Another Day in the Country
Tucked in and tuckered out
© Another Day in the Country
Whew, I have to sit down for a spell because I’m properly winded.
It’s a beautiful, sunny day, and I’ve been out cleaning up that Three Sisters garden. It was beginning to look like a jungle instead of a garden, but I had to wait.
Waiting is the gardener’s middle name. You’re waiting for spring, waiting for the last frost in March or April, waiting till you can get those tomatoes planted, waiting for the corn to come up and get tall enough so the beans have somewhere to climb, waiting for those tomatoes to ripen, waiting for the potatoes to be ready to dig and the beans to pick and for the grasshoppers to be gone. Gardening is definitely a waiting game!
My sister hates waiting — even more than I do.
“The problem,” she says, explaining why vegetable gardens aren’t her thing, “is that you wait and wait for something to happen, and then you have too much and don’t know what to do with all of it.”
As for me, I’ll wait and plead with the weather, threaten the grasshoppers, deal with the excess just for the thrill of having my first garden meal when I proudly announce to anyone eating with me that I grew all of this in the back yard.
With regard to the Three Sisters garden, I’ve been first dreading, then waiting, for the first frost this fall — dreading because the zinnias were so beautiful, and I hated to lose them; waiting because there was one unholy mess in the corn/bean/squash area.
I’ve also been waiting for some promise of rain, and I wanted to get the job done before the rain, if I could, so that any mulch I put down would get a good soaking to keep it stable from the wind.
Usually, frost comes around Halloween here in Kansas. However, this year, it hit a couple of weeks earlier. It didn’t kill everything, but most of it went down for the count.
I began to wait for enough energy to tackle the job of cleaning up that garden, and, today, I decided to give it a whirl.
I put on my old, blue, long-sleeved flannel shirt — even though it was warm — so that I wouldn’t get my arms all scratched up dealing with corn stalks and extra tall zinnias that had become like trees.
I needed a machete to slash my way through the tangle of bean vines but settled for garden gloves and took a whack at it.
My trusty lawnmower gets used for more than mowing lawns. Tooltime Tim used to chide me for going too fast and too close and plowing through when I was supposed to be just mowing.
“You do know that’s a lawnmower you’re driving not a bulldozer,” he’d say.
In my defense, my lawnmower, which I bought about 20 years ago at the same time he bought his (same make and model), has lasted longer than his did.
Mine, thanks to my repairman, Gerry over by Hope, is still running like a charm! That lawnmower is my leaf blower, my chicken food bag carrier, my mulcher, and sometimes my scooter when I’m too pooped to walk.
Today, I was counting on my mower to chop down and chew up all the plants that were freeze-dried so I could tuck that Three Sisters garden in for the winter.
In the spring, I’d been to California and helped my grandson repair his little fishpond in the backyard that had the misfortune of having a tree limb puncture it during a heavy rainstorm.
That pond is small, and the least amount of pond liner was way too much for our project, so I decided to bring the rest of the material back to put down under mulch in my Three Sisters garden that I was starting.
That said, I knew that I really haven’t liked plastic ground cover in my garden. It’s too stubborn, too impervious.
What I really like are old cardboard boxes, cut up and put under prairie hay. It’s my favorite mulching solution. But I went ahead and used the plastic.
A lot of weeds needed to be smothered in this new area, so plastic it was — until today and I took it all up and threw it out. Lesson learned. In fact, quite a few lessons learned in that Three Sisters garden.
I got out the old boxes I’d been saving for just such a time as this and put down a new mulch barrier around the exterior of the garden and covered it with hay.
There was my scarecrow frame, standing rather barren over by the fence. First he’d had on Tim’s old clothes and cowboy hat, and then I threw out what had deteriorated and decided to let the beans climb all over the frame while the corn played catch up this spring.
The scarecrow had been wearing a cowboy hat and a bean suit all summer. Stripped of the vines, he was looking pretty forlorn.
I had an old pair of overalls that were way small for me, but they’d fit this skinny scarecrow. I threaded the pants on and looked around for a shirt — and then took off my old long-sleeved shirt I was wearing and used it.
That’s one of the things about living in the country. There’s usually no one around.
It’s another day, and I want you to know that I had that effigy of the gardener dressed in nothing flat and high-tailed it into the house. My daughter always says, “Mom’s idea of modesty is to run fast.”