My weather predictions yesterday were all wrong. There was no fog at the lake and it was a beautiful clear morning. I paddled in short sleeves and enjoyed getting close to a beaver who swam right under my little boat and splashed his tail three different times as he tried to move me from his corner of the lake. I finally complied, but only after having a good show from the rodent.
The last few years, I have been growing sunflowers in my garden. I tell people that I grow sunflowers because I can’t afford to own a Van Gough painting. It is true that I can’t afford to own an artistic masterpiece. But there is a bit more to the story than that. To begin with, sunflowers are easy to grow once you have fenced out the deer so that they have the opportunity to produce flowers before being eaten. One of their qualities that is important for someone like me is that they are very weed resistant. They compete with the weeds well and tower above the weeds that are missed in my rather casual style of gardening. As long as they have a little water and plenty of sunshine they seem to do well.
Last year I took all of the sunflower seeds that I could find in my shed and mixed them together. That was so successful that I did a similar thing this year, adding in a few new seeds from the store. I think that there are probably some dynamics of plant genetics that I don’t understand. When I harvest seeds from my own plants, the yield is lower and the plants are a bit smaller. In order to get the really tall plants with the giant blooms I need to add a few fresh seeds from commercial growers each year. At any rate, I mix the varieties and plant a couple of rows of seeds and when things start to grow, I allow the volunteers to come up as well. Because I allow the pinion jays and other birds to harvest the sunflowers each year, a certain amount of seeds come up on their own. So some of my weeds are actually the plants that I was intending to grow in the first place. It works out well for me.
I’m not much of a gardener. I’m too busy or too lazy to do all of the work of having a perfectly manicured lawn and an orderly garden. But I like to grow a few things. I have a few rose bushes and each year we grow a few tomatoes. Other plants vary year by year. Most years I grow a little lettuce and a few carrots. Some years there are peas and spinach and a few other crops as well. We’ve grown potatoes and corn in our little garden. We don’t garden to replace shopping for groceries and we consume far more produce from the farmer’s market than from our own garden.
There are two kinds of flowers with which I am quite successful. I grow daisies. We started growing daisies in part because our daughter likes them. Daisies are perennials and once you get them established they come up each year. I’ve found a couple of places in the yard where they thrive and in the back where I have scattered wildflower seeds, the daisies are well established. Daisies are summer flowers and last for quite a long time. These days the daisies remind me of our daughter’s wedding where there were plenty of daisies.
My second flower crop consists of the sunflowers in the vegetable garden. They don’t produce food for humans, though I’m sure that there is nutritional value in the seeds and they could be gathered, dried and roasted. I just don’t bother. I like the day when the jays discover them each fall and we have a huge hoard of jays all around our yard for a few hours. In the symmetry of life, our son was married in the fall and their wedding featured sunflowers, so I have flowers each year to remind me of two very happy occasions in our family’s story.
Another happy thing about the sunflowers is that although the blossoms track the sunlight, the location of our garden and the amount of shade on the other side of the yard means that most of the time the sunflowers are facing the neighbors. We don’t really have the best view of the sunflowers from our home. We have to go out and walk around the garden to see all of the blossoms. I think it is kind of nice that I have a bit of beauty to share with the neighbors. We don’t live in an area with too much of the competitive gardening that is found in some neighborhoods, but we have neighbors who do a really nice job of taking care of their yards and sometimes our lawn features dry spots and our garden features weeds. It is nice to have something of beauty to share with the neighbors.
I was talking with friends the other day about how a beautiful lawn can be a real chore. In some cases, the harder you work to make you yard beautiful, the more work it takes to maintain it. For some people that can be a real joy and each year you notice a few new features and a few more additions to the yard. For others, who prefer other activities to yard work, the effort to have a beautiful yard can be a frustration. There are a few things that can be accomplished with minimal maintenance, but the truth is that the beautiful lawns are the product of weeding, fertilizing, watering, planning, planting and then more weeding. There are a few homes in town where they spend a fortune to have professional landscapers come in to design and plant beautiful yards and then the work of maintenance gets ahead of the homeowners. Things go downhill until they spend the money to have the professionals come back in and do it over again.
We tend toward the simple. A little grass, a few trees, some daisies and a few sunflowers are sufficient to make us happy in our home and give me time to go to the lake to paddle.
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