My Tin Can Garden

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My Tin Can Garden        

            Our house is built on the first or second shelf of gabbro/granite in eastern Duluth. If you go out the back door, where my garden is, you go straight uphill from there. And it has maybe four inches of soil before you hit rock. Clunk. Those four inches of dirt are, of course, infested with buckthorn roots. No digging going to be going on here. So, I hit on the idea of having containers. Sounds lovely, right? I know you’re thinking hand-thrown, hand-painted ceramic vessels, big and imposing with picture-perfect arrangements gracefully drooping over the sides and flaring with color. Nope. You must be in someone else’s garden. Mine has greyish galvanized metal tubs, bushels and horse troughs, all arranged in clusters, pretending to be “flower beds”. In the Spring, before it all greens up, it’s pretty ugly. But when things start to bloom, it’s quite impressive. Did I start small and work my way up to a sizable plot? Of course not. Have you met me? First of all, as with everything else in my life, I tend to over-do. Yes, I hear my children replying to that, “Really, Mom? You?”.

             I jumped right in and bought four large square washtubs, five over-sized round tubs, seven three-foot ovals, seven raised beds, two tall French florist cans, fifteen metal bushel baskets and three large livestock watering tanks. Forty-three containers. Yes, forty-three. Do you know how much dirt it takes to fill forty-three large metal containers? Me either. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Do you know what kind of perennials will survive a 30-below Winter surrounded by frozen dirt and cold galvanized metal? Me either. Let’s just say, in the last ten years, I’ve tried just about everything. Some years, the Columbines, Astilbe, Maltese Cross and Delphiniums make it through and some years they just never show up. The Daylilies, Hostas, Asiatic Lilies, Phlox and Monarda are pretty reliable, but rose bushes, Lupins, Cone flowers and Veronica just pack up and leave. Now I’m trying to get the upper hand, so I grow dahlias and Asiatic lilies and fill in with whatever annuals are on sale. Okey, sometimes, because I have to order dahlias in mid-Winter, I forget what I’ve ordered and yes, I buy ‘way too many, sometimes the same ones, twice. My learning curve has had some pretty impressive “lurches” in it.

            Speaking of lurching, as I’ve gotten, ahem, older, I’m starting to have trouble staying upright out there in the garden and I have visions of falling and rolling all the way down into the Lake before anyone can stop me. I did take a tumble last year, tripped over some flat rocks, landed on my face, broke my glasses and disappeared into the bellflower. No one around. I finally crawled, hands and knees, down to the stair railing, where I was able to hoist myself up. Not doing that again, so…..

            Since then, I’ve devised a couple of ways to combat the “creaky old gardener syndrome” and thought I’d pass my ideas onto you and others.

            First thing, I got a pair of arm crutches. You know, the kind with the plastic cuffs that fit around your forearm and have a handle to hang onto. I usually use just one and it has the advantage over a walking stick in that I can hang it over my shoulder or a near-by shrub when I am digging or weeding and I can also use it as a tool to scrape weeds into piles.

            Second thing, I had fencing installed. Not around the outside of my garden, but winding through my garden, along one side of the path. It is just tall enough so that I can “surf” my way around, through the various clusters of tubs, hanging onto the fencing for stability. I also discovered, when I was investigating the cost of this project, because fencing isn’t on the cheap side of your shopping list, that one of the local big box stores had the gates to their fencing sections on sale at practically “come and take it away” prices. So, I bought mostly gates. Many of them, of course. This way, I can still get to the tubs of plants by opening the gates. Aha!

            But I was still having trouble carrying pots, plants and tools, so, I needed to solve that. I had started using a walker when I went to places where I would be walking a long way or a long time. So, of course, I had to get a big deal, fancy walker with all-terrain wheels, a cargo-bag and a seat. The old, simple aluminum frame walker that I got after knee surgery had been relegated to the basement closet. So, I dug it out, laced a couple of those plastic lattice trays that you get when you buy too many plants, into the space between the handles and “look at that!”. The aluminum frame is lightweight enough for me to lift, put down and climb around my vertical garden, while also being able to get my plants and tools where I want to go. I’m not giving in gracefully to this ageing thing!

            Lucky for me I have friends and relatives who will pitch in to do battle against the dreaded Horsetail, Snow-on-the-Mountain and other members of the marauding weed population. However, there is a limit to what I can help with before the “old bod” cries out in pain and has to sit itself down. I find one of the hardest things to accept is that I can no longer multi-task, so the garden chores that used to take me a few hours, now slop over into days or weeks-or never. The bright side is I’m getting to be a champ at pointing and directing, so there is that.