Growing Things

I think of myself as a farmwife. But I am not the biggest success at growing things. I am a huge success with critters of all sorts: horse, goats, chickens, geese, and I know I'd rock at raising swine if J. would let me, but he won't. Plants though, well, I have mixed success with those.

When we moved into our house in '03, the previous owners had created a huge, gorgeous flower garden in front. I mean, HUGE. Now, not being a green thumb kind of girl, and being really busy that year dealing with making pens for the livestock and doing fences and getting the kids settled into new schools, I let the garden go.

I would rather clean a chicken coop than weed a garden. That's just who I am. Over the years, the flower garden has deteriorated. I have killed some of the plants. I have removed others. I have, some years, just let the weeds take over (which makes me annoyed, as I hate the way it looks, but I reach a point where doing anything at all to it seems overwhelming.)

Several years ago I paid a guy to come and redo the whole garden. When he was done it looked great. Cleaned up, weeded, new mulch applied. Looked lovely until fall, when the usual fall high winds blew all the mulch into the east pasture.

Next summer we were back to weeds. ((sigh))

This year I am going to throw in the towel and plant ground cover. I just have too much else going on to deal with it, and it's not my thing (even though I will admit to love playing with my virtual flower garden on my iPhone.) So if you ever come to our house to visit, just avert your eyes from the front flower garden, at least until the ground cover has taken hold and done its thing, ok?

In the meantime, here are some pics from my various Rose of Sharon bushes (my mom used to call these Mallow Trees, but whatever you call them, the blooms are lovely.) I've also uploaded these to my Facebook page, which you can see (and "like") here: https://www.facebook.com/FarmwifesDiary