The Experiment: Day 196 ~ Growing A Pot Garden in Baby Steps…

A few more pots on the deck…

Well, in bits and pieces I am growing my pot garden. The delightful little square pots (there are two more that you can’t see because I couldn’t get a wide enough angle, along the green benches that are cut off on both sides in the picture) were out in front of the grocery store, an amazing $5 each. The pots alone would have been that or more at Lowes. They are dahlias, begonias, and red geraniums. And when I went to Costco today to get the 6 big planters that will go down the middle of the deck and the soil to fill them I found the amazing big rosemary in the blue pot just under the pink and peach geraniums for only $15. (I’m just going to call them geraniums because when I say Pelargoniums nobody seems to know what I’m talking about!) I have learned how to root cuttings to grow more rosemary but I needed a good mother plant. I found it! I want to have rosemary growing everywhere.

The deck is in sad shape. It needs power washing, and a little over a year ago a couple of boards had to be replaced and are not painted. I have a can of paint here (Is paint good after 4 years? And if those boards get painted now will it make everything else look dreadful?) left over from when they painted the deck in 2014 after the house was rebuilt after the fire but I just don’t know if it will look worse trying to make it look better? I’d love to have the whole thing repainted but that is just not in the budget.

My son Aaron who is in town for a few days is going to be here tomorrow to help me with a list of things that need to be done. Things like lifting heavy things, changing air filters that are up high, all the kinds of things that are so hard to do when you are older and live alone. I am so grateful he is going to be able to help me. Since he was going to be here I went to Costco and got the planters — they are resin but like the wooden half barrels, they will make perfect big pots to plant in on the deck — and I got a dozen huge bags of potting soil. It was a leap but these pots will see me years into the future planting on the deck. This morning I went out into the yard and gathered eighteen bricks, 3 for each pot, to set them on so they don’t rot the deck. But the thing is Aaron won’t be here until tomorrow and I had a bit of a fiasco with the potting soil.

The lovely gentleman at Costco loaded up the soil, 9 bags in the back end and 3 bags on the back seat. These are huge 55 quart bags and they are HEAVY. I had figured that Aaron could get them out tomorrow when he got here BUT the guy who loaded them up kind of overloaded the back, or didn’t get them in right, and I didn’t realize it until I was driving home and the red light was on on the dash indicating that the back end was NOT shut right. My heart sank. I wasn’t sure what to do. These bags are too heavy for me to lift and there were 9 of them back there. The other 3 and the 6 half barrels and the rosemary were in the back seat. Lordy.

I pulled into the driveway without pulling into the garage (It’s a tight fit in the best of times!). I opened the door to the back seat (Honda Elements hold a LOT in the back end but the doors on the side are peculiar in the way that they open. You open the front door in a regular fashion but the back doors open kind of backwards at an odd angle. I opened it up, got the half barrels out and dragged them into the front of the garage (This opens onto the deck.) and then did my best to pull out and drag the 3 bags of potting soil out onto the ground just outside the garage door. That was as far as I could get them. I had hoped, foolishly, that perhaps it was the side door to the back seat making the thing light up on the dash. Nope, it was the back end, and how I was going to deal with 9 bags I had no clue.

I pulled into the garage, shut the garage door, and stood staring at the back end willing it to unload itself. Ha ha ha, as if! I opened it up — it opens up on the top and down on the bottom and I stared at what might as well have been a million pounds of potting soil, and then I did the only thing I could do. I pulled and tugged and heaved 6 bags out, getting them to the edge and letting 3 fall to the ground and then dragging a few more to the side. I got enough out to shut the doors. I checked the light on the dash. It was off. I made it.

I carried my little grocery store plants and the rosemary onto the deck and got the pugs out. They were practically doing back flips because they’d heard me pull in but I never came in. I think they thought I’d died out there! I thought I might!

Aaron is going to help me tomorrow with drilling holes in all the new colorful pots I bought and a few other pots I found here in the garage and then I will know how to do it myself. He will get all the really big ones filled for me and then I will have him stack whatever is left of the potting soil in bags on the back of the deck so I can just pot up the smaller more manageable pots on my own. Plants are on the way and by the end of April all of the plants, bulbs, and seeds I’ve ordered will be planted. I will have the raised beds planted with seeds and the roses will all be blooming. I talked to Maurice today and he will be here next Wednesday to see what’s what as far as getting the ground ready in the planting areas in the green gated garden and along the long fence to plant seeds there. By May I will be watering regularly and watching things sprout.

Just now I am sitting here watching the wild birds. It is 6:45, and they come in droves this time of night just before it gets dark. I am noticing something. The female Red-Bellied woodpecker, whom I never saw until recently, is here several times a day and I am not seeing the male who was previously here constantly. I am thinking maybe he is staying with the babies. I am going to have to read up on this. It is fascinating. There is so much happening now, here, just outside these windows and on the deck that I barely have time to think of anything else. And now I remember the years when I didn’t have time to be depressed because there was simply too much to do outside. Making a garden and feeding and watching the wildlings really doesn’t give one time to be depressed. There is simply too much to see, to do, a whole world of wonder and endless delights.

Oh my goodness, I am back! The natural world is where I belong. How could I not have gardened, why did it take so long to put the feeders back up? Now every day is filled with so much I just feel overcome with joy. What will the summer bring? I can’t begin to imagine. And who has time to even think about it? The present moment is full of so much I can’t think beyond now. Now I am planting and dreaming whole new worlds. Who needs more than this? Not I. Surely, not I.

The Experiment ~A 365 Day Search For Truth, Beauty &
Happiness: Day 1 ~ Introduction To The Project
“Do or do not. There is no try.”
Yoda