Last October, I had a lovely long autumn weekend in New York City with my 16-year-old for her birthday. We spent our days and nights wandering leaf-strewn paths of Central Park, visiting museums, sobbing through Broadway shows and exploring every neighborhood of every NYC movie we’d ever seen.
Upon arriving home, I anticipated at least one weekend of decent weather to put my garden to bed. The biggest job would be digging up my precious dahlias, separating the tubers and packing them away in vermiculite until spring. I just needed a day and a half of not terrible weather. Was that too much to ask?
Change of plans…
Yes, friends. It apparently was. The following weekend it snowed. And it snowed. And it snowed. Until mid-December.
So last winter my dahlias remained in the cold, hard ground and weren’t tucked safely inside their perfectly labeled containers in my basement. I admit I lamented for a bit, then decided to chill and just order new tubers.
Remaining flexible
Gardening is cool like that. There’s almost nothing you can mess up so terribly that you can’t just try again next year. It’s an excellent hobby for those of us who like to wing it and sometimes experiment without having all the facts.
Over the last 25 years, I’ve made quite a few gardening whoopsies. I’ve attempted to grow things that have no business growing year-round in zone 5. (Apparently, tropical hibiscus are only meant to be enjoyed in a pot for a season…rude.) I’ve overwatered every succulent I ever owned until I learned to cool it with the spray bottle. Some years I’ve thinned carrots with the audacity of a teenager tweezing her eyebrows in 1996 (no, I will not show you photos) and then the very next year forgotten to thin them at all.
There’s a place in gardening for every approach
Gardening is for everyone: the chronic rule followers with their detailed journals and subscriptions to Garden Gate magazine so they can dog-ear the crucial pages (me); the laissez-faire gardeners who let the seed packets at their local nursery speak to them to determine each season’s growing plans (also a little me); and even the folks who never intended to be gardeners, but left their rotting pumpkin out all winter and are now running a rogue pumpkin patch from their front yard (this one is actually not me, but sounds kind of fun). We can all thrive in gardening, and I think that’s pretty great.
Jamie Seitz is about to get full-time fancy in her home state of Iowa: She’s begun training to become a certified Master Gardener, and you can believe you’re going to hear all about it.
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