Carol’s Five Questions

I’m late as usual. Carol of May Dreams Gardens has posed five questions about gardening. I’ve blogged about most of them previously, but here they all are together:

What are you most proud of about your garden? The perennials I’ve grown from seed. I have terrible luck buying plants. I almost always manage to kill them. Seed is much cheaper so if only a few germinate and survive, I don’t feel like I have spent a fortune to obtain very little. Echinacea, Shasta Daisies, Rudbeckia, Dianthus, various Columbine, Alpine Strawberries, Thyme, Common Sage, Anise Hyssop, and Monarda fistulosa are the ones that come to mind.

When you go to sleep at night, what are you worried about in your garden? Squirrels! I hold my breath every morning when I make the daily rounds of my yard. Some days I just want to cry at what they have destroyed. But I can’t get too angry with them. They were here first. We have invaded their territory.

When others come and see your garden, what do you think they remember most about it? Like most gardeners, I would complain that not much is blooming at the time of the visit. Visitors, on the other hand, have told me that what impresses them most is the extent of my gardens and the variety of flowers, most of which they have never heard of.

What is your favorite gardening tool, the one you would recommend every gardener get? My seagrass basket that I bought at the Flower and Garden Show last year. It’s tough and weather-proof and holds everything: my tools, camera, sunscreen, plants, seeds, bulbs, plant markers, pencils. I’m always amazed at how much I can comfortably fit into it. It makes it so much easier to commute between my garden at home and my garden at Rutgers Gardens. I always have what I need.

If you woke up this morning with all the time and money in the world to spend in your garden, what would you do first? I would tear down the old shed that is steadily deteriorating in my backyard and replace it with a new, attractive one.* But not in the same spot. My shed currently occupies a corner on the side of my yard that gets close to full sun. I would place the new shed in the opposite corner of the yard. It would mean moving my shade garden from that corner to the side of the house and finding a new home for the birdbath, but it would be well worth it to expand my sunny border.

*For those of you who don’t live in NJ, getting rid of construction debris is horribly expensive because of the lack of landfill space to put it. In the few cases where I have replaced something like a porch or sidewalk, it has cost more to get rid of the old materials than the cost of new materials and labor combined.