Over on GardenRant I offered my succinct 39 Words on how to garden in the summer and thought I was done with the subject. But then I remembered HACKING BACK, one of my favorite activities in the garden. If you’re not familiar with the notion then I bet you haven’t read Tracy DiSabato-Aust’s best-selling Well-Tended Perennial Garden. No problem; I’m sure they’ll just keep printing the thing until we all have one – and learn to grow healthier and better-looking perennials.
Here’s how it works. The asters in the foreground of this photo, if left to their own devices, would grow tall enough to be flopping failures as plants; let’s face it. So I do just what Tracy tells me to do – I hack ‘em back to half their height twice, once in May and once in mid-June. So they’ll bloom a tad later but they’ll never flop on me.
Just behind the asters you see the Echinacea purpurea or purple coneflower just starting to bloom, which I’d hacked back once in May. Tracy says you can either do what I did, hacking back early, or cut off about a foot of the plant while in bud in early July, noting they’ll "recover and flower nicely from mid-August until early October." Well, in my copy of her book I wrote the decisive marginalia "NO" next to that point, so don’t say I didn’t warn you. Just goes to show once again that even the smartest of experts can’t predict exactly how plants will behave in our own gardens.
Okay, so flying this particular flag isn’t exactly a show of independence here in Takoma. Sporting a Bush ‘04 bumper sticker would be more like it, or driving a Hummer. But the point being that today we can celebrate what’s best about this country in whatever way we want – almost.
That used to be me sitting at the table in the upper right of this photo. The woman being jostled by photographers is the official Senate court reporter assigned to this hearing, and that’s what I did 3 days a week for most of my adult life. When Congress wasn’t working – which is a lot of the time, ya know – I’d work in the federal courts or really anywhere a transcript was needed, but the halls of the Senate and House were where I spent waaay too much time, and I’m happy to report that that chapter of my life is over, finished, kaput.
Kaput? Yes, unfortunately the company I worked for went belly-up last month, which was a very sad thing for its other employees and I hate to seem callous but personally I just feel FREE AT LAST. Yeah, instead of taking jobs with other court reporting agencies I’m making the break to get my second career off the ground – in gardening. Isn’t that the dream, to turn your passion into a career? Well, I’d never dreamed I could do it but it’s looking awfully promising, thanks to this blog.
This humble blog, you see, resulted in my being offered the 4-month contract I now have to write for and organize the DC Master Gardeners. (I’d written several posts about the program and it turns out the powers that be saw them and liked what they saw.) And the first thing I did for DC Master Gardeners was to create a website, which also serves as a newsletter, and because I’m being paid to write the site and it uses a blog program, I guess that makes me a professional blogger! Take that, you ignorant blog-bashers.
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Over on GardenRant I offered my succinct 39 Words on how to garden in the summer and thought I was done with the subject. But then I remembered HACKING BACK, one of my favorite activities in the garden. If you’re not familiar with the notion then I bet you haven’t read Tracy DiSabato-Aust’s best-selling Well-Tended Perennial Garden. No problem; I’m sure they’ll just keep printing the thing until we all have one – and learn to grow healthier and better-looking perennials.
