Garden Party

May 17, 2010 | Blog

Hi. First of all I want to apologize for my last post. I was having a bad day, and as you have probably noticed, I am an emotional roller coaster most of the time.

This past weekend was the first weekend all spring that we were actually home and it wasn’t raining. I finally got to start working in my gardens! I realized this weekend that I may have a small plant hoarding problem and that the classic rule of “Less is More” applies to your garden as well.  When we moved into our home four years ago, there we no gardens to speak of, just a bunch of weeds up to your waist that we rototilled away. In four short years I have managed to fill up four huge gardens that wrap the entire perimeter of our home with beautiful, and some not so beautiful, perennials.

I started with a few perennials from my Mom’s garden, and I was hooked. I mostly have wildflower type flowers that you can cut in bring in the house. I love this type because I’m cheap and lazy.  You don’t have to water them often and they come back every year.  Did I mention that they also have “babies” every year? Add to that my obsession with trying out new varieties each year and you end up with WAY too many flowers.

I started moving a few of my extra flowers to my “barf bucket” garden on the side of the house. I call it that because it literally looks like a flower shop threw up a big messy pile of flowers. I hate it, but I just can’t bring myself to kill any of the flowers, therefore keeping all of them. We used to have a vegetable garden in the back of the yard, but last fall I had to turn it into “barf bucket #2” garden to house the overflow from the first “barf bucket”.  This year, Joe had to build me raised planter boxes for our vegetable garden just because I can’t get rid of the flowers that I really don’t want.  I’m a weirdo, I know. I just hate the idea of killing any of these flowers. They are so pretty, not to mention alive. I feel guilty squishing a bug. I have issues, I know. That is when Joe suggested giving them away. Of course I had thought of that, but the work involved in putting them into pots and then trying to find homes for them seemed daunting.

Then I had another one of my “EUREKA” moments! I’d have a Garden Party! I’d invite friends and family for a BBQ and give them each a pretty pot and spade.  We’ll walk around my gardens and I’ll give them a little info about all the different flowers I have and then allow them to pick any they want to take home. I’m a genius, I know. If you’re like me and need to thin out your garden, consider having a Garden Party of your own! It’s the perfect time of year for it and your friends and family will apreciate the flowers you no longer want. The best part is your garden will look a million times better with less flowers in it and you don’t have to murder even one or do any of the digging yourself!

Not a gardener? You can still apply this principle inside your home. Go through your home and gather all those things you just don’t love or use anymore. Now, you can either host a Swap Party or a Junky Dinner Party. A Swap Party is where everyone brings a minimum of 5 items they no longer want and your friends and family take turns picking things they want to take home.  This is great because you get to get rid of your old stuff, and get some new stuff for free!  A Junky Dinner Party is when you host a Dinner Party (or just even drinks and snacks) and have all your junk laying out for your friends and family to help themselves to. This is a great way for a hoarder to let go of some items without having the work of a yard sale!

K. So if you are interested in some pretty perennials you can grow that require very little water and are basically unkillable, here are a few of my favourites I have in my garden:  Purple Coneflower, Shasta Daisy, Coreopsis, Lily, Blazing Star, Mountain Bluet, Phloex, Blanket Flower, Russian Sage, Pin Cushions, Hosta, Black-Eyed Susan, Jacob’s Ladder and Buttercups.