The Gardeners Anonymous Blog

When I Do Good I Feel Good

Some of my friends asked why I haven’t updated my blog about my drought-tolerant garden lately.

The project is mostly done but it’s on hold because of money. I should be able to update in March, for I’m pretty sure by then it’ll finally be done.

I feel like another statistic of this financial crisis.

And it’s so easy to get caught up in all the negativity and fear. After all, three people that I’ve known have put guns to their heads and pulled the trigger in the past few months. Most of my friends have lost great amounts of money and equity.

It’s a trying time for sure.

I have recently made a pact with myself that I will have a positive thought every day and try to do nice things for people and maybe even write a post about it.
Here are some things I did today.

I saved a newt.

I ran with my dog.

I brought my son lunch and he smiled at me—lifting the smeared chocolate in the corner of his mouth from the cookie I had snuck into his paper bag.

I called my husband and thanked him for making breakfast.

I opened a door for a lady with her stroller–twice.

I hugged both my boys until they told me to stop.

Here’s the thought for my day:

Try to be the change you want to see in the world.

Stumble It!

Chicken in a Pot

No, this is not a recipe post.

It’s about my friend Sivia, her garden, and her pet chickens. I’ve experimented with pet chickens before and the experiment went terribly wrong. Besides attacking my husband, my children, and a Viet Nam vet, my chicken, Missy Peeps (whom later turned out to be Mr. Peeps) ate all my plants.

Sivia has a few tricks up her sleeve for keeping harmony in her garden—even with chickens milling about. I was never able to do this.

First she keeps her veggie garden in a raised bed and netted at all times. Planting veggie gardens in a raised bed is a good idea, as chickens will destroy seedlings and young plants down on the ground.

My chicken not only ate all my plants—he pooped all over my patio—chased my poor dogs, and of course, never laid a damned egg. Sivia’s chickens lay eggs, primarily because they’re not roosters.

Sivia has a pen where the chickens sleep at night and where she can lock them up when she needs too.

She also keeps some of her more tender plants in pots.

Sivia uses a technique I like to call the pointy stick technique for keeping her chickens out of her flowerbeds. You take sticks approximately two feed long and stick them in the ground around your garden. You can push them into the ground at a slant. Diagonally placed sticks actually look kind of nice around a flower bed, like a rustic border. You could use wooden kabob sticks but they are kind of short and they will decompose rather fast.

Garden Hero

The other day, I asked a friend why I loved my new dog so much.

She said she thought that it was just transference of my love for the two dogs I had lost recently.

She is probably right.

But today I have a new reason to put my new precious pup on a pedestal.

My new dog is a gardening star: She, Moondoggie, killed a gopher.

My husband, my dog, and I decided to brave the downpour and take a walk. I didn’t take a camera because it truly was a downpour. It was so wet that as we strolled through an open field we could see the little rodent holes filling up, some were bubbling as the air inside was being replaced with water.

This particular element of the rainstorm was not good for little ground dwelling creatures. We moved our eyes from the little bubbling burrows to our dog romping through the deluge. She was running with joy as usual, when all of a sudden her ears perked forward she leapt into the air and pounced.

Drooling On My Pillow

O.K., here is the 4-1-1 on Animal Planet’s pygmy rattlesnake.

It turns out that the pygmy rattlesnake was from Florida. The guy who got bitten had what they call in the snakebite-emergency-medicine business “a legitimate bite”. That means the victim did nothing to provoke the snake. He didn’t even know it was there.

“There” was a potted palm.

This guy went to a gardening center to pick up some palm trees for his yard. He reached down to pick up a potted plant and BAM, a snake that was sitting in the container bites him.

The moral of the story is: Buyer beware.

He lived, and didn’t even lose his hand or any part of his hand.

I’m going back to bed now.

What Do Gardeners Do During the Winter?

Some gardeners are lucky enough to have greenhouses to play in during the winter months, most have some place in their home that holds plants they care for during those cold rainy or snowy winter days.

We also order seeds and plants and plan our spring gardens. But for me…well, hell, it doesn’t matter now, because I have the flu. I have the flu on the tail of a cold. I have been working backstage in my son’s play for the last two weeks and, of course have been exposed to 67 kids in close quarters for most of that time.

What else should I have expected? So here I lay, laptop on my...well...lap, not really feeling like doing anything. I have a one-hundred-degree fever and I feel like I just went ten rounds with Mike Tyson.

I’m bored.

Dinner’s in the crock pot. I don’t feel like reading. There’s nothing on TV.

So imagine my surprise and excitement when I saw that Venom 911 will be playing soon on Animal Planet. This segment is about a gardener that gets bitten by a pygmy rattlesnake.

Yeah, something to do, that has to do with gardening where I can just lie on my side and drool on my pillow.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’ve never heard of a pygmy rattlesnake before.
 Click here to read about my rattlesnake.

More Rain

It has been rainy for the last couple of days and it’s supposed to rain for the next few days.

The garden is wet and muddy and messy, so I will wait to work in it for a few more days.

But today it is not raining.

Today is a good day to take my dog for a walk.

But “take my dog for a walk” is really a misnomer when what I really do is follow my dog, isn’t it?

I try to be good, I really do. The latest training technique to keep your dog from pulling your arm out of its socket is one where you let the dog pull and you stop. You give the command heal and then you wait for your dog to loosen the slack. When the dog loosens the slack by turning her head or backing up you praise the dog and move forward. You keep repeating this until your dog realizes that she won’t get very far unless she moves at your speed.

Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Like many training techniques this one is great in theory. The thing that these so called trainers forget to tell you is that you have to have more patients than the dog. Oopy.

Moondoggie (my dog) is a cattle dog and border collie mix. A border collie is supposed to be one of the smartest breeds in the world. Smart does not equal easy to train. On the contrary. She knows she can outlast me. And therefore,  I follow my dog.

She is always drawn to the lake bed.

Here are a couple highlights from our walk.

A front row seat at the lake bed

Our first newt sighting.

And of course, the star of our walk

Stumble It!