From the voice of experience. Making wine is a highly developed skill. In my whole life starting with the wine mother made I have never....almost never...tasted good home made wine of any kind. My wine money and time consists of a trip to the store where a really good bottle of wine costs as little as twenty bucks a gallon.
My wine making experiences were only two. The first and the last. It was "What the hell was that" !...... when the mother plugged the vent in my basement ten gallon keg production. That sucker shot wine all over the place leaving me with no wine but one. For sure I wined about cleaning that mess up. That was my two times..........first and last. I love good California and Oregon organic wines. They know what they are doing. I do too....now.
I STARTED GARDENING...........
Too funny doc!!
Thanks Carrie!
When I bought my house and I am loving it!!
I had just moved into a place where the owner let me have free range of the newly bulldozed 2 acres of nothing, I had just finished one of my terms of school, and I had about 3 months between school and a job. A friend of mine worked at a plant nursery that needed to hire and asked if I would like to work there. I had never heard of the place, didn't know squat about plants other than what I thought was common sense things. I thought "what the heck, it's only 3 months." I started the next day. After being there a few weeks they asked me how I came to know what I did about plants. I was honest and said "I read the books on your shelf after I started here." They just laughed and I'm still working there 10 years later. And since I'm a complete push over when it comes to all things living, any plant that had been deemed "too ugly" or "too stressed" that went into the compost pile that still had a trace of life came home with me, no matter how mangled. Consequently I have the most sporatic menagerie of rhodies, and hard to find plants since that's what the place carries. For several years I had one of the ugliest assortments of a garden out there. Now, after several years of TLC, pruning, fertilizing, and actually arranging those once "ugly" plants so that they work together in beds, I actually have what someone might consider to be a garden....10 years later!
This message was edited Apr 16, 2008 12:14 AM
That sounds just wonderful. Please post photos. Best wishes for you and your garden.
lol, thanks. maybe wonderful, but whatever it it... it's something! I'll post some pictures late tonight when I get home.
Yeah, redchic! Sounds great! Photos please!
What a great story! Can't wait to see the pics.
I wish I were as optimistic about my garden as you folks are!! I also havn't figured out if it's even possible to post more than one picture per reply. I found something out though.... i've never really taken pictures of the yard just to get a view of it, i'm usually after a particular plant. some pic's you'll have to ignore the forground plant... such as the first picture. Taken late may last year. Ignore the purple rhody in the front, the elk had pruned it a couple of weeks before the picture. The red rhody and the variegated one in the background are about half there former selves since I had to take down a dead tree the year before. I did get the tree to miss all the plants! unfortunately there were those little things called branches.
and the variegated one is still hidden. I just noticed in the one before that it's obscured by the big purple flower in the way. now it's behind another one.
This message was edited Apr 17, 2008 1:20 PM
pic taken yesterday. I've already begun pruning the eventually giant rhodies, if it's a branch that didn't have bloom buds.... well, it's probably a little shorter and leafless at the moment.
This message was edited Apr 17, 2008 1:43 PM
also taken yesterday. In the picture, but still sleeping are 4 or 5 hosta's (actually you can just barely see little hosta "nana" right by the pencil starting to come up), 2 painted ferns, a few meconopsis grandis, and the the dear or elk recently ate 3 heuchera's. Thank goodness for the tough pulmonarias! I wouldn't have a thing going on right now if not for them.
This message was edited Apr 17, 2008 2:31 PM
yesterday
there was a bed of sorts where the grass/moss is, but an old city water main, that hasn't been useful for 40 years, ruptured and I quickly up rooted as many as were salvagable, so that crews could dig up the line to repair and ultimately remove. Haven't gotten around to redoing it yet.
that rhody was due for it's last "cycle" of a heavy pruning, of course after it finished flowering. That rhody is almost 4 feet shorter now than it was before. (It was a dumpster plant that recovered waaaayyyy too fast)
YIKES! the jungle!! that monarda and daylilly are both 6 -7 feet tall and only about 4 years old when the picture was taken. if anybody needs proof of this I have a picture with my 10 year old neice standing in the plant bed.
This message was edited Apr 17, 2008 2:25 PM
This message was edited Apr 17, 2008 2:37 PM
ok.... anybody bored to death yet? few those were maybe half of the areas of the yard that i'll show.
Very pretty!
great pictures,gardens are wonderful
I love seeing the pics!
wow!
Wow, You folks are really nice! I need to hang out with northeast gardeners more often! Then again.... maybe it's a way to feed the plant addiction by looking for the one plant we don't have yet, even if it's just in a picture. lol ok... so I guess pics of the other areas (only the ones i'm not to embarrassed to show) will be coming in a little bit.
ok. I wasn't going to post this one, because i had surgery in in early fall and didn't get around to cutting stuff back. But it's the best views of the Forest Pansy twins as i call them. I also don't like it because my lavender hedge has taken a beating. Spring before last the back 5 or 6 feet of the bank fell down the river bank taking with it 6 of the lavenders (along with some other plants at the back of the jungle) then this last summer they seem to have come down with a fungus, either that or their roots have been disturbed by the shift in ground as well. So they have been wacked at, but not all at once to hopefully lessen the shock. Ugh... my babies. :-( the good news is that most of them are growing this spring. And now it's supposed to snow again here in two days. It's going to freeze so much new growth! Just like it did two weeks ago when we had record snow and cold (for that date) we warmed up to 85 last weekend and now they are saying record snow and cold again. :-( :-( Guess i really don't need to wonder why the lavender are sick!
This message was edited Apr 18, 2008 12:54 AM
last fall before they fell ill
senior cat at her favorite watch post
you wouldn't believe how long i patiently waited to see what this strange foliage thing was going to do or bloom or whatever. I didn't plant it and none of the neighbors have any. I waited and waited. then..... it finally bloomed.
I took that picture to work the next day. First thing I said to anyone was, as I held up the picture, what the hell is this? After many uuuu's, ahhhs, and just plain ???? looks, I now know that I have a voodoo lilly. i think that they are a little more common on the east coast, in the warmer areas? Still completely clueless about how it ended up there.
taken as working on my retaining wall to hold up the ones left
the culprit in low season
This message was edited Apr 18, 2008 1:30 AM
again
and again.
looking west from the forest pansy's
a week or two later
the only view of northe that i'll show
south. the year prior to the picture some arsonist shot at the transformer in the powerline above this area to try to start a forest fire. Gee, not much of a match for the sprinkler system, but it still got to an area of about a 150' radius before I got to turn the system on and then fire folks were there a few minutes later. most of the on shorter, bushier, died or heavily damaged. My favorite dogwood (I have no idea how the cercis lived) was damaged but the the thing bloomed great the next year! It's going to bloom great this year two (that is if the snow doesn't kill the flower buds) but it is starting to show a lot of signs of stress.
one side of the house
same side, 10 feet over
another 10' over
west.... looking east. I've begun to do some replanting, after the fire, in there. Now, mostly a good place for plants the need tlc
after a fall thunderstorm
