Gardens of Defiance

Ever since I was a little girl, I had wanted a garden like I would read about in books. You know the kind: with the garden gate or secret doors and walls to close you off from the rest of the world. The messier and lush with vegetation and color the better. I would look at pictures of such in magazines, online, and coffee table books; dreaming of lolling away my days surrounded by English-style or Southern Living gardens. Only the sounds of birds chirping and the breeze blowing through while I would take leisurely naps in a hammock or lounge chair. Maybe even entertain a person or two in my secret garden if I was feeling like having company.

I finally have the space for such a garden. Yes, there are birds chirping. Yes, a breeze blows through. And yet…it’s nothing like I imagined. Instead of the peaceful Shangri-La, I have a push and pull, battle of the wills reality. I have gardens of defiance.

The woods, woodland critters, insects, and Northeast Ohio weather pushed at me hard. They’re going to do what they want. They don’t care about my vision. Nature plays by its own rules, as much as humans try to micromanage and change that.

The woods are constantly trying to swallow the manicured, cultivated areas. I keep having to pull tulip tree, maple tree, and ash tree saplings out of my pots and garden beds. Canadian goldenrod pops up everywhere. Corn stalks appear in pots, the lawn, and other weird places where the squirrels and chipmunks bury the deer feed. Poison ivy snakes through the hydrangea bushes and up the crabapple trees.

When we bought the property over seven years ago, the garden bed area nearest our gate at the driveway was perfectly manicured with hostas, panicled hydrangeas, and lemon grass. Now it has towering trees growing through it and chameleon plants which have swallowed everything up. Another couple of beds with bulb variety flowers have long been swallowed up by the woods. The previous owner who put in all those beds admitted to us that the property had become too much to manage. He was mowing twice a week and tending to everything else daily. Even though he was retired, it required so much energy and attention that he just couldn’t keep up.

The other properties around us have just let the woods be their natural beauty. There is nothing to manage at all, until a storm blows a tree across a driveway that must be removed. Rather than fight nature and try to be its caretaker, however, they just simply live in harmony with what is and they leave it be. Sometimes I am envious of that simplicity.

Back on our property, the critters will eat and destroy what they want. They’ve hit the bonanza, after all. Somebody came along and gave them all this free food they do not have to hunt for. And the silly humans didn’t electric fence it in. Woo hoo!

Same with the bugs. Japanese beetles love to ravage my grape vines every year. There are remedies but one requires poison, which is not ideal if we want to eat the grapes, and the other is costly because of how much area I would have to cover—milky spore. The costly option isn’t even guaranteed to work here in Northeast Ohio, I found out. It works great in warmer climates. In ours, it could take years before it helps solve the problem.

Weather? Don’t get me started. You see, we have this little thing called “lake effect” out here. Never mind what comes at us from the West, South, and Canada. Lake Erie makes up its own weather system. Imagine rain, snow, drought, and wind on steroids creating weather phenomenon that defy logic. And it hasn’t been a happy medium of my gardens this year. Too cold. Too hot. Too wet. Too dry. Too windy. Oh, look! A tornado.

The scenario of perfect gardens inside of my head be damned!

At first I pushed back because I’m stubborn. I wanted that picture in my daydreams to manifest in my outer world.

Thankfully, I’ve been able to keep the deer from chewing the hostas down to nubs this year! Last year, I had no flowers thanks to a group of does and their fawns.

In my last blog post, I talked about learning patience and learning how to work with my environment. It took a long time to come into acceptance and peace with it. I’m a work in progress, but I’m just about there. I realized that while it will never be perfect, there are some things I can do to at least help with the critter situation.

Earlier this week, I was making my normal morning rounds in the veggie and herb garden and noticed that once again, my grape tomatoes were pulled off the plants and laying in the dirt of the beds. Arrrrrgggh! The critters have been doing this for the past month, and I realized they really don’t like the taste of them. Each oval shaped tomato would have a single bite out of them. This time, there were no bites at all. The little bastards were just pulling them for fun now.

Same with my bell peppers. They didn’t like the taste of them a few weeks ago either. And as with the grape tomatoes that morning, I found a couple of bell peppers simply picked and left uneaten in the garden bed soil. Damn. Those peppers were not ready for picking, so now that is two less bell peppers I’m going to have.

As I rounded around to the bed where the bush beans are growing, I stopped short. All over the pine needle covered ground lay a whole bunch of green bean pods. None of them were chewed on. Just simply picked and littered all over the place. That really pissed me off. I could understand if they were eating them, but this destruction was unacceptable.

I figured it was a raccoon. I didn’t want to be impressed, but I was. I noticed that all the veggies pulled from the plants were cleanly picked. Nothing chewed nor were leaves pulled off. The only critters with crafty little hands that could pull that off are raccoons. I looked over at the woods and cursed them all.

Then I noticed my zucchini had been raided again. There was no doubt about who ate the blossoms and baby zucchinis. Deer. Chomped on stems. If I actually get one zucchini this year, it will be a miracle.

A few days later, I was standing outside with Rob looking at the gardens and telling him that I had come to the acceptance that this year was going to be a wash for the gardens. It was too late for anything to try to be saved. The weather has been awful and some of the veggies are not doing well. My tomatoes are nowhere as robust as they were in other years, the sweet peas are dying, the roma tomatoes are barely producing, and the bell peppers are stunted. We’ve been alternating between a heat wave and no rain to too much rain. And then there’s my garden raiders.

I told Rob that I’m finally ready to spend the money and create a fenced in veggie garden. It’s not a guarantee to keep anything out, but it will be better than having no protection at all. So we’re planning now for next year’s gardens.

And despite what I said in my last blog post about coming to terms that I can’t have the types of flower and plants I loved so much in California…

On Monday, a box arrived. From Sacramento, California. I hopped down the stairs from our sunroom to retrieve it by the garage door and ran up the hill with it to outside my She Shed. The panels were slid wide open that day, giving my citrus trees lots of direct sunlight and fresh air. With glee and hope that my item didn’t arrive dead, I pulled out a potted bougainvillea. One of my most favorite plants.

After watching all but two of the magenta colored bracts fall into the grass of the hill, I checked over the rest of the plant really well. I knew I was probably going to lose the bracts and some leaves after the plant had been traveling in darkness—going through who knows what—for almost a week. It was the rest of it I was worried about. My worry was unfounded. The vines and rest of the leaves are very healthy. Whew!

I put my new baby inside the She Shed next to my little lime, blood orange, and lemon trees I bought at the end of Spring at Tractor Supply Store. I’ve tried growing citrus in my sunroom a handful of years ago, and they did not survive. I’m hoping for success this year, along with my new bougainvillea. This time I did my homework. I used to grow these things without thought behind them elsewhere. Now they require a different set a rules to try to help them thrive in the land of ice and snow 7-8 months out of the year.

The new bougainvillea in her new home in Ohio.

Who knows what will happen this winter. Maybe my warm weather loving little friends will die. Perhaps the conditions inside my She Shed will be just right since the panels of the old pool enclosure create a greenhouse environment.

All I know for sure is that my She Shed is now hosting a little taste of home and it brings a smile to my face. It gives me something bigger than myself to work toward and something to look forward to. Their survival depends on it.

This is my defiance. I wouldn’t be me without it.