Yesterday, temperatures soared near 80. John asked if I could stop working early to help him out in the garden. He wanted to get some of the deer fencing up around the vegetable beds. The seed starting and planting calendar for Virginia that I printed off the Internet says that we should begin some of the cool weather crops outdoors very soon – St. Patrick’s Day, or thereabouts, which is only next week. We’re both well aware that our garden is going to be of great interest not just to the deer, but to that fat groundhog we’ve seen wandering around near the fruit trees. He visits every so often, but just often enough to let us know he’s around. Our pair of red foxes left their “calling card” right next to the garden too, and while I don’t think they’d bother the vegetable plants – one never knows. So the fence has to go up, and not just any fence. We know we need to have it eight feet high to keep the deer out, and have several inches bow out in an “L” shape and planted below ground so that if the groundhog decides to tunnel under, he’ll hit wire – and hopefully give up. We’d placed the fence posts last fall, and one roll of chicken wire was waiting in the garage. We hope this will work, although friends tell us we may need one hot wire – an electric wire – around the top to really discourage the deer. I hope not. I hope they go back into the woods where they belong!
Around 3 p.m. I closed down the computer, changed my clothes, and headed outside to help. I turned the corner around the garage and was surprised and delighted to see not a fence, but a new garden that I could gaze at from my kitchen windows! The area where we’d just placed the old 1950’s cement flamingos, the silly things from John’s grandparents, and the old bird bath was now a raised garden bed. John was happily angling the corners of the wood to make it an octagon. We have a thing for octagons in the house. When John designed the house, he designed the two towers and the tower rooms – my office, the master bath, the living room and the dining room – as octagons. Once when the electricity went out and we were sitting together in the living room, he read to me by candlelight the passage from Thomas Jefferson’s writings that had inspired the octagons. Jefferson noted that in octagon shaped rooms “the shadows cannot gather in the corners” and that was why he had them in Monticello. John and I are both fans of Thomas Jefferson, and John used his architectural ideas as a springboard for his own for our home . We built the house so that “shadows may not gather”. Sure enough, in the candlelight, no shadows could gather in the corners – a beautiful analogy.
The new flower bed is a long octagon rather than a perfect one, like the tower rooms of the house, and looks sort of like a boat. In fact, by the end of the day, we had nicknamed it the boat or the rowboat. I took down our beloved silly flamingos and put them in the shed. They need to be stripped again and repainted. They look like they are molting paint. I left a trail of hot pink paint chips on my route to the shed. Jack, John’s dad who lived with us, is excited about the new flower bed. He’s itching to plant there. My 81 year old father in law has a strange green thumb. There is not a marigold seed he has ever put in the ground that doesn’t grow. I say his green thumb is strange because he kills plants that are easy to grow, and things that every garden book on the planet says won’t grow from seed, wont’ reseed or winter over, Jack manages to do. I have no idea what his secret is – maybe it’s just luck, maybe it’s just him! I know we’ll have some marigolds out there for sure.
It’s so nice to have a husband who knows me well enough to surprise me not with store-bought things, but with hand made things. A new flower bed made out of scrap would is worth more to me than a diamond necklace, and I’m grateful my husband knows that! The pile of wood by the driveway left over from when Philip and John worked on the porch is now reduced, and I have a new planting area to play with this spring.
So what should I plant? I need a focal point in the center. It’s in full, direct sun. I haven’t got a clue. Guess I’ll surprise you too!
PS: We got about a third of the fencing done, too, before we were too hot and tired to continue on. It’s supposed to rain the next several days, so I guess completing the fencing will have to wait…
