Need a pep talk after this winter!

WARNING: Whine approaching!

1. After two years of hard work, my front garden looks awful.
2. I love looking at the pictures of everyone's beautiful gardens, but then I feel woefully inadequate (gee, why don't mine look like that? :) ).
3. I have too much lawn.
4. I have too many straight lines but when I try to make curves, they don't look right.
5. I plan gardens on paper, but when I put plants in they don't look right either.
6. My vegetable garden is half fenced, and that half looks terrible and needs to come down.
7. I've killed plants. And not just cheap ones, either.
8. I feel overwhelmed.
9. And it's snowing here AGAIN, d*** it.

I'm not sure if I need sympathy, therapy, or a boot to the head :) ...but thank you for listening to me vent.

pam

Hi Pam,

Two years seems like a lot of time as you're going through it, but in gardening terms, it's really not. That is, not unless you are rich and can afford do get everything you want, when you want it. For the 99.9% of the rest of us, slow and steady. My garden is about 10 years old and it's only in the past couple of years that I have felt it was BEGINNING to look something like my vision for it. Instead of doing a little bit in a lot of areas, pick one and do it fully. It's more doable, you'll feel better and you will have the confidence to tackle the other areas because you know you can start and finish something. I say all of this out of experience, not out of a book or tv show or anything. Good luck!

Victor

Indeed! Victor is right. My garden is just starting to mature and I've been working on it for 5 years. I have a huge backyard so I decided to split it into 4 rooms. That way it's not so daunting. There is a tropical side and a Charleston/English garden side. I have spent most of the last 5 years concentrating on the tropical side, brugmansia room and canna and elephant ear room. On the othe side I have planted what I call the anchors. Rose bushes, Franklin Tree and a Confederate Rose hedge along the fence. I started that from seed and this will be it's 4th year. This year it will finally be a proper hedge.

My front garden has only the anchors put in, miniature rose bushes and climbing miniatures. Pretty much all of the seeds I have started this year are for the Charleston/English side and the front. I'm planning to spend more time on this side this year. I also have a new bed I made after taking out a horrible overly mature Holly hedge on the side of the house.

Pam a garden should always be a work in progress as far as I'm concerned. As to your curves, use a hose to make the shape of the bed you want. Then get a long bread knife, not serrated and cut out along the hose. The bread knife is wonderful for removing turf since you are not digging and makes beautiful neat lines.

Take heart .. spring is on the way.

X

Sounds beautiful, X. Any overhead shots?? I've been kind of doing rooms in the back, myself. I like your themes idea. Pam, one piece of advice on curves. The ones I've seen that are ugly are ones where the radius is too sharp. By that I mean - use long sweeping curves. Short ones just end up looking silly. Even a smallish area can accommodate longer curves than you might think.

Pam, think of it as the first layer of a beautiful painting. You always have to gesso the canvas first, then draw your lines. Every artist goes over his rough drafts several times to get it just the way they want it.
I, too, am having cabin fever. We just moved here in August and there is absolutely nothing but old yucky bushes and shrubs of no color. I looked at most of this all winter and with the ice storm we had last month that broke large limbs off the trees in the front, it all looks like poop. But I keep thinking it's going to get warm and I can go play in the dirt.
Even if I don't accomplish much this year, I know I am going to have fun planting and pulling and changing things several times over. Spring is on its way. Hooray!!!!

Spending some time to plan and research really does pay off. It also helps to break a big project (read: entire landscape area) into smaller, more discrete phases where you can accomplish something within a reasonable time. Having an overall plan allows a cohesive "structure" from one end of the garden to another. It's like having the walls standing in a new house -- until they're up it's hard to figure out where the sofa and chairs are going to go.

Your walls are your house, any natural boundaries (fences and/or neighbors, etc.), hardscape and pathways. You know how the sun moves across your property, winter to summer. You know your soil and its needs. You have some idea of which plants do best for you, and whether they grow fast or slow. All this data gives you the "bones" of your garden.

It really does help to use a garden hose to plot curved beds. It's amazing how moving a few feet in either direction can make a huge difference in the overall effect. We had a large section (about 45'x40') in our backyard to design, working around 2 mature existing trees. My husband and I dragged a couple of garden hoses around for more than two hours, debating and tweaking and looking at it from all angles, until we were satisfied. Then we thought about it for a few days and tweaked it again, to come up with our final design.

Doing curves needs to be done judiciously; not overdone -- otherwise the eye searches desperately for some frame of reference! Smaller areas need only 1 or 2 graceful, not too pronounced curves. Larger areas can take a grander sweep, even mixing in some tight curved lines with looser ones.

There are areas, particularly narrow ones, where curves just won't work. By nature curves take more square footage to look good. In those instances, I use "layers" of plants with different heights, to spill over the straight edges and fool the eye.

When I look at my photos showing the progression of various garden beds, it's almost embarrassing to realize how many of those plants died or were moved around! But I tell myself that's just part of learning to garden -- you don't know until that plant is actually in the ground, how well it's going to do for you! I'm getting better at gardening, but I still look at most of my beds and start thinking, "Hmm, if I move Plant A to where B is, I could put a new plant X in A's spot which would look SO much better.....now where can I stick Plant B?" Other people think my garden is perfect, but really, no garden is EVER perfect, except if you're lucky enough to catch it in a photo at just the right time!

Just a thought too, if you lay out "curves" for a new bed, take a push mower and make a dry run following the curves. If it works easily (flows), it will make that job much easier and faster leaving more time to enjoy the rest.

Gardening can be frustrating, and I've felt like you do many times in the past 10 years. All of the advice you've been given already rings true. As for the curve verses straight edge as a garden outline, maybe the straight line is a better edge for you, This doesn't mean you have to have a rigid formal garden. Let some edging plants billow and soften the edge, pull a few taller wispy plants forward to soften the look also. The contrast of a straight edge and a loose planting style can be be charming. Remember it's your garden and only you have to like it.
I don't think I have left very many plants in the same spot they started. The most amazing thing I discovered when I first started gardening was that I could change, edit, move plants and most of the time it worked out, I wasn't going to kill them. Being a good gardener usually means taking time to learn what will work for you. I've also killed my share of expensive plants. It happens and it's ok. We all learn a great deal from our mistakes. The process is as important as the result.
.

1. Take heart.

2. Eat the elephant one bite at a time.

3. Remember, plants WANT to grow! They just can't tell you where.

4. We've all been there! I still am!!!!!

Mmm...(munch munch munch)...great elephant, yum! :) Thank you everyone for your support. :)

pam

Always start with the elephant's ear.

Pam, I feel your pain! This is my 4th year gardening, and my garden looks like a chaotic mess. I don't even want to add up how much money I've spent on plants that I ended up killing. BUT, each year, I learn more and get closer to garden nirvana. ;-) I think it's important to throw caution to the wind and experiment with what works best for YOU. Take notes...lots of notes. It's important, at least if you have a memory like I do. I've found that putting whole tomato plants in the compost pile will give me 10,000 volunteers the following spring and that no matter how quick I try to wash myself after touching poison ivy, I will end up with a horribly nasty rash. Lily of the valley and sweet woodruff, both normally invasive, will NOT grow in my impossibly thick clay soil. That 4 hours of sun is NOT the same as 8. Hybrid tea tree roses don't make good foundation plants. Neighborhood cats can be deterred from digging in my shade garden by placing thorny rose canes all over the bed. Rotten bulbs, corms, tubers, etc are REALLY gross when you touch them. Slugs are even grosser and the more you hate them, the more they will come to your garden to taunt you. Spring really will be here soon, so buck up little camper! Tamara

Zone5girl, some people claim that rubbing their poison ivy rash with slugs does the trick!!

lol Victor....I'd need some serious therapy after that!!!! Tamara

Pam! I have been there done that for years. For years I have planted everthing from soup to nuts and tried to work too. I got nowhere but messed up. Since I am older and retired, I am cutting down. I have an area about 100 ft long and 8 ft wide closer to the house where I can see from my front porch. I am very much into hostas now so am lifting my flowers that are in the shade and replaceing them with the hostas, I am planting the ones I lift in 8 ft rows all the way down this garden from short to tall at the far end. I put the walking pavers between each row so I can take my little garden rolling seat and go between the rows and pull weeds. Maybe in 50 years I will have it like I want it. Ha! Ha! Good luck and keep up the gardening. It is good for you. Bev

Here are my garden "confessions"


I've killed many things by just ordering too much and never getting them planted!

I've left all my mints out for the winter and they were in pots -they all died.

I get depressed when I see pics of other's gardens too and wonder why I can't get mine to look like that then someone comes over and ooh's and aahs over mine so....

I planted a lot of veggies last year and only got one pumpkin!

my dogs are currently digging up my raspberries that I just planted last year!

I've been know just to spread out bird seed on the soil so that something green will grow!

My front yard looks terrible too! I do not have the grass gene needed for growing grass! Neither does my DH so we have a lot of dead grass in front.

I waste tons of seed each year because I just broadcast it on the soil in hopes that something will come up - the birds love me.

I've found sunflower heads on my roof from the squirrels playing with them.

I can't have low bird feeders because my dog eats the birdseed!

She also eats my campanula!

I have sandboxes in my yard - for my dogs (I don't have kids) and sand is all over the place when they dig.

I don't worry about my cats messing in my yard - because the dogs eat it!

Currently I have about a ton of dog doo in my garden because of the snow here, I haven't been able to pick it up - I am not looking forward to warm days here!

I have one area where I have spent hundreds of dollars on plants and the only thing growing there now is 4 O'clocks which I never planted!

My philosophy is that if it doesn't grow in my garden it has no business being there anyway!

Pam, are you sure you don't live here in the same house as me? I know where you are coming from. Thanks for the great laugh(nothing personal) it just reminds me of me.

Phuggins, do you have a dog? This will sound really odd, but it works for me. When I am planning a new planting bed, I take my half-blind greyhound Sweetie for walks, repeatedly, in the area I am interested in. You know dogs never walk in a straight line, and their perspective so close to the ground means that they can pick out the easiest path on an incline. I gradually stake out the curve of the new bed, allowing for things like driplines from the trees, etc. Then I have a good path, and I extend the bed(s) out from there.

I think also that the "path" chosen by my little sweetie tends to be the most relaxing, or stress-free. Because she is blind she is easily spooked by odd movement, or objects that we probably do not register consciously, but she avoids them. And by following her instincts I avoid placing the path where I will be distracted from the garden that I want to see.

Thanks again for all the support...and confessions :) ...sometimes I think I should in all honesty report MYSELF in the "crimes against nature" thread. (Forgive me father, for I have...tried to plant azaleas in clay.) Greenjay, I like the paths-by-sweetie idea...how creative...I don't have a dog, but maybe my two-year-old would work. :) Zone5girl, I do in fact keep reasonably good notes of what goes on in my various gardens...thank goodness...I'm actually trained as a scientist and the note-taking thing was drummed into me pretty early on. We actually had a couple of days of warm (50s) weather last week, so I got outside and shoveled compost and cleaned the basement and actually felt much better. Inactivity is the worst.

Now if it would only stop snowing! :)

pam