Dad at home in Vermont with Sobie (that four-legged dark shadow) and his mums

I learned my most valuable gardening skill from my dad—patience.  You’ve never known patience until you’ve known my dad.  I consider myself blessed to have inherited just a fraction of his calm perseverance.  I may be content pulling garden weeds by hand, but Dad exudes joy “brush hogging” his 5-acre field with a hand scythe.  (He had his scythe custom made based on his body measurements. Seriously.) 

My Dad epitomizes all the sayings about life being a journey, not a destination.  This admirable trait makes him a skilled gardener, my favorite hiking partner, and a role model of a father.

The first true test of my gardening patience was supposed to come from our recent conversion of ½ acre of our yard to a native prairie.  It normally takes a few years for prairie plants to establish their deep root systems and begin putting substantial energy into flowering.  (This is a big commitment on my part considering the last time I even lived at same address for more than two years, I was in high school and living under my dad’s roof.)  I had fully braced myself for enduring years of patient weeding with a slow rate of return.  Our native prairie seed mix was augmented with a couple of annual species (corn poppies and cosmos) for people not lucky enough to possess my dad’s gardening patience… like my husband whose reaction to undertaking this project was something like “WHAT!!?? We don’t even know if we’ll be living here in three years!”

Diverse native prairie currently exhibiting as a monoculture of poppies.

Wowza!  I’m pretty sure this isn’t normal.  We have ourselves one massive display of poppies.  My husband is thrilled; I’m frantically searching for natives in the understory of the poppy canopy.  Now we’re  just waiting for the sheriff to show up thinking we’re farming its illicit relative.

I turn my nose up at the likes of roses, peonies and daylilies because I view them as too traditional and mainstream for my young, eco-minded gardens.  That said, you might find it peculiar that I’m propagating chrysanthemums.  I blame it on my dad and the serious case of nostalgia I have for my flowerful childhood at Maidstone Plant Farm.  My dad does an exquisite job growing 1500-2000 hardy potted mums every year in his front yard. Summer just doesn’t feel like summer to me without mums to fuss over.  Here’s the band-aid for my nostalgia. 

However, I am adding my own twist on mum propagation techniques.  In an effort to green up the otherwise not-so-sustainable process of growing these water and fertilizer needy plants, I started by making my own soil mixture using nutrient-rich composted biosolids.  We’re trying to capture and reuse rainwater runoff from our barn roof to irrigate the mums (but this saga deserves it own blog post.)  The mums are also in re-used tree pots from a local nursery.  I know I’ll never get them to Dad’s level of perfection, but it’s fun trying.

The spring rush of greens, strawberries, and peas is winding down and I fear we are approaching that notorious 2-3 week lull where our biggest harvest will be weeds and mosquito bites. 

As always, I planted way too many leafy greens that all peaked at exactly the same time.  There are only so many bowls of leafy green things you can make your husband eat.

Rainbow Swiss Chard, Spinach, French Mesclun, A Heirloom Cutting Mix, and Grand Rapids Lettuce

Last year I overloaded this planter along our garden shed with colorful annuals, but this year I’m enjoying this understated display of miniature sunflowers.

"Junior" Container Sunflower

This is the butterfly garden that we planted last summer with about 20 species of native, local-genotype wildflowers and grasses.  It was the perfect spot to plant locally-adapted natives because it’s too far from the house for a hose to reach. We watered this garden once—the day we planted the small plugs.  In bloom are Penstemon digitalis (Foxglove Beard Tongue), Coreopsis Lanceolata (Lance-leaved Tickseed), and Echinacea pallida (Pale Purple Coneflower). 

The "butterfly garden"

Making a decorative succulent mixed container was somewhere near the bottom of my summer to-do list, but when I saw this one for $20 at Meijer this spring I couldn’t resist buying it.  Impulse buying is NOT something my Dad taught me; hence I do it with the same care he puts into buying hiking boots.  This container makes the perfect low-profile centerpiece for the dining table on our hot, south-facing deck. 

My mixed combos on the deck have traditionally been bursting with color, but now that the surrounding perennial gardens are offering more interest, I’m toning down the containers and featuring contrasting chartreuse and burgundy foliage.  They look really sharp against the dark wood.

This is my favorite view.  I spend a lot of time just sitting here at our kitchen table looking out over our gardens, quietly dreaming and scheming with a luke warm cup of coffee.  This introspective habit, without a doubt, came from my Dad.  The kitchen table was, and still is, the center of his home and the catchall of his life. 

I wish I could’ve spent Father’s Day sitting around his kitchen table talking (or silently reflecting as we often do) about gardens and mountains, but I know that there’s a piece of him in the gardens that I tend to everyday, and I’d like to think that there’s a piece of me in some of his.  (I definitely know there’s a piece of me in those fields of tansy he’s scything, but that’s a story for another day.)

This post was brought to you by the dog Maddie and the flower Poppy.

I woke up at 2:00 AM this morning and was horrified to realize that I’d been designing a rain garden in my sleep.  It left me wondering if this dream of mine qualifies as billable work time.  From what I remember, it was a fine conceptual design.  It also made me realize that I really need a vacation.

Since a vacation doesn’t appear to be in my near future, maybe by venting about my recent rain garden experiences, I can clear my mind enough to allow it to return to dreaming about more important things… like flying giraffes. 

My rain garden dream wasn’t out of the blue.  I’m in my third week of a rain garden frenzy, working long hours to design a series of demonstration rain gardens to be installed around the city.  Last night (in real life) I helped to install the first rain garden with an eager army of nearly 100 girlscouts and boyscouts.

The rain garden plants laid out (note: perfectly) before the volunteer planters arrived

Rain gardens are specialized gardens that collect runoff from roofs and other impervious surfaces during storm events, allowing the water to slowly soak back into the ground while native plants filter out pollutants.  Rain gardens help to prevent polluted runoff from going into storm sewers and draining out into nearby streams and waterways.

But I’m not here to lecture; I’m only here to vent personal commentary.  If you’re interested in more rain garden information and design recommendations, I’ve listed a few good web resources at the bottom of this post. 

Installing this first rain garden with pint-sized volunteers was an interesting experience because half of me was delighted that we had so many enthusiastic little hands in the dirt and the other half of me, the perfectionist half, was screaming inside as I witnessed my precise design and perfect layout being muddled beyond recognition.  Despite detailed instructions and a handful of planting coaches, within minutes the garden turned into something more like a battlefield; the plants standing no chance against the army of scouts.  Everywhere I looked there were little feet crushing pots, little bums sitting on plants, plants too deep in their holes, too shallow, and even up-side-down.  

The first stampede of volunteers hits the rain garden

Because I’ve never known a life without gardening, I sometimes forget that there are fifth graders who have never touched a trowel in their lives. Something that seemed so obvious, like to take the plant out the pot before putting it in the ground, I quickly realized wasn’t that obvious to some of my volunteers. 

I felt my heart skip a beat as one kid flipped a gallon-sized pot over and used it as a stool as he dug a hole for the now-crushed plant still inside it. 

This particular rain garden was intended to be a more formal example of a rain garden (oops!), compared to what is typically a wild-looking congregation of native plants.  When designing it, I chose some of the better-behaved native plants to flow in curvilinear swaths through the center of the garden, a border of Prairie Dropseed (Sporobolis heterolepsis) to give the garden a soft, but defined edge.  To demonstrate how a native-plant-leery homeowner can incorporate a few familiar ornamental plants into their rain garden, I added a couple of masses of Stella D’Oro daylilies in the corners, which helped to link the rain garden with the more traditional surrounding landscape.  These bright yellow, long blooming lilies will also contrast nicely with the masses of native Pale Purple Coneflower (Echinacea pallida) behind them.

After the kids left, my co-worker and I quickly replanted the worst-off plants and mourned the loss of the perfect curves and plant spacing we worked so hard to lay out.  But when all said and done, it still didn’t look too bad and if just one kid came away from the experience with a sparked interest in gardening, then it was all worth it.

This really is a wonderful sight.

The end product. This rain garden collects runoff from a portion of the building's roof surface, sidewalk, and Mastodon(!!).

Here are a few of the better (in my opinion) web resources for designing and installing your own rain garden:

General rain garden info:
http://dnr.wi.gov/runoff/rg/

In-depth design tools: 
http://www.lowimpactdevelopment.org/raingarden_design/index.htm

Rain garden plant selection (for the Upper Midwest):
http://www.pca.state.mn.us/publications/manuals/stormwaterplants.html

I’m sure my husband has appreciated the week off from being the main character of my blog.  But don’t worry; he is currently fleshing out an idea for what I’m calling a poor man’s topsy turvy.  Something about a 5-gallon bucket and growing things upside-down.  I can already tell its going to have great blog potential.