Reading your Garden

Gardening is my favorite pastime.  Next to reading.  So, reading about gardening is a good thing in the long and cold winter months.  BUT, there's a different and better way to "read" your garden in the summer, that is, by discerning what your garden is telling you.  I spent the afternoon weeding, and got to thinking about what the soil was trying to tell me based on the weeds I was pulling.
So, I did a little research and found lots of information on which weeds grow in which conditions.  

I READ MY GARDEN TODAY.

I was pulling out horsetail for hours

photo courtesy of NW Farms and Food

in places I had NEVER had problems with it previously.  I know it grows in damp areas.  

Proof that this year's precipitation has been excessive for the garden.  Another hint was that there is moss growing on the surface of the soil in my garden.
I have cultivated to aerate the soil, but holy cow, it's been damp this year.

photo courtesy of Greenhorn Wisdom

On the bright side, I'm also seeing a lot of lamb's quarters, which is an indicator of soil fertility.

If you are interested in further information on what your weeds are telling you about your soil quality, I've added a link here for a great place to start for you:

Weeds and what they indicate in your soil

 AND.

 I received a gift from a friend -- The 1910 Garden Primer.  (Thanks, Emily!!)

And, how fitting that it was written by a woman named GRACE?

The photographs are vintage and charming, and the book reads like it should; a turn of the century-style prose that is interesting in today's day and age.

The INTRODUCTORY, as they are calling the first page, reads:

Making a garden is not the formidable thing it is often supposed to be, nor caring for it when once it is made half so arduous as many suppose it is.  Faithfulness to it, from beginning to end, make it a joy for everyone as well as a profit.

No matter how small a plot of earth is at one's command, whether it be four square feet or four acres, Mother Nature, aided by man's ingenuity, has growing things that will thrive in it.  The thing to do is to find out which of the plants you like and need will grow in the space you have available for them, and then learn when to plant them and how to care for them and for the soil that is to nourish them when once they are planted, until the happy day when they will have reached their maturing, and you will have had the satisfaction of giving an assuring answer to the old-time question of
"How does your garden grow?" 

OR, 

In other words,

READ YOUR GARDEN.

 This photo on the right made me laugh --  imagine recommending all this gear 

to a new gardener.   It would overwhelm anyone to think they had to 

drag all of that equipment around on their back.

 Lovely ladies who lunched in 1910 also apparently gardened in full length dresses. 

The info in the book is timeless, however.  The book does a nice job of covering "to do" lists month by month, and it was fun to realize how little has changed in 104 years.