Spring, you kill me. It’s been raining most of the week. The weather finally broke this afternoon just long enough for me to walk to the raspberry bed and check it out. I was standing there admiring the new growth, which seemingly sprouted overnight, literally. I stood there thinking of fresh raspberries for my cereal…raspberry pie…frozen berries eaten straight from the freezer…and then it started sleeting. Sleet! I ask you.

But patience is a virtue, and in this case, it will pay off with a bumper crop (I hope) like last year’s. The first berry ripened on the Fourth of July—nice!—and I picked the last stragglers around Labor Day. This berry patch came with the house, so I have no clue what variety I’m tending. The fruit is impossibly small and tender, and must be eaten within a day or frozen, but it’s sweeter and more flavorful than anything I’ve ever bought at the store. And these berries make sinfully delicious pie.

Last year’s crop was the best ever, and I think it’s because I finally got disciplined about cutting down every last bearing cane at summer’s end. That is the sum and substance of my berry-maintenance routine—well, that and hacking down the buckthorn—and it paid off. It also keeps the bed cleaner and easier to maneuver through.

I don’t have any wisdom on getting a raspberry patch started, since I had nothing to do with that. However, I can advise that you plant canes in a spot where they can either spread like crazy, or be contained in some fashion. Ours are in a raised bed, which helps, but new sprouts constantly pop up in the yard, and not just in the immediate area around the raised bed. I’ve found shoots in a garden 15 to 20 feet away. (Maybe those were planted by birds, but still.)

We finally gave in and hired a lawn service to control the plants in the lawn (along with the many other undesirables that seem to love our backyard—wild strawberries! The horror!), but I’ll still need to hand-pull them out of the garden beds. It’ll be worth it.

It isn’t a real rock garden, in the sense that rocks were placed there on purpose for effect. It used to be a honkingly huge shrub bed, badly overgrown with ugly yews, five-foot-tall cotoneasters and a vigorous stand of invasive buckthorn. We decided to pay a landscaping company a tidy sum to dig out all the ugly shrubbery, remove the hideous volcanic rock and landscaping cloth beneath, take out the rotting railroad ties surrounding it, and create a rounded raised planting bed that I could fill with all manner of pretty things.

Well.

It didn’t take long to figure out something was amiss. I had to call the landscapers back twice—once to remove enormous rootballs from a couple of shrubs that remained just below the layer of nice new topsoil, and again to get them to repair a gaping hole left in our composite siding when they removed a scrubby pine inexplicably planted rightnexttothehouse. (They argued about that one, but eventually fixed it—two months later.) They removed the offending roots without much of a fuss, but the biggest surprise was yet to come. Once I actually started planting, I realized they hadn’t removed any of the volcanic rock. I couldn’t poke a trowel in deeper than in inch without hearing the sickening clink of metal on stone.

After doing battle with them over the root balls and the siding—and with spring edging into summer—I just wanted to get some stuff planted. How bad could it be, really?

I decided to stick with tough, never-fail annuals like marigolds and zinnias, plants that shouldn’t be discouraged by a few crummy rocks. They bloomed, for the most part, but never spread beyond their landscaping-pot size, so the bed always looked patchy. I planted three shrub roses at the back of the bed; they produced a grand total of three roses, two of which flowered for exactly one day before the deer found them. This year, all the roses are dead.

Last summer, I got smart and took buckets and coffee cans with me every time I planted something. And every time my trowel hit a rock, I dug it out and threw it into the bucket. I filled lots of buckets. The garden bed still looked like crap.

There is one bright spot, though. Our former neighbor Alice, who talked me through many travails in my first garden, once told me that when she started gardening, she was so clueless that she planted daylilies in gravel. And they came up. Hmm. I have a wildly overgrown daylily bed in the back yard, so I divided them and planted a bunch on either side of the rocky bed. And you know what? They’re coming up like troupers. They aren’t the prettiest cultivars—they’re the orange ones we always called ditch lilies as kids. But dammit, they’re growing. It’s a start.

I could use some advice…got a bunch of plants last fall from a friend who’s starting a prairie in her yard and had some excess native plants to share. Weather turned before I could get all of them into the ground, and some of them are still sitting in boxes in my garage, rootballs intact. I’m wondering if there’s any point in trying to plant them now. I also have one hosta bought at an end-of-season sale, still in its black pot. I figure since all this stuff goes dormant over the winter, it might be fine if I plant it now. Anybody ever done this?

We got a nice soaking rain this morning, making the afternoon ideal for one of my favorite actvities—weeding. I tackled the bed under the apple tree, where I spent countless sweaty hours last summer removing some ghastly plant that had spread profusely and was clearly intended (by the previous homeowner) to be there but did not live up to expectations. No flowers, uninteresting foliage; feh. Digging it out proved to be quite a chore. The roots were treelike in places, but I thought I got it all, providing a nice spot for something pretty—coreopsis, coneflowers, maybe some bee balm. Whatever this stuff is, it’s remarkably persistent. The bed was covered with leaves sprouting from little rhizomes lying right on top of the soil. Clearly, this will be a tough customer to completely eradicate.

A tip for weeding: Wear disposable latex gloves. I buy ’em by the box at Walgreens for four bucks a pop. They give you more fine-motor control than a pair of bulky garden gloves, which makes it easier to massage the roots and shake off the topsoil, which takes oh, a zillion years or so to create. If you have good soil, you don’t want to just toss it out clumped to the roots of undesirable plants. If you’re yanking a sturdy root, you can just shake it vigorously to shake the soil loose, but plants with smaller, more intricately entwined roots, you can rub the roots between your fingers and let the precious topsoil fall back from whence it came.

This, folks, is sweet woodruff. Right now it’s just hopeful sprigs of bright green poking through the leaf litter. Soon it will be a lush, fragrant carpet that gives the illusion that I actually know what I’m doing.

It’s been glorious and almost hot today; tomorrow, I put the boys to work in the yard. Job One: Trim the living daylights out of the shingle-eating tree planted waaaay too close to the house. I love having teenage boys; there’s always someone other than me eager to climb a ladder.

The calendar says spring, but meh. Here in the upper Midwest, spring is a cruel tease, a trollop with a come-hither gaze who doesn’t actually put out until you’ve all but given up.

As I write this, it is a miserable 32 degrees. Spring threw us a couple of much warmer days last week—enough to encourage my four (count ‘em) hyacinths to poke through.  A handful of daffodils have emerged, but they’re a mere fraction of what I planted, because the squirrels keep digging them up. (The lovely springtime photo at the top of the page isn’t from my neighborhood, alas, but that of our talented Webmaster, J.C. Lucky guy—he lives in Atlanta, where spring arrives when it’s supposed to. In March. Not that I’m bitter.)

I’ll be pleased enough to see the daffodils bloom, but what I’m really waiting for is the sweet woodruff. I can’t sing its praises enough. It’s an incredibly hardy groundcover that spreads with absolutely no effort on my part, which is exactly how I like it. (I’m a survival-of-the-fittest gardener; my motto is Grow or Get Out.)

When we were preparing to move three years ago, I dug up a few clumps of sweet woodruff from my established beds and just left them in pots on the patio until I could replant them. They seemed perfectly happy with this turn of events, and took hold immediately when I transplanted them a couple of months later.

Sweet woodruff spreads freely, yet it’s easy to trim back if it strays out of bounds. When mine starts encroaching on the lawn, I just dig it up and replant it somewhere else. Timing doesn’t seem to be particularly important; I’ve done this from spring through fall with excellent results.

Sweet woodruff will grow in moderate to deep shade, but doesn’t seem to mind sun, either. It’s a fine choice for bare spots beneath trees and shrubs, and pairs nicely with bulbs and hostas. In spring, it produces small but fragrant white flowers with a scent usually described as “vanilla,” which I don’t find entirely accurate. Whatever you call it, the scent is absolutely lovely but never overpowering. Easy-care, self-propagating, a delightful scent—really, what more do you want?

Welcome! I know, I know—just what the world needs: another blog. Then let’s call it a gardening journal, something I’ve always wanted to keep. If you’re interested in following along, I’m thrilled. If you have stories of your own to share, even better. The more the merrier.

I’ve been kicking the blog thing around for years, although the initial idea was to write about parenting, back when my kids were toddlers. I ditched that notion after reading the newspaper columns of a Local Writer of Some Reknown, who wrote relentlessly about her kids—intensely personal, embarrassing and sometimes cringeworthy tales that should have stayed within her circle of intimates. It was an instructive example, one I didn’t want to emulate.

So why gardening? Because I’m passionate about it. And I can write about it without embarrassing my children.

I’m intrigued and challenged by the endless possibilities gardening offers. Since starting my first garden from scratch 20 years ago, and subsequently working for gardening books and magazines, I’ve learned a trick or two. The most enduring lesson I’ve learned, though, is how much I still have to learn, which is where you come in.

I’ve always savored the camaraderie of the gardening crowd. The best gardeners I’ve met generally aren’t experts with horticulture degrees. (I know one of those, too, and she’s spectacular—but most of us don’t have a horticulturist on speed-dial. And anyway, she’s way too busy and expensive for a house call.) I draw inspiration from other hobbyists, people who enjoy figuring things out as they go along and taking the inevitable disasters in stride. I’m not dismissing books and magazines as resources—after all, they’re helping to pay my kids’ tuition—but I love the immediate intimacy of sharing a thorny gardening problem with a fellow traveler and hearing, “Oh, I had that problem, too. Here’s how I fixed it.”

I share my experiences in that spirit, and for what they are—the work of a rank amateur. My gardens won’t win any awards, and you’ll never see them in a national magazine. They’re flawed—too bare here, not enough color there, too crowded over there. But the beauty, the challenge, the unending joy of gardening is that it’s always a work in progress—boundless opportunities to turn last year’s debacle into this year’s triumph.

So, welcome to my garden. I’m going to enjoy having you along for the journey.

You’ll occasionally find other information here, too—books I’m reading, music you might enjoy, a few green (read: cheap) tips and tricks, maybe the occasional recipe. And probably the occasional reference to my wonderful children. But nothing cringeworthy.