Can We Talk 2

Short Lived Blooms

         So many things in the garden take a lot of effort. You have to plant them properly, each one requiring a different depth or different spacing from each other. Then there's the weeds! The deer! The rabbits and groundhogs! The leaf eating bugs! Finally, the bloom.

         You revel in its beauty and maybe take a photo. You know what's going to happen. Too soon the petals fall off. The leaves wither. The ground is littered with browning partial blooms. All you have left is a mess and a photo.

         You deadhead petunias, but you also deadhead irises, peonies, and roses. It becomes as time-consuming as weeding. Petunias may come back again this year, but the big plants won't be back until next spring. You have to leave as much of the greenery above ground as possible, so that the roots will get the nutrients they need and reproduce.

         If you can't be satisfied with a brief moment of beauty, then don't plant. That moment of flowering has to be worth all the effort to you, or you'd be better off with a green shrub instead.

         Just a reminder. I know I've written about this before. NEVER put a voodoo plant in the ground. It proliferates and is non-destructible. I dug up over 200 last year before I lost count. They went into the trash, because I couldn't risk letting them end up in the compost. I thought I had them all by the end of the summer. So far this year, I have dug up 59, and I see them growing in the yard along with the vines and what's left of the grass. The flower beds are well worked and mulched, so I can dig those up easily if I have to dig at all. But the yard is hard. Unfortunately, they grow underground, so you think because you have the root, you have it all. No, it's already put out new roots with nothing showing yet. It will take me years, if I ever succeed in getting rid of this stuff. It started with one ugly plant.