Porch Chat: Confessions About My Gardening

It’s a lovely Friday evening here at May Dreams Gardens. Come sit on the bench on my porch for a minute or two, because I’ve got some confessing to do.

All set? Need a cold drink before we start? Here we go...

I confess that I have been just a tiny bit lax on some of my gardening chores this summer.

In particular, I confess I’ve been somewhat lackadaisical about mulching.

So how much mulching did I do? Well, I had three or four bags of hardwood mulch left over from when I quit mulching last fall, so earlier this spring, I dumped that mulch in a few key areas.

After that, I sort of, kind of, actually never had a good WOO (window of opportunity) for mulching. And when it got all dry in August, some of the plants suffered for lack of mulch.

So this fall, it’s time to mulch, mulch, mulch in a big way. Otherwise, some of the perennials will heave themselves out of the ground in protest when we have all that freezing and thawing over this winter. It won’t be a pretty sight.

I confess I also haven’t gotten around to harvesting very many grapes.

So how many grapes have I picked? Well, I picked two or three bunches the other day to take to a co-worker who had a hankering for some good ‘Concord’ grapes. He said he ate them seeds and all.

Not me! When I eat them, I spit the seeds out in a very lady-like fashion, of course, and only outside.

So this weekend, I’ve got to pick some grapes and make some jam. Otherwise, all those grapes will just “go to the birds”. But again, I need a pretty good WOO to get this done.

I confess I didn’t embrace weeding sometimes for weeks on end.

So how weedy did it get? It was embarrassing at times how many weeds I had growing. I think I’ve gotten caught up on most of the weeding, with just a few areas to attend to, like the back yard garden.

So before anyone goes around to the back garden, I need to get serious about weeding and make sure there are none of those great big weeds that like to announce to everyone, “the gardener around here is lazy and left us weeds to grow big like this”.

Instead, if there are just a few tiny weeds in the garden, you would hopefully only here a whisper of, “she’s a good weeder, so us little weeds have to stay tiny and quiet or she’ll find us and pull us”. Yes, that’s what you want your weeds to say.

I think that’s enough confessing for one session. I feel much better about all this now, having brought it out into the open. Now I best get up off the bench and start getting at some of this “gardening” around here and just be thankful that I didn’t have a SOGI, Someone of Garden Importance, come visit me while I was letting things go in the garden.

Oh wait, I just thought of one other confession! I confess I’ve done all the talking in our little porch chat. Forgive me! Do you have anything about your gardening to confess?