Musings on horticultural therapy and the soothing effects of plants and nature
Though most of our harvests are past, we are still working the soil. It is now time to plant garlic. I enlist Juana and Olivia to help me today. It is a bright crisp day with only a few clouds painting the sky and a slight breeze rustling the trees. The trees are still holding […]
Olivia strains with our final tomato harvest. There have been plenty of fruits, though in the last week they have stubbornly held on to their green color. She is a good helper, harvesting fruit regardless of its shade and eating half of what she pulls. Juana separates the tomatoes into different paper bags according to […]
My grandson Charlie is showing off his Venus flytrap. I bought it for him the last time we visited as he was fascinated by this hungry plant. He has been a good caretaker of it as it has more than doubled in size. I will likely need to repot it next time we visit.
Charlotte continues to be a great helper in the garden. She quickly helps me pick and identify the ripest of tomatoes as well as an underlying layer of green beans that we will have for dinner. Her reward is unlimited access to the blueberry bushes and their fruits.
We are in the middle of summer. There is no mistaking it. The afternoon thunderstorms, the humidity, the bugs are all part of summer. And with the season, come chores that Olivia wants to help her grandfather with. Today she is assisting me hang cloths on the line as the sun and heat makes short […]
It’s blueberry picking time and Charlotte and Olivia can’t wait. Even though the harvest is slim, both have the eye of a hungry bird in being able to focus on and grab any ripe berry in their reach. Given their desires, their baskets are often more empty than their tummies making extras for Juana and […]
The strawberries are in and so is Olivia. After some initial hesitancy to sample a strawberry, she digs in with all of the gusto that her sister Charlotte exhibited at her age. She smiles as thin lines of strawberry juice rundown her chin, staining her shirt. We probably lose half the harvest to her but […]
Olivia has learned the fine art of dandelion propagation ensuring that there will be flowers for muffins in the year to come.
When we bought our house over 30 years ago, there was a scraggly rose bush on the corner of the property that the deer never bothered. And magically it always explodes with lovely flowers right around my daughter Sarah’s birthday in mid-May. This heirloom bush with its sweetly fragrant blooms, has apparently always been part […]
Olivia has picked out a couple of pansy plants she wants us to pot up in a window box. I’m not sure where they will wind up but I am sure we will have fun figuring that out.