Evania's first garden

Gardening with my girls is one of my favorite things to do.

This year is Evania's first year to put in a garden. She picked out a 6 pack of annuals with some of her birthday money, and we are having her plant it at the base of "her" crabapple tree.

 Even before being "pollinator friendly" was a big thing, we have had a diverse lawn. Although I have no love for creeping charlie, I do enjoy many of the other broadleaf plants that are spread all over the yard - violets, scilla, clover, and can't bring myself to approve of chemicals on the yard to create a monoculture. That means dandelions and other thrive alongside violets this time of year. And children. Don't have to worry about them eating the dandelions in our yard!

Morel Season

On a brief after supper walk last night Leah discovered...a Foozie mushroom!

(Context: when we added on to our house, we hired a contractor from our church to do the framing because Matt couldn't do it all himself. He and the kids began an inside joke where they call each other "Foozie." When he was here working at the very end of the project, he saw a mushroom growing in the mulch of one of our gardens which he identified as a morel - and he and his wife both really enjoy hunting and eating morels! As much as we enjoy eating what grows in our yard, and even though I do appreciate mushrooms, I'm not quite brave enough...yet...to try eating my own mushrooms.)

In past years, the morels have grown in the mulch right around the base of our old elm tree that didn't make it through the construction, so this was the first time that we'd seen any out in the grass, and, Oh! were they out there!

When Foozie and his wife stopped by late the next day, they filled one and a half collanders with little morels, leaving the very small ones to grow a bit so they could come back for a second harvest in a few days. The kids are guarding that piece of lawn meticulously, making sure we don't inadvertently step on any of Foozie's mushrooms.

The dead elm itself provides a perfect perch from which to supervise the harvesters.

Blue

The scilla are the first flowers to bloom around here. I love them because they spread vigorously, and show up in seas of blue in the gardens, and in many places have crept out into the lawn, and make pools of color in unexpected places as well, including my kitchen window, because the girls just can't resist picking handfuls of them after a winter of nothing!

Even down in the side of the yard where we staged construction supplies for a strong year, maybe two, and silt and junk so destroyed the grass that we had to start over with sod, they are peeking their little blue heads up through towards the sunlight and although that mass of them is not as strong, I have a feeling it will be just a few years and it will be almost back to where it was.

This neglected garden at the top of the driveway is incredible this time of year:

I love how it ties in with the blue swings in the background!

Here a tiny one shoots up next to the well pump cover...

 Next to come will be the bluebells - their tiny pinky-purple buds are just starting to show up.

First ones in

It's a little frivolous, but Leah and I spent a little bit of my birthday money two weeks early and picked out a few pansies. With a garden season approaching where I don't think I'll get as much time to putter as I do some years, it seemed as though starting with a pop of color early would help to ease it out. Three 8-packs later, I've got enough to spread around a few key places in the garden. Today Evania helped me put some around Reuben's crab-apple tree in the new front garden between our driveway and the neighbors' while we waited for Krassimir and Reuben's bus to drop them off from school.

A bit of height

Thanks to another end-of-the-season clearing out find of Sam's, I've now got a vertical element in the sprawling front garden. When Matt and I first began this garden soon after we were married, there was a crab apple tree in this location, under which the grass did not grow, thus our decision to turn it into a shade garden. That crab is long gone, long enough that the stump was completely rotted and very easy to turn into the dirt to make room for something new.

Thank you, Sam, for thinking of us, and finding something fun to anchor the center of this garden again!

My little helper

The best times gardening are when my helpers are with me.

Sam dropped off a few heucheras a few days ago, so taking advantage of the beautiful November weather, Rinnah, Gloria, and I went out and got them into the ground in the new garden down by the road.

Motley Garden

motley (mot-lee) adj. 1. Varied in color. 2. Composed of discordant elements; heterogeneous; diversified.

For years I’ve wanted to give our house a name. Although I remember talking about it briefly with Matt, he has no recollection of it – apparently it meant more to me than to him! But at the time, we couldn’t come up with anything. But the idea lingered in my head for a long time, and periodically I would try things out, but nothing stuck.

Then one day our neighbor lent me some of her favorite flower garden books written by an English author, and I was once again inspired to start thinking – obviously, English gardens and country houses would have names, like Barnley Hall, or Cotsworth, etc. And that’s when it came to me - “Motley Garden.” There’s an obvious reference to the gardens surrounding our home. As I walk through the gardens, there are so many memories – the hydrangea by the door that was from Matt’s Dad’s funeral; the crabapple trees from our neighbor who works at a garden center and brought home the ones they weren’t going to winter over last year; the bleeding hearts that I have loved since my grandparents bought me a tiny one when I was maybe five years old; the humongous white lilies that Matt and I picked out of a flower catalog years ago, the peonies that we pulled out of his grandma’s back garden before we rearranged for the fill from excavating for the addition, the gooseneck from a past clients back garden (“Here! Take a shovelful of this before you go! But be careful – it spreads!”); the limestone walls built from rock Matt’s Dad and his cousin pulled out of the river flats many years ago when the MSP airport was being built; the bridal veil bush that Matt’s grandparents planted that we thought we’d have to dig out for the addition, but didn’t; the oak tree we dug up at a friend’s cabin when Owen was not yet born (Owen’s tree!); the red daylily my brother- and sister-in-law gave me for my birthday (and the big red one I picked out for myself!) It’s a very varied conglomeration, but the joy of gardening to me is the constant and steady movement and development and growth of all of the pieces, every year bigger and more full, massaged and edited here and there to create a thing of increasing beauty. It’s not a garden that was designed all at once and installed, but something that’s grown over time with the bits I’ve been given – it’s a motley garden.

But there’s so much about the garden and gardening that intertwines with our life as a family. Not only is the garden itself a calming outlet for me that allows me to pursue a hobby without ever leaving my home (something which matters a lot when you have a family that makes it tough to get out!) but it’s also a picture of what it’s like to be part of a family, and particularly part of a family like ours. Every single one of us is growing, and one of my jobs as a mother is tending these young little sprouts and guiding them to grow tall and strong and true through daily watering, weeding, and sometimes pruning or transplanting.

My dad likes to refer to his grandkids as a motley crew, and they certainly are – a many-colored, diverse batch of individuals – sometimes truly “discordant elements” all composing one family. Just like I enjoy my wild, fleeting, self-seeding (in odd places, sometimes) poppies next to my steady trio of petite, well-behaved golden-edged hostas, it is the combination of all of the individual persons that makes our family a beautiful thing.

Our family is particularly diversified with our mix of boys and girls, Bulgarian-born and Minnesota-born, able-bodied and physically-challenged, some ready to take on the world (by the horns, for some of them!) and some content to take whatever comes. I like to picture God as the Master Gardener who picked all of these many “colors” and placed them together in one garden, and given me the little job of puttering and tending.

So, we’re rolling it around and trying it on for size, but I just think we might have a name that our home can live up to!

Motley Garden.

(It may also be worth mentioning that the last definition of “motley” in my dictionary is as follows:

n. An outfit variously colored, used by a clown.

 

Looks like we could make that work, too. 😏)