dear Grange Gardener GirlFriend!
 Thought of you often over the summer, especially as I herded grandsons away from my meager pea patch, which they were intent on feeding to my angora rabbits… YES!! I DID manage to scrounge a couple handfuls outta there for myself, although it took 3 REPLANTINGS to get any…
AND… now I think the culprit has been identified: a darling wild bunny who sits on our tiny front lawn and watches us thru the window on BunnyVision, streaks away at the slightest movement– a likely suspect indeed! All the lettuce is on the front porch in pots to survive his presence, along with the 4th batch of peas, now well past seedling stage. Gonna fence ’em off this time with a ring of hardware cloth!!
Those of us gardeners who stretch out our gardening kinks at Grange yoga sessions often receive the fringe benefits of FLOWERS from Roger Walsh’s garden– he’s living on Robin Koken’s old place just down the road from us at the 18-mile marker. You can see he’s got the place all duded up, and I guess his glads’ve been falling over in these August rains— he brings bucketsful to yoga. I can get them to stick around for near 2 weeks with judicious plucking of spent blooms and concomitant shortening of stems… our entry features a marvellous tall vase, a triumphant work of #4 Son the Potter, although I’ve been hard pressed to find flowers tall enough to suit it until Roger’s glads came along. A splendid way to greet visitors!
We were talking about the Prolonging of Bloom Life after yoga last week, and I recalled a paragraph in Gerald Durrell’s My Family & Other Animals… he’s the naturalist kid brother of famed author Lawrence Durrell, Alexandria Quartet. His tutor’s mother kept her house full of flowers. She apparently had some secret ‘in’ with the Flower Devas, and had been informed of what the different species required for greatest longevity… I copied her list into my Family Recipes & Secret Potions volume to keep for a moment just like this: here y’are~~
ROSES:Â aspirin
CHRYSANTHEMUMS:Â drachma (what’s THAT??Â
 Hum now, the dictionary says ‘a copper/nickel coin of modern Greece;
the older ones were silver…)
so drop in an old nickel and penny– our recent ones are zinc & who knows what else…
SWEET PEAS:Â brandy
BEGONIAS & other fleshy flowers:Â lemon juice
She says if you put to many flowers together they get on each other’s nerves and start to WILT.Â
I’ve especially noticed this with pyrethrum which hypothetically makes a great filler otherwise…
To the above she adds that some kinds of flowers have ‘class distinctions’Â —
guess I’ll have to keep an eye out for snobbery in the vases. Or VAHSES…
Change water once a week and add a handful of earth each time.
So is THAT ALL??? In my imagination’s memory this list was a good page long!! Do you have secrets to add?
May these gentle August rains puff away our careworn wrinkles!! (Maybe we had oughta try some of the above remedies to see if they encourage Blooming Human Faces as well~~)
Love to you &
All good things–
Ayala