Studio3Music Blog

My mother and my sister garden for the process. They like to do it. My sister agonized over what to put in her garden to attract butterflies and hummingbirds.  She read books and looked stuff up on line…. And she DESIGNED her garden – like actually planned where to put stuff, and thought about what would bloom when and how long it would bloom.  She planted things that require attention and tender loving care and then she provided it.  I plant things that say HARDY on the tag.

She grows things you can eat and then she makes things out of the things you can eat and puts them in jars and gives them away all winter, like she was Ma Ingalls.   One year it was a salsa garden, the next a marinara garden.

She grows trees that bear fruit and then she makes jam.   Okay, I make jam. I buy the fruit at the roadside stand and mix it with sugar and pectin and throw it in jars in the freezer, if we just don’t eat all the berries first.  My sister actually makes it the old fashioned way, with a canning bath-thing-a-ma-jig pot and mason jars.

This year, she PEELED the peaches that grew on her tree and made jam and she enjoyed it.  Now you may be thinking that this was about having peach preserves to eat all winter. Nope. She is mailing it all to me, because peach is my favorite kind of jam.

She’s totally about the process (and making her little sister blissfully happy doesn’t hurt, either!).  She doesn’t get mad when the birds eat her strawberries, because that means she can go out in her garden and fidget with the stuff growing there…. I don’t know why the birds eating her strawberries means she can go fidget, but that’s what she does.  The birds continue to eat her strawberries, she continues to fidget- and everyone is happy. I, however, don’t get it.

My mother has in the past grown things to eat, but now that there aren’t a herd of kids in the house to eat the things she grows, she has moved on to flowers.  She still grows her own tomatoes.   She likes bulbs.  I think she likes them because in Colorado they seem to require a certain amount of fussing.

One year, while on vacation here, she bought an entire garden of tulips – one variety per grandchild, and one variety per child (My parents have 11 grandchildren, and 4 kids…. that’s 15 different kinds of tulips.) She planned which ones come up early and which ones come up late and mixed them in the bed so that the whole bed would have blooms all the time, all season long.  She measured the holes so that they are the right depth for the variety of tulip going into the hole.

She likes to dig- she loves the feel of the dirt in her hands, and often doesn’t wear gloves. Oh yuck! I wear two pairs of gloves (latex under the garden gloves), and if I have to dig a hole and the going is tough I make a ring of rocks and fill it with dirt I bought at the hardware store and plant the stupid thing in that.)

She mulches with just the right kind of mulch for tulips, and when tulip season is over she moves on to lilies.  Which seem to me to even more complicated because sometimes you have to dig them up and divide them…. What is that all about?  Actually, I know what it’s about, it’s about the process.  She loves the process, and so does my sister, and I love the results.

Recently, my sister was here visiting and she paid me a very high compliment.  She said my garden was lovely, and that sitting in my back yard was like food for her weary soul.

This is just what I wanted – a beautiful, sanctuary behind my house, a place of peace where conversation and iced tea could be enjoyed on a sunny day.  My mom and my sister have these lovely outside places, too.  But these two wonderful women in my life approach gardening from a completely different angle.

All three of us are successful gardeners, but we have completely different reasons and motivations behind our need to plant things.   My mom and my sister crave the process that their professional lives don’t give them; I crave the product that my professional life doesn’t give me. In the end, we can share an iced tea in each other’s back yards in the abundance of nature that we’ve cultivated. AHHHH- SUCCESS!!!!

-posted by Miss Allison, who got to have both process and product in writing this blog!

I garden with one thought and one thought only in my mind. I want a beautiful display of flowers, and I want it to last all summer, and I want to do the least amount of work to make it happen. 

I don’t like to garden.  I don’t like to be dirty. I don’t like to be hot.  I don’t like the sun to touch my skin for too long because it will burn me. I don’t like sunscreen; it’s sticky and smells bad.  I don’t like bugs. I don’t like spiders.  I don’t like dirt under my fingernails, and my sun hat makes my hair all flat and ugly the rest of the day.  But I love flowers.  So I’ve figured out a couple of things I can do to cut down on the gardening process and still get a beautiful garden.

I plant perennials mostly, but not the kinds that only bloom one time per summer.  Then I’d actually have to plan and plant things that bloom in order, so that something was blooming all the time. (Way to much process for me.) I like the kinds of flowers that bloom all summer – like dahlias and begonias.   

When I plant perennials I don’t have to dig as many holes the next year. (You can add digging holes to the list of things I don’t like about gardening.) All I have to do to keep them nice this year is water, fertilize, and dead-head.  Easy-peasy – I can do that! 

I’m careful to buy the plants that will tolerate the full sun, western exposure in my front yard, or the very shady eastern exposure in the back.  That way I don’t have to re-plant half way through the year to get that product I am looking for – loads of flowers.  

When I plant an annual, I do it for sentimental purposes. I plant snapdragons every year because they were my youngest son’s favorite flowers.   I can’t plant them at the cemetery for him (they need too much water to survive up there), so they go in the front yard, where I can see them and be reminded of his laugh and his passion for living.  Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don’t, but I always add more.  

I planted daisies for my friend Susan last summer. Susan means “daisy”.  She was fighting breast cancer, and the daisies were my everyday visual reminder to pray for her and my aunt , who was also fighting breast cancer.  Interestingly enough, my daisy’s came back this year, just as Susan was getting a clean bill of health, and a full head of hair.)  In celebration, I added Black-Eyed Susans for her this year.  And yes, her eyes are black as night.

I don’t research what to putin my garden; if I have any questions, I call friends who like to garden and pick their brains.  For me, gardening is about the product, so information must be gained in a pleasant and expedient way. Otherwise, it would create too much process.

I don’t work too hard at preserving the garden over the winter, (too much process) but I do fertilize and mulch in the fall.   What comes back, comes back, what doesn’t – I’ll re-plant from whatever catches my eye at the hardware store in the spring.  I’m there often, following my other product oriented hobby, but that’s another story…

And to avoid the sun and the heat, I have been known to garden by halogen shop lights on extension cords in the middle of the night. I’m not joking… I do it fairly often.

­-posted by Miss Allison, who will tell you all about her mother and sisters’ process-oriented gardens tomorrow.