Like a Pig Rooting for Truffles

I'm SO sore.

My back aches. My legs ache.

I'm hobbling around like John Wayne moseys through a pair of batwing saloon doors.

Looks way less cool when I do it. Pilgrim.



Why am I hurting?

I'm an idiot. But I'm an ambitious idiot!

Last week, I decided I wanted to grow pumpkins. I've always wanted to grow pumpkins. I figured it would be difficult.

Then I saw many of my garden blogging friends with posts about the pumpkins they were growing. They made it look easy, so I decided to give it a go this year.

Even this baby grew one.




The only drawback to growing pumpkins as I far as I could see, was that one needs a shit ton of room. My whole yard is room.

I think we have a third of an acre? I have a memory like a goldfish, so I could be wrong. We have a lot of yard and no fence.

I'm so excited (but not quite 'Royal Wedding excited)! I hope I don't cock it up. But I figure all I put into it was $2 for a pack of seeds.

Oh. And a lot of sweat. I dug a very large patch of earth all by myself. With a spade. Not a tiller.

You don't understand what a great feat this is. I have zero upper-body strength.

I'm like a Tyrannosaurus Rex.



Chuck and I usually rent a heavy-duty tiller because our ground is such a bitch to dig up.

MY impatient Canadian ass decided on a Sunday (when the rental place is closed) that it was tired of waiting and wanted the pumpkin patch IMMEDIATELY.

In one short week, I have been rewarded. My pumpkins are sprouting.

My friends say that I should have them looked at by a doctor.



My sunflowers are doing very nicely as well. I dug that sunflower bed up myself about a month ago. Once again, all by hand.






And if that wasn't enough vertebral punishment, yesterday I got a wild hair and decided to make a new garden out front.




I'm terrible at estimation when it comes to measurements.



Especially curved measurements, and I wanted a curvy garden with curvy stone edging. What can I say? I'm a curvy sort of girl.

I actually surprised myself by guessing the right number of edging stones I'd need. But of course I bought the wrong number of curvy and straight ones. I laid them all out as soon as I got home in the shape I wanted, and it was totally not working.

I usually buy this type of stuff at Lowe's Home Improvement, and it takes me about 40 minutes to drive there and back from my house.

I discovered my mistake AFTER I was already covered in dirt. A thick layer of dirt. Sunscreen and sweat-matted dirt. There was no way I was making that 40-minute drive AND going into Lowe's covered in greasy freaking dirt. But I wanted to finish my garden that day.

I could only think of one option.

I put out the Chuck Signal.



Shit. Wrong one. But all that digging does make a curvy girl hungry...

Anyway, after I asked my lovely, wonderful, amazing husband to save me by stopping by Lowe's for the right stones on his way home from work(I might have cried if he'd said no), I got down to business.

That little area started to look a lot bigger once I started digging. It probably took me two hours of digging to make the garden as big as I wanted. With the scorching sun beating down on my back. I might have gotten it done faster if I didn't have to take breaks to prevent heatstroke.






And I found out there were a whoooooooole mess o' wolf spiders making homes in that little patch of dirt.

Pissed off Mama-Wolf spiders.



Ten years ago, if I saw a spider like that within 20 feet of me, I'd have been running away screaming, garden abandoned. Funny what you can get used to.

Don't get me wrong, if one of those fuckers happened to scamper across any patch of bare skin I might possess, my screams would have been heard in Nepal.



When Chuckles got home, I was finally able to put in my edging stones. I made this garden mainly as a feature for my new gardenia, but I also bought a couple of daylilies, gomphrena, and petunias to fill it out a little till I decide what to really do with it.

When it was all finished, I was really proud of myself. I worked so hard, and I did it all by myself.

Well, 97% by myself. When I was attempting to place the edging, Chuck was hovering around and eyeing me as if he wanted to take them out of my hands and do it himself.

"What?" I asked. "Am I not doing this right?"

"Well....maybe if you move that one there...And tamp that one down a little...And put some more dirt under that one..." he said, sipping his beer.

"Do you want to do this for me or something?" I puffed, sweating my ass off. Covered in dirt.

"No, no! I'm too tired," he said. "But maybe move that one there a little..." Another sip of beer.

I think he finally had enough of watching me place them 'wrong' and helped place a couple of the stones, no matter how tired he was from work. I mulched and it was all done.

I didn't get enough mulch though (of course). I got more today.

I think it looks damn good. Jazzes up the place.














Here are some quick looks at other random things in my yard that I couldn't cleverly fit into the above:

My vegetable garden. A cherry tomato, a bush cucumber, and a cayenne pepper. Aren't those drywall buckets glamourous?



My Japanese Maple (dwarf Bloodgood). When I bought it for $12 late last fall, it was a sad sight. The garden center had it out in way too much sun, and it was all scorched.

Looks a damn sight better now.





My English lavender. I usually kill this crap every year. It dies over the winter.

This year, it not only lived, but re-flowered. It's the small victories!




And this is my favourite! I love this caladium. It was an impulse buy today when I was getting more mulch. I want to buy another red pot to put it in. For now I just have it propped up behind my hosta. Sexy!



I think I'm going to take a rest from all this 'extreme gardening' nonsense for awhile.

I'll be 30 in three weeks.

My old bones just can't take it anymore.

Love, Cancer and Good Friends

One of the questions I get a lot when I tell people I'm from Canada, is "How did you end up in Jacksonville?"

The place where I live is next to the Marine Corps base at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Like...in it's backyard. You can hear bombs and guns going off all day and at night. Sometimes it rattles the pictures on the wall.

Everyone assumes that I met a Marine, and that's how I ended up here. Women end up in this town in one of two ways: their boyfriend/husband is a Marine and brought them here, or their dads are Marines and they came here that way. I guess there's a third option, that the women came here as Marines themselves. How archaic is my thinking? ;)



Anyway, I'd like to use this post to tell the story about how I ended up here. I know that this is a gardening blog, but maybe this will help my readers to understand the author better. :) I love reading blogs about people's gardens, but my favourites are where you can also follow the life of the gardener. Makes a blog seem less impersonal, and I can see where the garden style influences come from.

Alright. Let's try this again, since it got deleted yesterday :)

Way back in 2004, I was a happy-go-lucky, 23 year old woman in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. This was before I discovered my love of gardening, and I spent most of my time playing an Irish sport called Gaelic Football. My teammates were not only good friends, but they were my family.
If you haven't ever heard of GF, you should check this out, very cool sport:




I'm #17 :)


I also am a huge lover of music (right now I'm the manager of a music department). When I wasn't playing GF, I was online checking out music forums. I met Mr. A on a Led Zeppelin message board in late November 2004. He had made a comment about a sports injury that I mentioned I had received, and we talked on from there.

We talked on the phone every day, for two months before we met. He bought me a ticket for Christmas, to come down and see him. My family and friends were a bit worried I think. He not only lived 2500 miles away in a different country, but he also is 19 years older than I am (gasp!). My mum said, 'Maybe he's online in prison, and he's trying to lure you down there'. lol

But I came down anyway, and I saw that he hadn't been lying about himself, and we had a great time!

Just after we met face to face:


In May of that year, he came up to visit in Canada for my 24th birthday. I picked him up in Calgary, and we drove through the mountains for two days. Mr. A was in total awe of the Canadian Rockies. He had never been out of his EST timezone before, let alone in a different country. Let me share the scenery with you:



We took this picture over a cliff, and right after that we saw a bear cub climbing up another cliff right above us. Amazing!


In Banff, Alberta (major ski resort town)


In Edmonton on my birthday

Things were going along well, and then in December of 2005, some bad things started happening. Mr. A started coughing up blood. We were both very freaked out. He had been a 3 pack a day smoker for 30 years, but quit entirely before I first came down to visit. He's also been a drywaller for 25 years, and breathes in all sorts of nasty things at work.

Mr. A put off going to the doctor, and everyone that cared about him nagged him till he went. They put him through all sorts of tests, and finally near the end of January the doctors told him he had lung cancer. A 'garden variety smoker's cancer', said the doctors. He had to have the bottom 2/3 of his right lung removed ASAP.

I was back at home in Edmonton this whole time, and I was an absolute wreck. I had been crying so much that my face looked like a truck backed over it a few times. My excellent, excellent roommates/teammates Carlin and Sky convinced me to fly down to North Carolina and be with him through his surgery. They told me not to worry about the rent, or taking leave from work, or stupid bills, because those things aren't as important as they seem. My brother and sister-in-law paid for my plane ticket to come down here. I'm very grateful to a lot of people, more than words can say.

Mr. A didn't want to put me through any of this, and begged me not to put my life on hold. But I'm stubborn and came down anyway. I arrived here on February 7, 2006.

Surgery was performed on Valentine's Day. :) That was the longest wait of my entire life. I had company in the waiting room: my husband's two daughters, Lindsay (who was 20) and Desiree (who was 10), and Mr. A's ex-wife (she came to comfort the little one).

When the doctor came out to tell us that everything had gone ok, he asked what our relationship was to the patient. We told him, "Daughter, daughter, girlfriend, and ex-wife" and he answered 'I don't even want to know...' LOL!

This is a pic of Lindsay and Desiree, taken on Lindsay's birthday after Mr. A got out of the hospital:


Mr A. was in the hospital for 10 days. For most of those days, the hospital was accomodating enough to set up a cot for me next to his bed. Originally, they thought the cancer was caught early enough to not receive chemotherapy. The doctors removed some lymph nodes along with the lung. They found cancer cells in two of them. Chemo was now on the itinerary.

Originally, I was supposed to go back to Canada after Mr. A was finished recovering. But now, I was scheduled to go home three days after his second round of intense chemo. I had seen the effects of the first round...not pretty.

We talked it over, and both decided that we wanted me to stay. We got married on May 3, 2006. It was a Courthouse Special, with Lindsay and her cousin as our witnesses. We went out for breakfast afterwards, and took some wedding photos in the park by the water:






The next day we spent our honeymoon in the chemo bay at Pitt Memorial Hospital in Greenville, NC. The doctors and nurses at that hospital are amazing people.


Mr. A has now been in cancer remission for 4 years, and we're coming up on our 4th wedding anniversary. During that time I became a permanent resident of the US of A, and we're very happy. We both love being outdoors, and going on all sorts of adventures. Our best time spent together is tag-teaming the yardwork :)

I'm glad all of you Patient Readers got to 'meet' Mr. A, and to share in the story of how a Zone 3 Canadian ended up in Zone 8a :)


Thank you very much for reading! Tomorrow, we'll be back to your regular, gardening schedule.

Nice to Meet You!

Hello my fellow gardeners! :)

I was sitting in front of my computer today, and I found myself visiting online plant nursery sites. Yes, it is only January 6th, and the gardening bug has bitten. It is the middle of a rare cold snap in southeastern North Carolina, so that may be the only bug around at the moment...:)

As I have said in my profile info, I am originally from Edmonton, Canada. That is Zone 3 on the cold hardiness map. First official frost free date is May 28th. Yikes!

I now live on the southeastern coast of North Carolina, Zone 8a. A jump of 5 zones, folks! The growing season is technically all year round, depending on what you're growing. I was so fascinated by all the beautiful things that grow here, I had to start gardening.

My husband (let's call him Mr. A) lived in this house before I arrived on the scene, and I moved in with him. He didn't have the time and passion to do much with the landscaping, so I had a clean canvas to work with. Just the thing for an artist such as myself!

There were no trees, no shrubs, and only a few scraggly flower bulbs planted in the 'gardens' when I came along. And I was in the process of immigration, so I couldn't work. What better to fill my time than gardening? I wasn't sure if I had a green thumb, a brown thumb, or a purple thumb :)

One of the very first things I planted as a newbie was this repeat-blooming hybrid tea rose, 'Bella 'Roma'. Beautiful scent, and the colours are so vivid when it blooms for the first time of the season.

Now it can get quite large, I prune it back quite low every late winter. The only problem is the horrendous black spot disease it has acquired. I try to get rid of it, but it just ends up taking over no matter how hard I try. :( Roses are very fussy in this area, the humidity does a number on them. I have since tried a climbing rose in a completely different area of our large yard, made sure all my tools were sterilized, and I wouldn't even go near the thing if I had walked by the Bella 'Roma. Didn't water it overhead, it had excellent air circulation...that one still got black spot. :( No more roses for me.

I want this blog to be an outlet for my gardening passion, but I may include other things at my whim. My husband and I love to be outdoors, and I may include some pictures from our adventures...whether they be of flowers, animals, beaches, neat cemeteries, cool houses and gardens of other people in the area, etc...from the past or present. I have seen some beautiful things in the 4 years prior to starting this blog, and would like to share some of my memories and experiences.

Hopefully you will enjoy reading this blog as much as I will enjoy writing in it. :)