Peril in the Garden!

So there I was, doing what the Jolly Green Goddess does best.
That would be snipping roses and geraniums as a gift to a friend less able than I when she wasn’t looking. Well, that is until a two-foot high pointy rock jumped out of the ground and decked me.
Rock thought, “Push over. Watch me!”
I had just had a great conversation with neighbor Nick Weeks while clipping Mary Powers’ roses. Then I dutifully picked up and dumped all the cuttings, and a few she had left on the ground, into her yard waste can.
Impulsively, I turned to trim a spent-looking geranium another friend planted and usually maintains for Mary, and thought, gee, I really should make the effort to help out there as well. We are talking four feet away from where I was standing.
I turned too quickly, natch, took a step toward the geranium without looking, and that’s when the pointy rock jumped out of the ground and watched me fly.
Using the old brain and my right hand, I reached for Mary’s yard waste can as I was falling, and managed, in all my grace, to pull the can loaded with prickly rose cuttings down on top of me, pouring all of its stickery contents on my head.
Fortunately my thick and yuckily stained Tilley hat that I so adamantly advocate wearing outdoors slipped off slightly and protected my face from that rising earth, while all that flashed through my simple mind was “Don’t break your glasses!” I still wear dual rosy spots between my eyes indented by my sturdy Versace frames.
As I lay there, quietly assessing the bodily damage and discovering that I had even cut my hand twice with my own clippers in my gravity-driven flight, I thought, “I wish someone would see me and come help me.”
And then, as I regained my composure ever-so-slightly, my attitude changed to, “Oh, I hope nobody sees me! How embarrassing!” How stupid!
Eventually I picked up myself, the yard waste can and some of the cut dead roses and geraniums that were strewn around for several feet, tossed a few of the latter back in the can, and realized it was the one day I had forgotten my cell phone.
So I sat on Mary’s side step for a few minutes, dripping blood on her cement path and porch as evidence of some potentially violent crime, and finally staggered the two blocks home.
Bleeding from a lucky thirteen wounds on my legs and hands, and with a new inch-high lump below my knee, I tripped (my usual entrance) into our house and told Jerry, “I need help,” a plea most men love to hear.
After receiving his loving care and cold compresses, two days later I “got back on the horse” and walked to Mary’s house to water her roses on the way “out” on my normal morning walk, and are they happy! So am I.
Waiting at Kaiser Petaluma for attention, two other people shared waiting room stories about their banged up legs from aggressive gardens. One simply couldn’t understand why digging up her onions warranted a broken leg!
Back to gardening:
Several lawns, including ours, are looking more like Fall than the first or second week in August normally warrants.
Granted, ours is somewhat water-deprived, since we are doing our part to save water. But still, the color brown it has is pre-seasonal, as someone must say. One remedy, of course without a guaranteed cure, might be to aerate your lawn, meaning poke holes in it, which Lydia Constantini of Sonoma Mission Gardens says might be stressful for growing lawns. Normally we aerate in October, particularly after rain has soaked the ground.
You can rent machines to do this that actually pull “plugs” of dirt out of the ground, or you can conserve energy and do it yourself with a long-handled two- to four-pronged tool. After watering your lawn, whenever you do give it some moisture, use this gizmo that has a location to place your foot and stand on it to poke the holes. This allows water to run into the ground, encourages deeper root growth and helps reduce water run-off.
Constantini suggests fertilizing at half-strength with Green All lawn food containing minor elements such as sulfur and checking the sharpness of your mower blades. Dull blades will pull apart the grass leaf and leave massive shreds which can add up to a brownish tinge.
It could heat up again soon, since we get hot spells in Sonoma Valley into October, and fertilizing heavily could possibly burn your grass. Additionally, stimulating massive grass growth will require more water, which we should avoid during this dry year.
If you are anxious to cheer up yourself or your neighbors with some instant bright color, try zinnias, marigolds that are in at local nurseries in red, orange and yellow; dianthus that Sonoma Mission Gardens has in “polar mix” of hot pink, purple, and pink and white; petunias in red, white, pink and then all those colors in one flower; chrysanthemums, which will carry into Fall, and unusually scented geraniums.
Snapdragons are in and available although they perhaps should be planted in partial shade in the heat we can still experience here. There are loads around in everything from white to purple.
Veggieville:
If you think your lettuce plants have had it, hold on! You can make one lettuce plant create two or three heads of lettuce.
To harvest lettuce, cut it just above the first or second set of leaves, which may be flattened on the ground slightly unappealingly with nibble holes enjoyed by your bug family.
Tiny baby leaves will ease their way out from where those old leaves are attached to the stem, and then you just nurse them along with a little water until edible. While I often feel like some sort of guilty trickster doing this, the tender leaves that I usually pick or cut one at a time are divine.
There isn’t a whole lot left in plants to buy, although Sonoma Mission Gardens has 12 kinds of lettuces, which should be planted in that famous “dappled sun,” meaning sun that peeks through tree leaves or lattice work.
SFG has loads of Echinacea, which produces an interesting droopy daisy-like flower, and Patchouli plants for sale, if you are into those herbs.
This is a fairly good time to start early seeds for winter crops of broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, spinach and Swiss chard, either in large ice cube trays, old plant trays or, small containers, which, hopefully, you have saved from spring and summer starter plants.
You can put seeds for carrots, peas, spinach and radishes directly into the ground after you have mixed in compost and let it set for a few days to cool off.
Speaking of cooling off, it’s time.
Get down. Get dirty.
“All my hurts my garden spade can heal.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson in Musketaquid.
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