant natives are wilting in this heat.

In places where the climate tosses this kind of weather at the native populace all the time, they’ve developed a siesta culture to deal with it. When the sun is hottest, when everything slows down or crawls into some shade for a nap, they go inside thick-walled houses (to keep out the heat) and rest. We who live in Anglo-European cultures, however, bustle on, as if our Puritan taskmasters were flicking their whips at our backs. “Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun.”

If the globe is indeed warming and the world’s climate changing drastically, we might be wise to adopt the siesta culture during the increasingly hot weather. Plan to rise early and retire right after lunch until late in the afternoon when we’d arise again and return to work, continuing until much later at night, eating a late dinner at 10:30 p.m. and going to bed at midnight. People would have more energy, and we’d get more done. It will never happen, of course, because of those Puritan taskmasters and their whips, so long ingrained in our national DNA.

I’m finished with my blog post now, and I’m going to be smart and take a nap in a cool inside space. But first, let me wash some dishes and water those poor drooping plants and run to the post office and answer some emails and…

What’s your ideal way to handle blazing hot midsummer?

Linda Rodriguez's Dark Sister: Poems has just been released. Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop, and The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East, an anthology she co-edited, were published to high praise in 2017. Every Family Doubt, her fourth mystery novel featuring Cherokee campus police chief, Skeet Bannion, and Revising the Character-Driven Novel will be published in 2019. Her three earlier Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, and Every Last Secret—and her books of poetry—Skin Hunger and Heart's Migration—have received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin's Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has been optioned for film.

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International Thriller Writers, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Visit her at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com

Midsummer

by Linda Rodriguez

Because I have just sold my old home of 45 years and am housebound in my new one with no garden or landscaping (until I'm back on my feet next year) and, thus, am homesick for midsummer flowers, butterflies, bees, and birds, here is a post from several summers ago.

Midsummer

It’s the summer solstice. The sun is beating down, and air conditioners up and down my block are grumbling as they try to cool things down inside their homes and cause periodic brownouts. Hummingbirds and butterflies visit my Rose of Sharons by the back door and the scarlet bee balm flowers in the back raingarden. In that raingarden, huge clusters of white blossoms cover the three-foot-tall native hydrangea. In the front yard, purple coneflowers, butterfly bush, native and hybrid day lilies, sage, peppermint, and lemon balm are all blooming, and the honeybees, bumblebees and more butterflies flit from flower to flower, as if at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Crimson geraniums and ruby begonias sit on the front porch and steps while zinnias bloom in rainbow shades in the basement window-well boxes, visited by wasps and yellow jackets, also important pollinators, though hardly my favorites.

I don’t know how this happened. It should be just barely spring, but somehow it’s that hot, full, lazy buzzing time already. It’s been in the 90s and 100s for weeks. We’re in a drought and long for a good rain, but clouds bypass us. We’ve used all the collected water in our rain barrels on the soft potted plants—geraniums, begonias, and zinnias—but even the hardy, drought-resistant natives are wilting in this heat.

In places where the climate tosses this kind of weather at the native populace all the time, they’ve developed a siesta culture to deal with it. When the sun is hottest, when everything slows down or crawls into some shade for a nap, they go inside thick-walled houses (to keep out the heat) and rest. We who live in Anglo-European cultures, however, bustle on, as if our Puritan taskmasters were flicking their whips at our backs. “Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun.”

If the globe is indeed warming and the world’s climate changing drastically, we might be wise to adopt the siesta culture during the increasingly hot weather. Plan to rise early and retire right after lunch until late in the afternoon when we’d arise again and return to work, continuing until much later at night, eating a late dinner at 10:30 p.m. and going to bed at midnight. People would have more energy, and we’d get more done. It will never happen, of course, because of those Puritan taskmasters and their whips, so long ingrained in our national DNA.

I’m finished with my blog post now, and I’m going to be smart and take a nap in a cool inside space. But first, let me wash some dishes and water those poor drooping plants and run to the post office and answer some emails and…

What’s your ideal way to handle blazing hot midsummer?

Linda Rodriguez's Dark Sister: Poems has just been released. Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop, and The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East, an anthology she co-edited, were published to high praise in 2017. Every Family Doubt, her fourth mystery novel featuring Cherokee campus police chief, Skeet Bannion, and Revising the Character-Driven Novel will be published in 2019. Her three earlier Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, and Every Last Secret—and her books of poetry—Skin Hunger and Heart's Migration—have received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin's Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has been optioned for film.

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International Thriller Writers, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Visit her at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com

SUMMER IS FINALLY HERE

This past week summer finally arrived although I’ve always considered the first day of June summer. I have to admit that although I’ve always enjoyed gardening, this year I’ve totally neglected my gardens largely because March and April were either cold or rainy much of the time, and in May my sister, Catherine, who lives in Washington State, and her husband came to town for two weeks. My sister Elaine had planned activities for all of her siblings to do on the days they were here in Ohio like visiting Zoar Village, hiking in Cuyahoga National Park not far from my home, and Moraine State Park in PA., the Akron Zoo and other places so there was no time for weeding or planting the plants I had bought at the beginning of May.

Part of my back yard.

After being hospitalized with pneumonia in June last year, I didn’t get much gardening done, either, and I decided then not to worry about it. Instead I decided to let nature take over in the several acres of the twelve acres my small farm has with half of it in woods and a nice sized pond out near the woods. My son mows the large open area behind my barn, but I do mow my lawn around the house and on the other side of my driveway where I have gardens, too. And I don’t have a riding mower so I consider that my exercise.

The gate leading into my sad Veggie Garden

Last year I hadn’t planted very many vegetables in the large vegetable garden my son had fenced in for me at least eight years ago. The little I did plant, the rabbits had managed to get under the fence and eat what came up. So this year the vegetable garden has no vegetables planted and the whole area including the raised beds with brick walkways around them is one huge mess of tall weeds. On my list of things to do sometime this summer is to pull up all those horrible weeds, and then put something down like layers of newspapers and cardboard or the black material I bought before to hold down with rocks to cover where I pulled them so next year I can again put in a garden of vegetables and flowers.

The hanger for pots my daughter gave me in front of the barn door.

My little farm has a large red barn and tall beautiful spruce trees in the area behind the house and a few in the front yard, too, with old maple trees, a few oak trees and a large weeping willow beside the house that when it died had to come down. It also has some apple trees, too. In the years that I’ve lived here, I’ve planted several Japanese maples, a dogwood tree, a redbud tree, a few crabapple trees, three magnolia trees, two pear trees, a sweet gum tree, a sycamore, a linden tree, another weeping willow, a blueberry patch and at least a dozen rhododendrons plus azaleas. I have many, many hostas of all kinds and hundreds of daylilies, too.

This is only part of my little goldfish pond.

Years ago I had my grandsons dig out a place to put in a small goldfish pond, and two parents of one of my students (the father was a supervisor of Ohio’s Sea World) who learned that I was going to put one in, came over with their kids, rocks (which I already had a lot of) and put in a lining and brought some water lilies as well as goldfish to finish the little pond close to my house and the patio with a gazebo over it.

My Saint Fiacre bed before I mowed the grass around it.

I had some retired teachers to lunch two weeks ago, and they looked at my backyard and side yard and thought it was so beautiful. You see many people don’t know the difference between weeds and perennials.

Just a few of the many, hostas I have in front of the old orchard.

Since I bought my small farm in 1989 after my divorce, and two years after the elderly man who lived in it since 1938 had died. I finally moved into it in the fall of 1990 after my son had gutted it, replaced the wiring and put up new walls and made the house a nice place to live. He put in a new kitchen. He and one of my cousins and her husband came over and sanded and varnished the hardwood floors throughout my downstairs and upstairs. I hired someone to turn one of the front rooms into a library with built in bookcases on two walls. 

Over the years my son added two rooms and a bathroom upstairs, and turned a sad back porch into a sun room. with

Hydrangeas against the north side of my house.with a hen

I love my small farm with two ponies, four hens, two barn cats, and of course, my beautiful collie, Maggie, my house cat Brat Cat, or Pixie, as my daughter wants to call her, my two old African Ring Neck Doves and Pavarotti, my canary who loves broccoli.  I love it even more since I’ve decided to let nature pretty much take over. Yes, I’m still doing some weeding around the edges of my gardens and pulling out weeds that are taking over here and there and mowing my yards although sometimes my son comes down the road on his riding mower to mow my front yard and the old orchard beside my house. Most of the time I mow the front yard before he comes.

Roses and Clematis on an arbor leading to the side yard.

Do you have gardens that you keep weeded?

Have you ever thought of letting nature have its way?

SPRING IS FINALLY HERE

some of the many plants I bought.

After a miserable March and an April not much better with rain sometimes mixed with snow and awful wind storms bringing down branches and sometimes trees here in Northeast Ohio. May has arrived with sunshine and nice weather. I did have lots of daffodils and narcissus all over in April, but nothing else in the way of flowers and even very few of my trees had any leaves starting to show.

The Amish Sugar Loaf Green hous 

On Saturday May 5^th my sisters Elaine, Suzanne and I headed out for our yearly trip to Bluestone Perennials in Madison, Ohio up by Lake Erie to shop for perennials with the $75.00 gift certificate our younger brother, Phil gives to his sisters for Christmas each year. It’s an event we look forward to. On the way there we stop at Sugar Loaf Greenhouse, an Amish run greenhouse with lots of flowers, too. My sisters bought some there, but I didn’t buy anything because I live close enough to go there on my own and that way Elaine’s trunk wouldn’t get filled up with three of us shopping. I did go back on Monday and bought four beautiful rose bushes and four flats of annuals to plant in pots and longer containers to put on the graves of my mom and dad, my son John and my six-year old granddaughter, Megan.

After we finished shopping at Bluestone not getting a lot because their small pots of perennials no more than three or four inches square cost $7.95 or $9.95 each. They did have some larger ones on sale near the door for $3.00 each, and I bought four of those. Afterwards we went to down town Madison and had lunch in a small restaurant. The food was very reasonable and quite delicious. Afterwards we drove to the Madison Park on the edge of Lake Erie. Elaine and I went down to the beach, but because Suzanne has not totally recovered from her smashed hip several months ago, she stayed at the top looking out over the lake with clouds on the horizon.

My  yellow daffodils are done but these narcissus aren't.
My smallest magnolia tree is in the background.

Since the beginning of May, flowers are coming out everywhere. Dandelions that so many people hate in their yards are like little suns in the large area behind my barn and in my yard, too. The vinca vines around my house have beautiful blue flowers. In the small grove of trees in my back yard that I call my Cook’s Forest area, trillium with white beautiful flowers is blooming and there are yellow daffodils on the edge there, too. In fact very few areas of my yard don’t have daffodils or the white narcissus blooming.

I forget the name of these flowers growing in different places.

There are small plants with a mixture of pink and blue flowers in various places throughout my gardens. I wish I could remember the name of them. My sister told me on Saturday, but I already forgot it.

Both my Korean Spice bushes are blooming and smell so wonderful. My Japanese maple has finally got its colorful leaves although not quite as big as they will get. Behind the Korean Spice Bush is a tall  dogwood tree.

 I have started cleaning out my little goldfish pond near the patio. The water lilies are just starting to come up. Because it’s mostly in shade, they rarely bloom. My crab apple trees are getting blooms, and so is one of my pear trees. I think my old apple trees are starting to bloom, too. 

The May apples I transplanted from my woods.

The white Magnolia behind my vegetable and flower garden has already bloomed and lost its blooms, but my other two magnolia trees with pink blooms are still blooming. The May apples that I transplanted from my woods to a shady area have spread out. The peonies are up although not yet ready to bloom. It’s the same with all my irises and even more so with my hundreds of daylilies that popped up in March everywhere. They won’t bloom until July.

The side yard where my son cup up the tree so I can mow now.

I was going to start mowing my lawns, but the front yard had a huge branch as big and bushy as a small tree in the front yard because while I was out of town there was a storm and it landed on my roof. My son-in-law saw it and called my son and he went up on a ladder and threw it off. Last evening he came over with a chain saw and cut it up and took the branches off to a weedy place near the fence by my side woods. That whole day I had been cutting branches off the long tree that had fallen across my side yard with the branches at the top stuck in one of the almost dozen rhododendrons I’ve planted around my place. Soon they’ll be blooming. I had hauled three wheelbarrows full of branches out to my brush pile near the side yard close to my large pond. When Joe finished with the front yard one, he came over and cut that long log that went from the north woods grove almost to my driveway. I had to yell at Maggie when she tried to attack his chain saw. I put her in the house.

One of my crab apple trees covered with blooms.

After he finished that and left, I fed my ponies, barn cats and gathered two eggs from my four hens. I could hear Joe mowing over at his place and then he came over and cut all the large open area behind my barn and vegetable garden. When he was done there I started raking up the grass and putting it into my wheelbarrow for my ponies. They’ve pretty much eaten down their small pasture. When I left the barn and started for my house, Joe came down the road and mowed my front yard, beside the house, the old orchard on the south side of my house, behind my well house, the driveway and in front of the barn. He keeps telling me if I took down my arbors to the back yard and the side yard he’d mow those, too. I keep telling him that’s my exercise although I haven’t even started my mower yet. It’s not a riding mower, but I planned on mowing my back yard and the side yard now that the dead tree is gone the next day,. but then I  headed down to a local church to vote and then headed to The Pochedly Greenhouse where I buy a lot of plants. I had their two sons in my third grade class, but not their daughter because a new principal wouldn’t allow parents to pick their teacher choice. Sometimes they give me a discount.

Trillums I planted in the small grove in my back yard.

Today  I’m going to start on weeding my gardens and planting what I bought at the three garden centers I visited. Of course, I've been saying that for days now, and today I have to Deliver Mobile Meals and it's supposed to rain, too.

What do you like about spring?

WRITING WHAT YOU KNOW by Gloria Alden

I chose to write my Catherine Jewell Mystery series in a fictional town called Portage Falls in northeast Ohio where I’ve lived all my life. The town is a composite of the small towns in my area and my imagination.

Conservatory in Longwood Gardens near Philadelphia

My main character Catherine Jewell is younger than I am and is a botanist who works part time in a large public garden. She also has her own garden center where she sells plants. So how is she anything like me? Well, I love gardening so it seemed like the way my character should be, too. I’m not into cooking so I wouldn’t have a food series. On the many vacations I’ve taken over the years with my siblings, we always make a point to visit large gardens like Longwood Gardens. I’ve been their twice now. So that’s how I’m able to describe Elmwood Gardens where Catherine works part time. Am I a botanist? No, but I have a sister who is and who helped me out sometimes in the beginning. What else do Catherine and I share? She lost her husband and only child, a daughter in an accident ten years before the book started. I lost my first born son John to cancer, and I know the pain of losing a child never quite goes away. I also lost my husband but not to death.

What about the other characters in my books? The other main character is John MacDougal the police chief in this small town who has never had to deal with a murder before in the first book. What do I know about a policeman’s job? Only from the hundreds of mysteries I’ve read over the years. He, of course, will eventually be Catherine’s boyfriend.

My brother who died 7 years ago. I miss him.

Then there’s Ed Flavian, who is based on my brother although my brother never worked in a public garden, he was an avid gardener who even propagated hostas of his own, and had many, many rhododendrons and other plants around his beautiful farm.

In my second book Bruce Twohill an environmentalist comes to town to try to stop a huge freeway from going through a wetlands. When staying in the bed and breakfast run by the police chief’s mother, Martha MacDougal, he ends up talking her into going on a backpacking trip with him on the Appalachian Trail in the Shenandoah Valley National Park. She tells Catherine all about it in the next book.

Here I am backpacking on one of my trips.

I’ve always been interested in saving the land, but what do I know about backpacking? When I was sixty years old after reading Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, My sister, Elaine thought we should do that so we bought backpacking equipment; back packs, small stoves, water purifier, backpacking tents, etc. and with three of her teenage children we drove down to Shenandoah National Park and hit the AT that went through there. At first her son had to put my pack on, but in a few days I could do it myself. We covered about thirty miles in the five days we hiked.                                                                                                     

A year when brother Phil, Cathi & her husband Bill joined us.

                                                                                 

The next year my sister Elaine with only her son that year, our younger brother Phil, with his two teenage sons, and my Washington state sister Catherine, with her teenage son went back down to hike more of the AT that year.

 From then on my sister Elaine and I continued the AT trail with her son, and sometimes we backpacked some Pennsylvania trails, too. After Elaine had a heart attack, we stopped the back packing. She survived and is just fine, but cell phone service in the mountains is unreliable so that ended our back packing although one of my brother’s sons did the whole AT a few years after we stopped. Would I like to go back packing again? Yes, but I don’t know anyone who would go with me, and I’ll admit I wouldn’t be able to go as fast and as long as I could before.

One thing that I have in every book is the breakfast meetings with elderly men in the local restaurant. It’s one of the things I noticed if on our camping trips we decided to go to the nearest restaurant instead of cooking breakfast in the campground before we headed out on a hike or on to another place.

 In my third book,Ladies of the Garden Club  I have three members of the Garden Club poisoned. (Thank you Luci, the Poison Lady).  I do have four books on poisons, and I am quite aware of what plants are poisonous that I grow, too. I pull up the deadly nightshade that grows by my barn and get rid of it in case it spreads into the pasture where my ponies graze.

In the fourth book, The Body in the Goldenrod, I haven’t been to a Civil War reenactment, but I have been to Gettysburg, and a woman in our writers group writes only Civil War books and stories. She and her husband are re-enactors.

In the fifth book Murder in the Corn Maze I made a point of going to walk in one since it had been a long time since I had gone to one.

In the rest of the books it’s been mostly my imagination except for Catherine’s grandfather going into a nursing home. My father was in one and so were several cousins.

And now we get to the tenth book I’m working on, Daffodils in March. The newspaper is full of the opioid problem so I’m bringing that into this book as it just came to Portage Falls.

This is not near my house.

     

Also, I decided it’s time to bring a few Amish families to the area around Portage Falls because I have Amish families in my township. Horse and buggies go down my road, and the blacksmith who trims my ponies’ hooves lives a few miles from me. I have to drive there to pick him up. Once he was busy mowing the field behind his house so his wife invited me in. When she heard I wrote books, she was interested and said she loved to read so I gave her the first book in my series.

P.S. My collie Maggie barks at them from the living room or beside the house. I think she doesn’t believe horses should be on the road. At least she doesn’t go near the road.  

This is an Amish nursery my sisters and I visit every spring.

                                                                                                                                                                         What do you feel comfortable writing about in your books?

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