Sponge Green Lives Thrice!

Yesterday as I was finishing my gardening the Avon lady came by and gave me a chance to sit down and talk. She always brings me five or six different catalogues and they're always full of products I never use, but the woman herself is so likeable that I usually get a little something...anyway, for her part I think she just uses selling cosmetics as an excuse to go out and visit. I traded her two garden plants for a botle of Avon Volumizing shampoo. Thus we keep the alternative economy alive here in rural America.

People around town have been dropping hints lately about my annual plant sale. Which is a sale of perennial plants that I have, you know, once a year. I kind of wonder where they all were last year when exactly ONE person showed up? DESPITE my papering the town with signs AND telling all the local gossip ladies. Well, ha on them. Stupid bastards. That one person who showed up took away 3/4 of my stock for 25 cents on the dollar. Her poor husband kept rolling his eyes at me as he sweated and puffed back and forth to their motorhome, loaded down with foliage. I got rid of plants, she was glad; I was glad, and it's all profit. The pots are free and the plants are seedlings or divisions of things I already own. Why be greedy? I hate to throw a perfectly lively plant into the compost. So some nice lady got the beginnings of a very nice perennial border for an insane low price and I had money I didn't have before she pulled up.

We'll see what happens this year. I just finished freshening my stock for this years sale. I'm working a month late, but the good weather ought to bring them along nicely. They all look so good!

If I was placed in the position of having to choose just one gardening task to specialize in, this would be it. Maintaining potted stock is like the entire gardening experience distilled, minus the heavy digging (and being attacked by hummingbirds high on testosterone.) A perennial plant relies most of all on its root system and crown. Plants in containers quickly become root bound and must periodically be lifted. Those with a system of cable-like roots must be shaken free of most of the medium and the roots themselves cut away, sometimes at their length, sometimes by volume, like taking away a wedge of cake. These are the plants that will strangle themselves as the roots circle round and round looking for medium and eventually constrict their own nutrient uptake. Perennials that form fiberous systems-think of fibrefil batting, for example- are shaken to loosen the structure and then sliced down the length of the root ball, placed into a larger pot and then re-packed with fresh meduim, taking care to spread the root ball apart and press medium into the cut.

During al this hacking and gouging, you get to see the entire plant. I like to examine its various parts closely, and this is better done with something that isn't the size of a small car. You trim away old dead growth and prune for shape. You learn more about each plant as a whole, rather than relying on pictures in a book, and in this way you develop a 'feel' for each individual plant in it's seasons much more fully than you would otherwise.

I make my own medium, and this is another favorite job. I use my own compost, and my own garden soil. Now turning compost is a bitch, and sifting compost is tedious and dusty, but the end product outweighs the toil. It is beautiful stuff, and it smells WONDERFUL, like autumn. I remember carting out a wheelbarrow load to show my husband in the garage one day, shouldering my way through a pile of bikers, going 'Oh my God! You have GOT to look at this! This is bioactive as fuck! It's incredible!' and by God, they all agreed. Hint: it's amazing how you can get through a packed room if you're pushing a wheelbarrow full of squirming compost in front of you.

So, by making my own medium, I can tailor drainage and richness levels for the pot depending on the specific plant. Once in the ground, plants seem to find their own balance given a particular biome, but in pots it's best to take some pains. They aren't designed to be confined at that high a temperature, and they aren't meant to take all of their moisture and food from the public water supply. Even the healthiest perennial in a pot (unless it's a succulent) is already under a certain amount of stress, which means uptake of nutrients will increase, which means more water in the main.

And see, you thought I was just a scroungy broad pulling weeds.