Don't Try This At Home

It is safe to say I garden a bit differently in the wilderness than your average suburban home owner. Because the wilderness for one and after close to thirty years as a working peasant gardener, I am willing to take some risks on an expanded knowledge base.

Don't try this at home. The Showy Orchis, Galearis spectabilis, I transferred out of the deep forest, over the hill and into the garden is coming back. Wild orchids are incredibly fussy about fungal and bacterial relations. They do not like being moved. My native soil four hundred feet away either has it or kept it alive when it was moved with the orchid.

I have transferred quite a few trilliums out of the deep forest as well. This is a store bought one though. The wild trilliums are just barely beginning to come up. I need lots and lots of trilliums. My hope is they will start to multiply in the garden.

A working gardener's observation was that the tulip 'Negrita' was a good repeat bloomer and multiplier. When I told Bulbarella the news she had to have some. I got some extras. Tulips get planted here with a poisonous daffodil surround to try and throw the bulb eating varmints off their scent. So far so good. It doesn't always work. Some times they find them and eat around the daffodils.

I got Bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis, all over the place. I just let it be to go about it's business. My intent is to plant and encourage all the very early, April blooming, native spring ephemerals. I can get a whole month of bloom from them before the Lush arrives.

I'm sure the passing neighbors are forever scratching their heads wondering why this crazy man on top of the mountain mulches his vegetable garden. It is so not done in these parts. I would have much preferred my free wood chip mulch instead of buying it, but this will have to do.

I actually like wood chips as a mulch better. Its chunkier, less uniform consistency lets air and water pass more easily.

With mulch I don't have to spend quantities of time weeding or watering. As it decomposes it feeds the soil. The copious amounts of composted dung I added make the soil even better. Fertilize? Why bother.

Ten more bags should finish it off. I plan to do some seed sowing of the cool season crops this weekend.

What is this? I had to mull it over. Then a distant vision bubbled up and I remembered my pilfering Sister #2 coming home with some Fly Poison, Amianthium muscitoxicum. It is the second time she has come home with Fly Poison.

I vaguely recall there was more than one this last time. I wonder where I planted the other one? I'm not sure Sister #2, a master's degree nurse practitioner has realized I plan for her to be in charge of mountain medicinals after I grow them. I need to get her a book on potion making.

There is Fly Poison and there are daffodils like you would find in any suburban garden. I do things a little differently, but there are still elements of a typical garden out here in the wilderness.