Celebrating our failures

From the hammock

Call me crazy, but I planted my leeks this week.

I know I am late. But hey, if we don't challenge ourselves to do the impossible in the garden, where are we going to learn to fail? Raising our kids? Practicing our favourite form of religion? Going to work? ("Hey boss, I intentionally botched up this job just to see what I could learn from the experience.") I don't think so.

Have you ever thought about how much time we spend celebrating our successes? There are conferences going on across the country right now featuring guest speakers and lecturers who will too gladly tell you how they succeeded to do this, that or the other thing.

I would like to propose we?a bunch of gardeners?get together and talk about what we tried and failed, and what we learned from it.

At our previous home (before moving into our 10 acre garden two-and-a-half years ago), I had an average suburban lot to deal with that was surrounded by a mature hardwood forest. Sugar maples, American Elm, White Ash?you name it, we had the shade to prove they would grow in our environment.

Only problem was anything I planted under this cool canopy would refuse to grow. Forget hostas. (Shade lovers, right?) They went into a slow decline that usually took three years before they just disappeared like the cash in my wallet.

Frankly, it took me about 15 years to figure out that there are only a small handful of perennial plants that will tolerate not only the dense shade of a hardwood bush but the competition for moisture from their roots, too.

In my zone 5 garden, I was able to grow pachysandra, epimediums, lily of the valley, tiarella and of course trilliums. Not much more.

Coming to this conclusion took time and a lot of replanting. Lots of failures.

So, I will let you know if I am able to harvest a nice crop of leeks this fall. Chances are not good, but that is a good reason to try it, from my point of view.

I hope that you are enjoying your hydrangeas. Wow! The Annabelle (white) hydrangeas at the front of our place?I planted 30 of them three years ago?are looking better than any that I have seen anywhere, I swear. Well, except maybe in England or Lower Mainland, B.C.


Pride may cloud my vision on this one, but after waiting a year for them to bloom again at their best, I deserve it.

So do you! Your day lilies, hollyhocks, Shasta daisies, and many other mid-summer performers are putting on a concert, and I can only hope that you are not on summer vacation somewhere and missing the show.

Which reminds me: be sure to stake these beauties. Your delphiniums are finished, so now is a good time to cut down the old blossom and move the stakes over to the next tall perennials that are blooming their heads off.

Also, you only have until the beginning of August to fertilize your roses, shrubs and perennials. Adding fertilizer after the first week of August may force soft growth that will not 'harden off' in time for the winter months to hit them hard. In other words, left to their own devices for the second half of the gardening season (August to late October or early November depending on where you live) is the best advice that I can give you.

Relish it. I don't very often tell you when not to do something.

Like the "Dandelion Festival" in Nova Scotia this past May. I had arrived in Lower Sackville for a speaking engagement for Home Hardware the first week of June and picked up the local weekly newspaper. The front page offered a review of the successful event the previous week at which the annual smothering of yellow dandelions flowers in virtually every public place and a lot of private ones was being held up as something to celebrate. It seems the biggest challenge for the organizing committee was to discourage residents from cutting their grass that week.

What? A group of people met to discuss how they were going to get locals to not work on their lawn? That's right.

The festival was such a success the organizing committee has already met to work out a strategy of what not to do next year. Don't let anyone tell you Maritimers are not resourceful. And they love to party, for just about any reason evidently.

Let me know if you would like to follow up on the 'celebrating our failures' idea. Maybe we'll see some Maritimers at our party!

Keep your knees dirty.