Garden Plans



Just a portion of our new yard with the "vegtable garden" in the foreground



            In theory I live where there are four seasons –spring, summer, fall and winter. In actuality I live where there are two – when I can spend lots of time outside and when I really like the idea of spending time outside but it’s just too bloody cold to actually do it.  Sure, I can go cross country skiing when it’s nice (and in northern Minnesota in February, “nice” means you can go outside without being afraid of your eyes freezing shut every time you blink), or I can go ice fishing when it’s not (but then I’m not really outside).  But after a while you get tired of putting on every piece of clothing you own just to survive walking across the yard.

            So every year about this time I start getting what people up here refer to as “cabin fever” because it sounds nicer than “a vaguely homicidal hatred of snow”. This is only enhanced by the gardening companies who thoughtfully send me large glossy catalogs full of summer. Or at least all of the possibilities for what summer could be –presuming I had a million dollars to spend and nothing else to do with my time.  

            Our new home is in Zone 3 – which professional gardeners refer to as the “zone of despair”.  The 3 indicates that the growing season here is about three weeks too short. Doesn’t matter what the plant is, it would have been “really great” in another three weeks. In addition to really cold winters, Zone 3 also features really hot, humid summers. Not only do plants need to be “cold hardy” they also have to be “heat resistant”.  If I want vegetables or fruit, they can’t be bothered by “early frost” or “late frost” or “why the @$&# did it just frost in July” frost.  So finding plants can be a little frustrating.

             This isn’t good because I’m going to need a LOT of plants. The new house currently has somewhere between 2 and 3 acres of yard - not counting any of the already established gardens, of which there are only a few. There’s the ubiquitous northern Minnesotan “randomly shaped front island bed full of overgrown irises and quack grass” garden, the “we planted stuff around the foundation but it turns out that large solid objects like houses create a lot of shade so daylilies are the only thing left” garden and the several thousand square feet of vegetable garden that has some strawberries and herbs of questionable parentage. 

              On one hand this is awesome. I basically have a blank slate. On the other hand it’s a really big blank slate. So there are a lot of options. I know there are a lot of options because I’ve taken my usual route when I don’t know how to do something which is, read everything I can get my hands on about a topic until I’m so frustrated by conflicting information and a lack of real advice that I say “screw it” and do things my own way.

I was really just trying to get some ideas for designing a largish garden on a budget. To anyone who reads gardening magazines and books, no, that last statement wasn’t meant to be a joke.  I was unaware that neither the concept “large garden” nor “budget” were discussed in garden literature. Every article seemed to be obsessed with how to spend as much money as possible to cram as much stuff as possible in the smallest space possible.  Near as I can tell, the ultimate garden design would be to spend three skillion dollars putting eight hundred plants, four fountains, two Adirondack chairs and a patio onto a lot the size of a standard newspaper.  

            I was also unaware that I was going to have to learn a whole new language to read these books.  Well, not a new language, they are technically written in English. It’s more like a whole new set of definitions for the current language. For example, when garden writers talk about “elegant” what they really mean is “expensive” and when they say that something is “solid” they mean “heavy”.   Garden furniture that is “aged” or “charmingly rustic” is really “rotting”. And when a plant is “enduring” or “care free” it actually means “you’d better like it because it’s going spread like crazy and take fourteen burly men with jackhammers to remove it”.

            And then there’s the garden’s “style”. Do you favor English Country Gardens, or Cottage Gardens? What about Zen Gardens? And have you tested the soil’s pH? Is it well drained? Did you mulch? What kind of fertilizer are you using? How about….AAaaaaah! Screw it!

            This summer I think I’m going to experiment with something completely different.  Mostly because I think it will be fun. But, partly because if you try something in a way that no one else has – there isn’t anyone to tell you that you’re doing it wrong.