Good morning, and here's to another year. Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging, Sixth Anniversary Edition!
We've had pretty normal February weather in Denver this week. Highs have been in the 40s to 50s (except yesterday when it was 24°); lows have been in the 20s (except for last night when it was 13°). We got a spit of snow Thursday and Friday, but it wasn't even enough to coat the ground.
And for the weekend… warming up a bit, but not warm enough to got out and fart around in the garden, as it was that fateful Saturday in February 2005 when, as I waited for the frost to burn off I posted the very first Saturday Morning Garden Blogging
It was a whim; I was impatient. And I'm still sitting here in front of a computer on Saturday mornings.
As I've done in past years, I'm re-posting a few of my favorite photos from the last year.
Back in early December a commenter complained about the content of my posting that week, dismissing my offerings as "inane" and asserting that I should be displaying my expertise about gardening on the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies.
There were a couple of problems with that comment, the critique of my writing style not being one of them. I admit that some of my ramblings are less than compelling (face it, it's hard to come up with content week after week, especially in the dead of winter), but I force no one to read any of them and, indeed, harbor doubts that the Saturday Morning Garden Blogging diary is read with any care, if at all, by a lot of people who are weekly participants.
No, the first problem is that I am not an expert, and have never claimed expertise about gardening here or anywhere else. Indeed, I frequently express my frustration with so-called experts and suspect that many proclaim the difficulty of one process or another solely for the purpose of burnishing their own mystique. I am not educated about a lot of things, but I am curious, and I do experiment, and I write about my experimentation, what has worked for me, and what has not — never discounting that serendipity has a lot to do with what I manage to accomplish. Because I had a datura that happened to survive for many years outside it's hardiness zone is not a testament to how much I know about sheltering tender perennials, but a quirk of a microclimate by my front steps and a series of mild winters allowing the datura to gain a huge root mass which allowed it to survive colder temperatures.
Now, I have shared that experience as an example of how using the microclimates discovered in a yard may allow others to grow a tender perennial that may not otherwise survive where they live.
And you know, just because tomatoes happen to adore the soil that happened to come with my house, it doesn't mean that I'm an expert in growing tomatoes — I haven't been able to give the Polish Princess any depth of knowledge which allows her to duplicate that result at her house, just a few miles from where I live. However, I do share which tomato varieties have worked well for me, and why I gave up on growing heirlooms varieties.
The second problem with the comment was that Saturday Morning Garden Blogging is decidedly not about gardening on the Front Range. How boring would that be for everyone else? And how useless for anyone outside the Denver-metro area. There are some generalities that transfer to gardening in other parts of the country, but I am heartbreakingly aware that how gardening works in Oregon is different than how gardening works in Denver or Florida or Texas or Ontario or Maine (damn but I wish I could grow different varieties of daphne). Shit, gardening in my little corner of Denver — where we are blessed with sandy loam rather than the more typical Colorado clay, is different from gardening in the suburbs.
And the reason that Saturday Morning Garden Blogging is not about gardening on the Colorado Front Range is because Saturday Morning Garden Blogging is not about me — it's about you. All of you people who show up week after week, posting your photos and allowing the rest of us to discover plants we might not have stumbled across in ordinary course, sharing seeds, relating how you have dealt with pests that might not affect me in Denver (I've never seen a Japanese beetle) but may be a big problem in other parts of the country.
I doubt Saturday Morning Garden Blogging would have lasted had it been centered on me, or Denver. I would have long ago grown bored of staring at my own navel and run out of ways to pretend that I'm smarter than I am.
So here's a cheer for all of you, who have allowed me to prattle inanely about fucking Christmas trees, post pictures of my cats and otherwise take credit for what truly is not my making. You're the best.
That's what's happening here. What's going on in your garden?