In the rock garden the first blooms of the alpine sunrose and the delicate yellow flowers of Draba are out. As it always is, the garden is slow to start and then overnight I am suddenly playing catch up. Last week the honey berry bushes were bare branches. I went passed them yesterday and they are ready to bloom. The fruit spurs on the apple trees are getting fat. Rose Tree of China will open any day.
Getting ready for all of this means cleaning up last seasons left over vegetation. We use to do it in fall but a master gardener friend suggested leaving it until spring so that the dead vegetation can act as a mulch to protect plants in winter. In fall I’m always happy to do this until spring comes and it needs to be done all at once. We use to enjoy the pleasant past time of puttering in the garden until one day we noticed “puttering” had crossed the line into heavy labor. It was time to get some garden helpers.
Two weeks ago our garden helpers came to get the orchard ready. They took off the trunk protectors that keep voles from girdling the trees under the snow. They picked up all the cuttings from Dan’s tree pruning. They raked up leaves. I so enjoy the days they come to work. There are three of them, 11, 14, and 17 and they love to work in the garden. They accomplish in just a few hours what it would take me all week to do on my own. Last week they came and cleaned out all the beds. One cut back all last years leftover plant material, one gathered it all together, one hauled it all to the compost pile.
When our gardens were of reasonable size Dan and I found it satisfying to do this all ourselves. But as my mother use to say “our eyes got bigger than our stomach” and “we bit off more than we can chew”. Its a common Alaskan malady brought on by all those garden conventions that start in early February and keep going just about every weekend until May when everyone can stops talking about gardening and actually starts gardening. Our modest little rock garden expanded to a second rock garden twice as big as the first because we ran out of room for rock garden plants. When we ran out of room for perennials our border perennial garden kept getting wider until now it has a path down the middle of it. We went from one vegetable plot to two, put a container garden on the deck for herbs, put up a trellis for a kiwi garden and clamatis and added a shade garden on the north side of the house. The orchard went from 25 trees to 50 to 100 and Dan is opening a new section this summer.
Now we have garden helpers and I can just go about “puttering”, making sure everything has enough room, moving things to better spots, pulling out the good ideas which turned into problems. Like capanula glomorata which travels into places it shouldn’t be and filipendula ruba which does the same thing, getting the gardens ready for new ideas.