Visiting a gardening friend this weekend I started second-guessing my decision to hold off on watering most of this summer. My garden is all about shades of green and brown, mostly brown. There is so little color, I hate to admit it, I've been bored. Nothing wrong with green and brown. Those are the colors of so much in nature, but this summer flew by before I had a chance to savor the bright, rich colors of the season.
I've watered in places ... the plants that droop a lot or those that get the most sun or the seeds and seedlings in the vegetable bed. But mostly, I've held off. It seems so wasteful to water day after day and eventually, it rains, right?
This summer has been rough. Except for three days of rain, very dry. My poor garden looks bedraggled after so much heat and water deprivation.
My friend's garden, on the other hand, is lush and green. You'd think it was early June! She's got more shade, a smaller space, and she's obviously watered more than I have. And P.S., this photo is of a container in her back yard. It has sweet potato vines and employs a little trick to keep things interesting. She took her spent alliums, which are so pretty dried, cut them off, tied them to small, thin bamboo stakes, and stuck them in her containers to provide a spikey feature and some height.
Cool!
In my garden, I have my choice not just of dried alliums but dried lupine, dried baptisia, dried hydrangea, dried lilies and coneflowers, dried absolutely everything.
So what to do. On Saturday I did something I've never done before - I went out and bought a few flats of annuals to plant around for color. They were half-price but still, the bill was way more than I'd wanted to spend at this time of year. They're not a conversation piece. But tell ya what. They go a long way toward perking things up.
I remember once seeing a bumper sticker - and you know this had to be at a hard-core horticultural event - that said "Friends don't let friends buy annuals." That, to me, is the height of snobbery, but then, every field has its snobs. Last year, I tried to keep my annual purchases to a minimum solely because of the expense. If I was going to spend a fortune on new plants, I figured, I'd just as soon have it be an investment in perennials.
This year, who knows why, my garden desperately needs a color lift. So bring on the annuals. We'll enjoy these flowers for probably another two months, maybe more if we have another mild winter.
How much is satisfaction worth? How much money would you spend to prolong your blooming season, to eke as much pleasure out of your garden as you can before the weather turns frosty?
Thought of that way, a few impatiens and begonias are a bargain! That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
