My Neglected Garden

I belong to a local garden club and our September meeting will be in my garden. I expect that the club will be understanding about newly planted roses, but the central part of my garden is more embarrassing. This area combines a vegetable garden with ornamental features. I used to have a nice strawberry patch but I don't have the time to maintain it. I just use the weedwhacker on those parts of the strawberry patch where the strawberries have died out; this is now about two thirds of the patch. The vegetables don't look too bad. I have three long rows of broccoli and I just planted a long row of cabbage. The vegetable garden is separated from the main walk by a row of tires which are planted with zucchinis every year. It looks like I had better enrich or replace the soil in those tires, because most of the zucchini plants are a bit stunted this year.

The main walk sprats the vegetable garden from the clay bottomed lilypond. There is a border of iris and crocosmias along the pond, but by late summer the leaves aren't at their best, so I decided to mow most of them down so that the club will get a better view of the waterlilies. The waterlilies are the stars of my garden during the summer, all other flowers just play a supporting role, so I am sure that the club will focus on them rather than on the brown stubble where the border used to be. It is the canal which really looks awful this year.

Actually, the water in the canal looks the best that it has in several years. A native rush had seeded itself to the point where the water was barely visible; I had been avoiding trying to weed it out because it looked like a huge job, but when I finally got forced myself, I discovered that they pulled out very easily. The banks of the canal are the main problem;

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