A couple of weeks ago, I thought I picked my last roses for the year. It felt like we'd suddenly gone from summer to winter, skipping over fall completely, with the chilly pouring rain and cold nights. Part of me wanted to leave the last few blooms in the yard, uncut, to kid myself into thinking that the lovely heady scent they perfume my yard with wouldn't be gone just yet. My selfish side wanted to put them in a vase and have them inside with me to ward off the winter. My selfish side won out.
If there's one thing I'm selfish about in the garden it's my roses. Not selfish in the sense that I won't share them with anyone, just in the sense that I 'm the one who takes care of them, talks to them, adores them. I soak up their essence every day I can.
My rugosas and my very old English rose bush start blooming in late March or April and they bloom all summer long producing the most wonderful spicy, musky rose blooms. Their fragrance is what wakes my up in the spring after our cold, soggy winters. After I'm certain I just can't handle one more day of that wet chill. Picture yourself walking outside into the garden in the morning with a light rain or leftover dew settled on the plants, when the roses begin blooming, and oh the musky rose scent, it's intoxicating. It can stop me in my tracks. It's my antidepressant.
And I don't have to do much to these rose bushes; I fertilize them and deadhead them and prune a bit, but even when I completely neglect them, they grow and flower and make me happy. Their scent surrounds my garden and breathes life into my senses all summer long. And so much of what gardening is for me is about scent.
I also have one Joseph's Coat Rose, which isn't the healthiest rose in my yard, but is hands down my favorite looking bloom. It begins as almost a dark reddish orange...
and as it opens up becomes more orangey-peachy-pink with hints of yellow.
It's scent changes too from spicy to passion-fruity.
My dear friend, Ingrid gave me two roses to plant for my birthday this past February, a Touch of Class...
with a lovely spicy balsam scent,
and a White Licorice Floribunda which smelled sweet and sugary, like vanilla.
I love the scent of roses in my garden, so unlike most store-bought roses, but this year I was surprised when the kids started to enjoy them too, how different each one smells, the way the bushes change and grow, how fast black spot can spread through a plant. Plus, all the rose bushes attract ladybugs, snails and weird looking aphids, and their thorns are amazing!
One of my favorite things about the garden this year was watching Lily and Jasper decide how perfectly lovely it is to cut a few roses every day, put them in a vase, and set them at the dinner table to enjoy while we're drawing or eating family dinner.
Our family dinners can be absolute disasters sometimes trying to get Jasper to eat what we make, but the ritual of sitting down together is one I hope he will grow to love, and I like to think this summer helped a little bit as he always looked forward to putting a vase of roses at each meal.
Three seeds, two experiments, lots of growth. Way back in the middle of the summer, the kids and I planted yellow squash, marigold and bean seeds in egg shells and egg cartons. We also tried a bean experiment to see which way the bean sprouts would grow. Both experiments were fun and after the sprouts started growing we planted them in the garden.
After that we mostly just watched them grow,
and grow,
and grow.
Of course we watered them and added compost once in a while, but there was a lot of just watching. Watching and being amazed at how beautiful they are,
how tall they got,
how fast they grew from tiny to huge,
how clever they are.
It reminds me of my kids, obviously I water them and feed them (hmmm, maybe Jasper would eat compost?)
I try as hard as I can every day to nurture them and not get frustrated. I fail often. I hope for sunny days to soak up the warmth and rainy ones to splash in puddles, a good balance of both. But a lot of the time, I'm just watching.
Watching them grow.
We sent Lily off to kindergarten this month and I'm amazed for all of these reasons.
How fast she's growing,
how beautiful she is,
how clever,
how fragile yet resilient,
and how hard and amazing at the same time it is for me to just let her go (grow!)
It's that time of year again, spiders are everywhere!
Outside, their sticky webs are waiting every morning, in the doorway, strung from zucchini to sunflower, nestled around my tomato plants and beautifully attached to old anemone buds.
Inside it's like they're haunting me, appearing in the bathtub in the morning before I can barely see straight. A HUGE one racing across my bedroom floor as I turned on the light the other night. Waiting for me in the bathroom at 2 am. Am I embarrassed to say I've screamed for Greg to come save me several times from them? Absolutely not!
I love spiders in the garden, their beautiful webs and their appetite for insects, but boy they are ginormous this time of year, all fattened up from all the eating they've been doing, but I really, really don't like sharing my house with them. And, dang are they hard for me to photograph clearly!!
Lily and Jasper love to find spiders in the garden, and they love to find spiders who have trapped insects in their webs. This weekend Greg and the kids and I were playing in the garden and there were webs everywhere. Greg thought it would be fun to find a bug and toss it into one of the webs and watch the spider in action. Never gonna happen I thought to myself. I never doubted that they would find a bug, after all, Jasper is my bug whisperer, but tossing one into the web seemed like it would never work.
It took Jasper, after tipping over a few potted plants, about one minute to find and grab an earwig. Greg gently tossed it into the web and WOW! That bug stuck and that spider moved like lightning tearing apart bits of its own web to spin that earwig into submission while we watched from the sidelines. So fast it was amazing! (Off to the side is a trapped ladybug Lily wanted to save. She said, "I'm going to go find a wood chip and knock that ladybug free." Greg replied, "I think it's too late for that darlin'.")
Turns out Greg really enjoys tossing earwigs into spiderwebs. Tonight the kids found a roly poly they tossed into a web which fell off after a minute. A minute was all it took for me to capture it on camera. Not the best photos I've ever taken, but they do a pretty good job.
But then Jasper fell onto an old wooden bird feeder, broke it apart and discovered families and families of earwigs inside. Eeeeew! Greg gathered a whole cupful and while the kids ran around the yard chasing Dizzy, Greg had fun throwing earwig after earwig into a web trying to get one to stick. I could tell he was way too into it because whenever he missed he kept saying, "I can't get it into the net!" But the hockey player persevered and, finally, GOAL!!! One landed and stuck and Greg and I watched again while a spider secured its prey. I'm making us out to look like bug assassins, but really, our organic garden is crawling with them. And to be perfectly honest I can't stand earwigs. Plus watching a spider dart over and grab its prey and use its web to bind the prey up faster than you can say gin and tonic is pretty fascinating to watch!
I'm telling you, there is never a dull moment around here!!
