My flowers...this is what keeps me mostly sane.

 My boyfriend and his business partner purchased the business in October of 2002. Spring of 2003, found me wondering the lot after the ground dried  from all the melting snow. When I was a kid I was always wondering wooded areas and the flood plane near my house so this was not unusual. This time I was looking at trash and car parts that had been strewn around the unused areas of  the property. Over the years we have gotten rid of the junk cars in these pictures.

There is a small creek that runs behind the property and it was near the creek that I found roses and irises growing wild. I've always assumed someone threw out an arrangement like the kind you find in a store with that lovely colored foil around the pots. The stems on the roses were several feet long and had rooted in different places where they came in contact with  bare ground. The roses had several small clusters of pink flowers the first year I found them.  I never saw the irises bloom, not even after I dug them up and replanted them. The mound of iris was about 4 feet in diameter hinting that it was, I believed, to be one plant which along with the roses, that had been thrown there many years before.

You'll see through the photos how my garden has progressed over the years and that I may have gotten carried away a couple of times with the volume of things I planted. Its been a lot of  hard work with very little help. I  built all the flower beds myself including the one off to the side that is stained blue. There are over 40 bags of dirt, 40 pounds each, in those flower beds because the soil is too rocky to dig into.  I also built the cold frame myself and the work bench/ storage area from scrap bought at a lumber yard.

There is no running water near the garden. In 2004, I designed and built the flower box the old fashioned pump is mounted to. It is a wooden frame with a plastic column that is screwed to the wooden base. The metal pipe is hidden in the column,  and runs out the bottom with a 90 degree connector that I was able to attatch a garden hose to.  That year the pump worked and I was able to get water from the creek but the rubber plunger in the pump got worn or torn and I couldn't find parts. Now I have to bring the water out there because I'm not about to run 300 feet of hose accross a dirt parking lot. For the past 3 years I have been putting a 30 gallon plastic container in the trunk of my car. I back up to the garden and pump the water out with a Coleman camping shower pump that runs on 4 D batteries. Believe it or not it works great.  

2007 was the worst year for my garden. I had minor surgery in April of that year which took many months to recover from. I wasn't able to plant much because I knew I wouldn't be able to take care of it. The daylillies were beautiful but some sort of critter destroyed my Oriental and Asiatic lillies to the point that I'm not sure they will be back this year.

 Hopefully in 2008, I can bring back my garden to the beautiful, fragrant, peaceful place it once was. Right after I rebuild it. In the fall of 2007 I decided it was time for a change and dismantled the area around the old fashioned pump. I haven't come up with a new design yet. I may decide to tear up a flower bed or two also.  That will have to wait until spring when it warms up enough for me to sit on my bench, coffee in hand, listening to the water in the creek and the finches over head and stare at the ground plotting my next move. This time with a few less plants than in 2006.