If you plant only one garden ever in your life…

… Make it Perennials.

A collection of Columbine

Just a quick summer post to share with you the latest Dew Claw Kennel photo album. If your kind enough to go indulge me and look at my photos you will find mostly flowers. June is the month where we get fully green, things really start to bloom and come to life, and it is a beauty I need on some level to feel like it is really summer in all its lushness. Cause until trees are covered with shinny green leaves and bright colors appear atop green stalks and bushy stems it still feels a bit like the depressing muddy gray of break-up.
*Break-up: What Alaskans lovingly call the 2-3 weeks of total snow melt, river ice jams, flooding, and mud that happens in lieu of spring. (a quick course in Alaskan terms)

Columbine

If you look closer at the flowers you might also notice that they are almost all perennials. (OK technically the pansies re-seed, but I added to this years box with some starts from a local greenhouse. I just had to have that splash of color Now) Yup, this girl has got lazy gardening down. Plant a perennial bed and then enjoy it for life. OK yeah it needs some maintenance, good weeding in the spring, some water & compost, then clean up in the fall. But really that is the barest minimum of effort when you look at what goes into growing anything at Zone 3. Doesn’t matter weather you are putting in herbs, veggies, annual flowers, or perennials; the initial investment in labor and soil is the same. Why not plant one you only have to plant once?

Your reward is year after year of beauty.

A reward I continue to enjoy, as I garden less and less. Each summer I have cut back on garden projects to make time for kennel projects. Already this summer Dan & I are gearing up and planning for next years race season! Hope to be at the Iditarod 2013 Sign-Up Picnic on the 30th. Very excited about next winter already. Not having a big garden anymore? I don’t regret it in the least…
well usually.

Iris bed, with the sauna in the background.

But then there are those days where you are just itching to get your hands in the dirt. On those days my reliable perennial beds are there happy to let me work with them. Of course on those days when leader training and construction projects get priority, those same perennial beds are equally happy to keep living and growing on their own basically ignored. Until a beautiful sunny day when I kick back on the lawn and think, “wow, I am pretty lucky to live somewhere so beautiful.”

So CHEERS to the hardy and beautiful, plants that take our fickle attention, give so much and ask so little, perennials. Hence the advice, if you plant only one garden in your life, make it perennials.

Fern bed by the house.

Gardening Resources: that cover a variety of topics. What they have in common: I found them interesting and/or useful.

• Cooperative Extension, find your local office here. Co-op offices are a wonderful resource with specialized information for your region.
• Organic Gardening
• Perennials.com
• Beginning Farmers
• Urban Gardening Help

Flowers are those little colorful beacons of the sun from which we get sunshine when dark, somber skies blanket our thoughts. ~Dodinsky

Earth laughs in flowers. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson