Accessible Gardening: Laughing For Joy #8, 2 by Amargia

Amargia wrote:
(Jim) Hi Sheri! It’s so good to read your post again here. Also, good to hear the VA is doing right by you, but sad the scooter is now a necessity. Are you still in the same house with stairs to manage? Do you still have your cute little ankle biters?
It looks like I do have some cool blue coming. Blue mist flowers, aster relatives, will be blooming as a tall groundcover in the wilder areas and the ‘Heavenly Blue’ morning glories were planted late and should bloom soon. Kay proclaimed Amargia the Ipomoea Empire on today’s property walk. I guess I did go a little crazy with the morning glories and moon vines and there were already some MGs that had re-seeded. I actually did not know that sweet potatoes were in that family.
I am trying ‘Scarlett O’hara’ in the Old Soldiers Garden. I should have read Plantfiles first and gone with cardinal vine. There is never a question of cardinal flowers being a good red and there has been a problem with Scarlett not being true to type even when the seeds come from ordinarily trustworthy sources. If it is just some white in the center instead of being pure red, that is okay, but I will be disappointed if it turns out too pink. I bought ‘Grandpa Ott’s’ for the purple themed garden around Nadi’s micro-house. There are also ‘Milky Way’ and a no-name pink Kay encourages to re-seed among the dewberry brambles. There is a tiny flowered variety I mistakenly believed were natives until recently. The nickel-sized blooms are sprinkled through the WildPower Garden. Kay calls them African morning glories and believes that they hold the sandy slope making life easier for all the natives planted there. The vines make a thready web over the soil and I see no sign that they interfere with the growth of their neighbors. If Amargia is the Ipomoea Empire, then I am the emperor because I am looking for ‘Kniola’s Black’ (a dark blue in reality) and cardinal vine for the OSG, bush morning glories to top the retaining wall between the MerFolk Garden and the Bee Yard and our native railroad vine now that I know that isn’t what the little white MGs in the WildPower Garden are.
I hope you made it over to this thread, ellonwheels, because there is a psychological trick we discovered for managing 1acre+ properties buried in my chatter. If you break the property up into separate spaces in your head, it will not feel as overwhelming. (You don’t have to give the different areas goofy names. That’s just what we do as a way of talking to one another about specific spaces.))I guess the trick would also work for handling smaller spaces with greater physical challenges. I get a sense of accomplishment when I can say I finished something. I could never say I finished anything if I considered the property as a whole. There is always something more that needs done.
Kay’s doing okay. She put in a very hard day Friday and has slept most of the weekend. Nadi is taking over my job as mow monkey. The bouncing is getting too hard on my back. I’m scheduled for surgery in mid-July. The roid shots are no longer enough to keep the pain at bay.
Fenny at five. I had better close. Kay has found a new way to get us all up and out in the cool of the morning. She plays the harmonica and Fenny-dog “sings” along. It sounds a little like this
[HYPERLINK@www.youtube.com]
except Fenny is a soprano soloist. What is it with some dogs and harmonicas? It obviously doesn’t hurt her ears. Fenny loves to “sing”.
#1: Put one of mk’s concrete scraps under the fruit to prevent ground rot. Hope it works.
#2: Moonflower (Ipomoea alba)