The Greening: Flower Power

Tiger Lilies with a  Swallowtale Butterfly        r.a.kukkee

I am turning green.  

Green with envy, that is.
Why, you ask?   It's the power of flowers.  Flower power.  No, not cool retro hippie daisies,  and Are you going to San Francisco  in an old VW van  to put flowers in your hair.  Not that kind.
  Regular flower power and gardening is a  greening, growing force in North America.  Why? Demographics? Survival? Fear of greedy powermongers controlling food supplies?  Think about it, Remove your fear and  their power by growing your own food.

Readers of Incoming Bytes are always encouraged to think for themselves. That includes serious efforts at attempting to grow food for yourself.  Survival is more than a hobby.  Maybe to some of us  it's just a wonderful, relaxing, and productive hobby,  and there's more to the greening of gardens than just vegetables for  food. It's about better food, better nutrition, a healthier lifestyle --which includes a fine frame of mind and the appreciation of beauty.
 Flower power meets the eye and stimulates the soul itself. There is a quantum leap in beauty available to you, wherever you are.  Let's talk beautiful first. 

Like  most serious gardeners everywhere,  I admire beauty,  and that sure includes the wonderful pictures of flowers that our  gardening genius Glory Lennon regularly shares, interesting, at times even stunning photographs of all things floral. Somehow, somewhere, our clever gardener genius successfully takes pictures that make everyone that lives in a geographical area colder than zone 5 just a bit envious.
Living in N.W. Ontario in zone 2-3,  our growing season is colder, slower, less predictable,  a few weeks later, especially with weird weather, but we persist and insist on beauty anyway.    I offer a few pictures to show that growing 'beauty'   is not impossible, even in N.W. Ontario --in cool Canada.

A small,  early double Peony

White Roses

  

Giant Lupins Multi-coloured

 Tiger Lilies ready to Open

Even  Wild Roses !

So what is life about if we don't go for it?   We may not be able to  grow tulip trees or flowering dogwood, citrus trees or pineapples,  but we have flowers not to be sneezed at unless you're an allergic type. Think that's all the flowers we have?  Not by any stretch of the imagination. We have many others that come along as they may. We'll bring some more to you later.  

What  about veggies? Food?

 I  envy Mac Pike's gardening acumen when he shows us  rutabagas, grows collards and cabbages, busts onions, and  keeps Farm Girl on the alert for squash bugs, interlopers  and old fossils.
 Some gardeners do seem to have  green thumbs, garden better, and  weed faster out behind the shed somehow.
Encouraged by Mac's calming, continued words of encouragement and assured success,  I hereby examples some of  my own garden stuff for Mac's highly successful and critical garden-eye complimentary wordoodling, praise and doggerel.

 Here's the beanery, with no weeds in-betweenery:

The Beanery,  heavily mulched!

 Hang on, Mac, I can see you're conspiring and winking at Farm Girl.
 You must want to see the peas'ery-pleasery too. These are Green Arrow peas that have been up for only a week or two. They will be heavily mulched after the pea trenches are topped up for additional  root growth potential and a better yield.  The two rows are actually on a raised bed that's kind of narrow.

Peas complete with Pea trellis

And now I bet you want to see the only perennial potato in Canada.  In Mac's gardening fidoodle dictionary, that would be called a pertato, and this is the third year it came up in the the same spot, this year it's in the baby cabbage-plantery since we rotate our crops on the raised beds.

Perennial Potato growing in the baby-Cabbage-plantery

And here's the tomato patch!  It's heavily mulched to preserve moisture and suppress weeds!  As Mac knows,  "Termaters they are,  when you get to hoe,  the far end of the row,  can look like it is more than far"

Tomatoes Grow with a Helpful Scarecrow.  Dangling Cd's make a Laser Show for the Deer

 And  those be mulched, --- lest we be drygulched by weeds,  quite merry, trying to steal a sweet strawberry!

The first Two Strawberries of 2012 --a bit LATE

Now  you have to know that everything has to grow FAST here because of the short season. Look at what happened  to the peonies!  They are even  bowing politely so you will come visit again!

The front Peony is 10" across and very heavy

Glory, you gotta see these, too!They are just too beautiful!

More Lupins!

So there.    I'm always wondering if everyone thinks  the grass is greener in other growing zones. Is it greener on the other side of the fence?  Do vegetables grow better?
 Maybe this one isn't so bad after all.  Should we be turning green as a bean  with envy?  I think not!   *Mac and *Glory, what do you think? 


Is that incoming I hear?

*Loyal readers of Incoming Bytes are encouraged to visit  Mac Pike's  www.unclemacshed.blogspot.com   and  Glory Lennon's   www.glory_garden.blogspot.com  for  enjoyable reading,  gardening knowledge, and  their weird and wonderful sense of humor.   ~RK

All Photo credits:  r.a.kukkee 2012