Author: Sandra Educate

Poets just love spring. It’s the season in which a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. The season which inspired Wordsworth’s host of golden daffodils. Spring inspires me, too. I can hardly wait for the first shipments of plants and I rush to my local box stores and nurseries and what do I find? You guessed it.  Hundreds of petunias (iffy here, at best). Thousands of impatiens and marigolds. Pansies everywhere. Oh, and maybe a few flats of begonias.    

The whole concept sounds romantic, doesn’t it? Gardens and parties seem to be made for each other....

What is the most mollycoddled plant in these United States? On which plant do we spend the most time and money encouraging it to grow, only to regularly whack it down? You’re getting warm. What plant do we allow to grow brown and ugly for months every year, and yet we keep it? You’re almost there. What plant covers more acreage in the U.S. than any agricultural crop?  Maybe all agricultural crops combined?

Most of y’all are probably too young to remember the comedian Red Skelton’s persona of the ‘mean widdle kid,’ who pondered, “If I dood it, I get a whippin’ . . .  I dood it!”

Whew! How did we ever make it through? I moved down here from the north because I didn’t want to spend 3 months of every year, stuck in the house not gardening because of the weather. Little did I realize I would be doing the same thing here . . . only the months would be different.

Well, of course it’s better to bee. Let’s start with honey bees. There’s a lot of conflicting information about whether or not honey bees are endangered. The honey bee is actually an immigrant from Europe, Africa and Asia; not native to this country at all, so honey bees are not on our Endangered Species List.

You know how when you live with someone for a long time, you really don’t see them anymore? As we age, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing! But this can happen with your garden, too, and that is a bad thing.  

Kenny Rogers isn’t the only one who knows about gambling. We gardeners know a thing or two as well. We do it all the time.    If we rely on plant labels to tell what will grow here, we’re gambling. If the label says good for Zone 8, don’t ante up yet. 

Ah, tomatoes. The delight and the bane of home gardeners everywhere. Especially here.  Down here in the Lowcountry, our soil is full of fungi, wilts and blights that decimate our ‘Brandywine’, ‘German Johnson’, ‘Mortgage Lifter’ and most other heirloom tomatoes.