Speaking in Code

Mr. Moo woke me at 5:30 demanding a cat cookie and I couldn't go back to the sleep, so I got up, made a pot of java, hauled out my box of gardening seeds and inventoried them. Hmmmmm.... I have six kinds of basil. Does that say *anything* to you?

I have a boot box full of seeds for plants that demand full sun. I have a very limited amount of space which gets full sun, and it's all gravel. This says "pots" to me. Thankfully, due to the generosity of my new next-door neighbour I have a good selection of *very* large pots. I think these will be just the thing for a few acorn and yellow squash plants, my basil selection, and a tomato plant or two.

I could use a flowering vine to screen the neighbour to the north, as he apparently doesn't know that soap and water applied to the *black* end of his trailer would make it all white and sparkly again. And he has a canoe pulled up there, a pile of hoses, old tools and various flotsam and jetsam. You get the picture. I need a screen. But it needs to be something which doesn't need much sun. That I have to think on.

In the place where I can use a flowering vine which does get sun I will plant scarlet runner beans, perhaps morning glories or sweet peas. The sweet peas might cook in the full sun of the Okanagan. I'll have to ask the neighbour how they do. She is an avid gardener too.

The planning of the garden is a most enjoyable pastime for the gardener. In your mind's eye everything jumps out of the ground and bursts into bloom within about a week. (This is fantasy.) In truth the plants will struggle half-heartedly out of the ground in poor competition with the weeds, attract every insect in a radius of a mile, and flower two days before the first killing frost, if they don't topple over in a windstorm first.

Nevertheless, here I am at 6:00 am on a Sunday morning, trying to decide if there's any place where four-foot tall red poppies would work. At least in my case the word gardener is code for hopeless optimist.