Commence Operation Daylily

Here in Kansas, the weather seems to be turning, and when the wind stops blowing for brief instances of time, ProfessorRoush can get outside,experience fresh unmask-filtered air, and see what he's been missing all week as he drives into work in darkness and comes home too tired to visit the garden.  As you can see, my Magnolia stellata burst into bloom on Friday, the first spring shrub to show up this year.   The petals are a little brown on the edges and that alluring musky fragrance is barely detectable in the nippy air, even without the mask, but it's a sure sign that spring has arrived. 

I was able to take advantage of a productive few hours on Saturday, the sun just warm enough to allow me to shed a coat and the wind just quiet enough to let me pile up some debris, so I frantically attacked the back bed, ripping out the dry remnants of peonies and daylilies.  Those piles build up quickly, as you can see to the right, but only two trips with the sheetbarrow down the hill to the burn pile and they were gone.  

This bed, as you can see, now looks much more tidy, as tidy as I'm ever willing to make it.  I'm not a fanatic about picking up every stray strand of debris; the Kansas wind and God will do the rest.  But it is clean enough that the fully-blooming daffodil clumps that live here in a full southern, unshaded exposure now look much happier in their upgraded surroundings, reflecting back the sunshine in their cheery yellow faces.

As soon as the bed was cleared, I also executed a long-held plan to fill this area pictured to the right with daylily divisions from other areas; the most beautiful daylilies of my garden.   Formerly, this area held an overgrown and suckering bayberry bush that never caught my fancy, and a struggling lilac that the bayberry had strangled nearly to death.  Resolving last year to fill it with daylilies, I had staked out the best of my daylilies as they bloomed, the larger clumps all over the garden that were ready for division.  Twenty or so divisions later, an equal number of holes dug, a little water sprayed around, and the deed was done.  You can see one of the staked daylilies in the picture above.

Why daylilies, you might be asking?   Well, an old gardener, like ProfessorRoush, is also a wise gardener.  The fleeting gardening whims and indiscretions of my youth are far behind me, set aside and subdued by the realities of sore hands and thighs and a hundred scars.  To be a wise gardener, one becomes a simple gardener, and no plant creates beauty and requires less care on the Kansas prairie than a daylily.  Plant them, watch them bloom, and each year  it requires only a few seconds of the removal of dead debris and they're renewed again, a cycle of gracefulness and self-sufficiency that I can't turn down.  As I age with my garden, I turn to daylilies more and more often to provide color and carefree joy in the hot Kansas sun.  I'll show you this area again, later this summer, so we can enjoy the "fruits" of my labor together.

Sunny Satisfaction

ProfessorRoush did just exactly what he said in last week's blog as he skedaddled last Sunday out into a rare, warm early February.  I chose to tackle the back garden bed surrounding the patio, a choice made on the basis that it is the south-facing bed and was bathed in sunshine all afternoon.  I wanted those golden rays on the back of my neck all day and blessedly received it!


On a day where the local temperatures reached 70ºF, I quickly shed first a down sleeveless vest and then a flannel shirt, baring maximal skin for Vitamin D production within minutes after starting.  Short sleeves in February?  Oh, yes and loving every minute, as was the grass-rolling and sunshine-crazy Bella, joining me in the joy of a pseudo-Spring.  Sheetbarrow II and I launched into full antic mode, respectively holding and pulling load after load of daylily debris, rose cuttings, and other leavings down to the trimmings pile, to be burned along with the prairie when spring really arrives.

Before

After

It was a great weather day for great accomplishments and at the end of a few hours, I had cleaned up the entire back perennial bed and the smaller daylily and peony bed near the deck.  I know that some fastidious and flaky gardeners  don't consider this "clean," as it is certainly not raked to bare ground, but this is as close as my garden ever gets to spring tidiness.  ProfessorRoush removes the vast overage of last summer's growth and if a few leaves and old mulch are left behind, so much the better to put new mulch upon.  At least nothing is impeding the sprouts of daylilies and daffodils as they push up from the cold earth.

Before

After

The rebirth of life is, in fact, already starting in my garden, the tranquil and healthy daffodil sprouts in the first picture above uncovered from within the dried remnants of last years leaves.   You can see before and after pictures of both beds both above and here.  Pick over them to your heart's content, because the next time you see pictures of these, the edges and debris will be covered in green.   Since winter returned this week, with the highest daytime temperature only reaching the 50º mark and that on a brisk windy day that felt 30º, I can only pray that it will come soon.

Bed Measures of Man

Saturday last was a glorious, windless, sunny day of almost 70ºF here on the Kansas prairie, a premature peek at the spring season before winter rallies once again.  ProfessorRoush took advantage of the good-natured weather to begin his spring chores and he bounded madly out with shears, sprayer and sheetbarrow to work for a few cherished hours.

As I removed vast tons of brown winter debris, trimmed a few roses, sprayed the fruit trees with dormant oil, and puttered here and yon with gleeful abandon, I also spent some time in general pondering, mulling once more over the beginning of another year in an aging but happy life.  And it occurred to me that, other than merely making my muscles sore and strained, the measure of my accomplishments on this Saturday could be calculated in beds.  In all, I cleared the debris from 7 beds, or about 3 of the 4 sides of the house.  It was thus a record day, a 7-bed day, in the annals of my gardening life.

It seems to me that one can ultimately measure one's health, aging processes, and perhaps even the advancement of one's wisdom by keeping track of the number of beds one can clean on a first day of spring.  I was certainly pleased on this Saturday that there was no measurable decrease in the number of beds I was able to clear from last year.  In fact, I was even more productive than ever, a gain that I would like to attribute to working wiser, not harder, as I age.  Certainly, I surprised even myself by finding that the abrasion of time has yet to seriously cramp my gardening agenda.

While mulling, my thoughts also turned to how many of the decades of man can also be measured by a number in beds.  As a child, happiness is roughly equivalent to the number of warm and safe beds into which one has been snugly and tightly tucked.  Active pre-teen and teenage males often measure their vitality in the number of uncomfortable but adventurous beds they make in tents or under stars.   Young adult men of my post-hippie generation (and likewise those of all generations reaching back to the Babylonians), measure their victories in the number of strange beds in which one spent a night, a contest that I gladly surrendered to others after I discovered the joys of repeated moments in the embrace of Mrs. ProfessorRoush.  Here in middle age, I'm happy counting in gardening beds, but I recognize that life by garden beds can only last so long.  Old men, too, have a different sort of measure by beds; the measure of how many hospital beds one either avoids or is forced into.

The latter, though is in the future for this gardener.  Today is the feel of sunshine, the buttery yellow of the first snow crocus, warm mulch beneath my knees, and sharp shears in my hands.  

Wheelbarrow Schlemiel-barrow

Listen carefully.  I'm about to divulge my best, most-useful, most-fabulous gardening secret.  Wait for it....wait for it....

Get rid of your wheelbarrow. 

Wheelbarrows are medieval, cumbersome, unwieldy, often heavy, monstrosities that should be banned from gardening circles and left to muscular, sweaty construction crews.  Literally, although there is some evidence that the Greeks and Romans may have used something similar, the best evidence is that the wheelbarrow became popular during the dark Middle Ages of Western culture.  As far as I am concerned  it should have been left there in the Middle Ages. 

I don't own a wheelbarrow anymore.  I've had two in the past twenty years; a typical steel-bodied, one-wheel contraption, and a two-wheeled plastic cart.  Both suffered from the same problems in my eyes; limited payload sizes, a strong tendency to tip over on uneven surfaces and with large loads, tiresome to drag back up the Flint Hills after emptying, and finally, they just took up too much storage space.  I threw the last one out when it fell off its designated wall hanger and banged into my shin.

Instead, for the past five years, I've been happy using a simple flat bedsheet to collect all my spring garden debris.  The particular bedsheet I use, pictured at right, is an old one, in fact it was a wedding gift for us 28 years ago, our first set of married sheets.  Once retired from use for slumber and other indoor activities, it has been variously used over the years as a frost cover for plants, and as a dropcloth for painting walls and staining decks before it was requisitioned as a load-bearing device. In fact, it could still be used for most of  those activities without sacrificing its usefulness as my substitute barrow.  My "sheetbarrow."      

There are a number of advantages to a sheetbarrow, not the least of which is that you don't have to lift the load except to gather the forward three corners and angle them up a bit.  In that regard, it still functions as a somewhat flexible Class II Lever (I'm sorry to introduce Physics 101 into the subject).  The ground supports all the weight of the load and the energy to overcome the friction of a fairly smooth cotton surface against the smooth grass is substituted for the energy of bearing the weight of the load, to the benefit of my lumbar vertebrae.  It stays where you stop, never trying to continue downhill in an accelerating fashion. It won't tip over a heavy load and smash your toes.  It is light to carry back uphill after you dump the load and dumping the load is a simple matter of "flipping" the sheet. And it folds (or crumples) compactly for easy storage.      

Now, it's true, you could purchase a reinforced plastic tarp or an expensive, heavy cansas tarp and accomplish the same task, but an old bedsheet is lighter, and doesn't make the irritating crackly plastic noises of a store-bought tarp.  The stain and paint residue has left my bedsheet stiff in places and may have welded the fibers together to improve the material strength, but I've only got one small hole in it after five years of Spring use for all kinds of materials, including vast loads of thorny rose trimmings.  And perhaps it is true that the sheetbarrow works exceptionally well in my circumstances because I garden on a hill and deposit all the wastes at the bottom of the hill so that I'm always moving the weight downhill over a smooth mown grass surface.  But I can pile a lot of material, including limbs, on a bedsheet that I couldn't fit into a wheelbarrow and I've never had the bedsheet smash one of my toes. 

So rummage through your closet, grab an old bedsheet, and give it a try.  You may not agree that it performs quite as good as I've advertised, but I believe you'll find it an improvement over your typical hardware store wheelbarrow offering.  If nothing else, the memories evoked by the old sheet may keep a smile on your face as you trudge down and back from the debris pile.