Gardening is a lot of fun in the Spring. Everything is new, and we are making plans for the coming season. Seedlings are quite adorable, I think. All is lovely, happy, and hopeful. Then the problems start. Weeds grow, animals come and eat the plants, bugs come and eat the plants, the plants get diseases, there is too much rain, there is too little rain, and the list goes on and on.
This year, I got a late start on the garden. This was in part because of the weather and in part because I was incredibly busy. I continued to be busy through the Summer, and this year was unusually hot. I have been having trouble getting up early enough in the morning to avoid the heat, so my gardening has been limited to the evening when I can get to it.
Needless to say, I have not had much of a garden this year. The weeds are doing very well, though.
Weeds are an interesting dilemma, aren’t they? There are some plants that are considered weeds that are really quite useful, such as dandelions and violets. Usually, weeds are just plants that naturally grow in the area. Some weeds are quite lovely. There are some people who like and appreciate weeds for these reasons.
All that being said, if you want to have a garden, you really do need to decide the plants you want and the plants that you do not. It is a sad, cruel fact of life that there are limited resources. Most of the work of the summer is watering and caring for the plants you want and weeding out the plants that you do not.
In the Filianic Tradition, the Summer Solstice celebration is Rosa Mundi, or the Rose of the World. This is a fire festival, and in particular a festival for outside bonfires. One tradition of this holiday is to write down a trait or a fault that you wish to free yourself of and throw it into the fire. In a sense, this seems to me to be a weeding of one’s own heart.
The first year that I tried gardening, I weeded a little bit here and a little bit there, but I never seemed to accomplish anything. Last year, I realized that it was better to take a section at a time, no matter how small, and weed that area as completely as possible. With that in mind, I took on Maria-sama’s garden this evening, once it had cooled down a bit.
It is not perfect, but a whole lot better, I think. It actually did not take that long, and I have a nice sense of accomplishment.
Maybe that will inspire me to do another section tomorrow.
There was a pole in front of the house that we shared with her. Apparently, the pole was for a gas light, which had long ceased to be functional. My grandmother thought that the pole was ugly, but getting rid of it would be an expensive and dangerous process if it was even possible at all.
This Spring, I am not sure why or how, but I seem to have found the energy and the inspiration to start my own garden. I bought seeds for the vegetables and herbs I liked and cooked with. I never had any talent or inclination for gardening in the past. I was never even able to keep houseplants alive. Indeed, once my spouse and I had a cactus that lived for years until I took an interest in it, and it died shortly after.
For the past several years, Mormor (“grandmother” in Swedish) and I lived in the same two flat, which was owned by my aunt. In the front of the house, there was a lamp post, which used to be a working gas lamp. Mormor thought it was ugly. She researched, and she found that it would be costly and perhaps dangerous to remove it, so she devised a way to make it beautiful. Last spring, she planted roses around it with the plan that they would climb and cover the post.
I hope that the reader will indulge me a little in boasting about my grandmother. My grandmother has always been an amazing gardener. She is going to be ninety this fall, and she loves to garden. Even when she lived in the North Side of Chicago, she managed a substantial vegetable garden in a tiny backyard.