It’s time to plan your garden: here’s some inspiration for you!
Remember these? Flowers that actually grow outside in your own little garden?
Winter is getting a little long here out on the snowy tundra, the windy plains, the bleak gray landscape that is Nebraska. This is what we must do here in the Midwest to make it through the winter: we get up one morning, we pull on our wool socks and our thirty-two layers of clothing against the cold, we wipe our dripping noses, we brew ourselves one more cup of hot tea, and we sit down with pencil and paper and our treasured seed packets, and we plan our summer garden. At least that’s what I do. My head fills with visions of fresh greens and crunchy radishes and aromatic herbs and somebody stop me!! buttery summer squash, and oh, those baskets and buckets of beautiful tomatoes, the likes of which you cannot buy in the Midwest during the wintertime.
So next week, I’ll plant heirloom tomatoes in flats in the house, from seeds that I carefully saved last year from my favorite tomatoes, and a few new varieties that I’m trying out, too. Also I’ll plant a flat of jicama because I’m experimenting with that enticing tuber, and of course several varieties of eggplant and many varieties of peppers. I’m looking forward to this with a pleasant tingly excitement, and I plan to share the process with you.
I don’t really need any inspiration to do that, but I ran across these quotes about gardening a few days ago, and I thought that you, Gentle Reader, like me, might need a little inspiration to make it through these last, long, excruciatingly long weeks of winter.
So here goes:
“Science, or para-science, tells us that geraniums bloom better if they are spoken to. But a kind word every now and then is really quite enough. Too much attention, like too much feeding, and weeding and hoeing, inhibits and embarrasses them.” ~Victoria Glendinning.
“It is good to be alone in a garden at dawn or dark so that all its shy presences may haunt you and possess you in a reverie of suspended thought.” ~James Douglas, Down Shoe Lane
“Weather means more when you have a garden. There’s nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans.” ~Marcelene Cox
This purple kale I grew last summer was a soldier, producing valiantly through the hot dry summer, and the last thing to freeze in the fall.
“Gardening is about enjoying the smell of things growing in the soil, getting dirty without feeling guilty, and generally taking the time to soak up a little peace and serenity.” ~Lindley Karstens
“We have descended into the garden and caught three hundred slugs. How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It makes it so lifelike.” ~Evelyn Underhill, Letters.
“One of the most delightful things about a garden is the anticipation it provides.” –W.E. Johns
“There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.” –Alfred Austin
Remember these . . . ? Oh, they are so easy to grow and so delicious! Green zebra, striped Roman and orange ox-heart!
“Let no one think that real gardening is a bucolic and meditative occupation. It is an insatiable passion, like everything else to which a man gives his heart.” ~Karel Čapek, The Gardener’s Year
“Tomatoes and squash never fail to reach maturity. You can spray them with acid, beat them with sticks and burn them; they love it.” ~S.J. Perelman
“I appreciate the misunderstanding I have had with Nature over my perennial border. I think it is a flower garden; she thinks it is a meadow lacking grass, and tries to correct the error.” ~Sara Stein, My Weeds
Oh, I just can’t wait!
“I don’t think we’ll ever know all there is to know about gardening, and I’m just as glad there will always be some magic about it!” –Barbara Damrosch
And a sweet little poem about gardening to share with you:
“The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,
One is nearer God’s heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth.”~Dorothy Frances Gurney, “Garden Thoughts”.
Gardening quotes taken from: http://EzineArticles.com/247241