Garden Digest

It's easy for anybody to get bit by the gardening bug.  I can remember the dynamic rewards I felt a couple of summers ago when I built my own split rail fence on the back hill – in an opening under the bounding oak canopy – and planted along the bottom rail my first raspberries, blueberries and strawberries. Nearer the house, placed out on the brick terrace, I potted lettuce and tomatoes, wild grasses and flowers, and some boxed carrots.  Eventually, inside a newly constructed raised stone planting bed, cucumbers, a failed attempt at potatoes, and some – what I came to find out – very deer-edible flowers.



It's a bug you get bitten by because fruits, veggies and flowers are all essentially sunshine in solid form. In gardening we have to follow the gift that is the pattern of the sun, and although we know we need moisture for the process to bear fruit, so to speak, the garden hose is a masterful substitute if need be.  Before you know it, that sunshine is made plump and sweet and we see how the natural cycle of things works once again.

There is the work of the spade and de-weeding claw, the disappointment of the failed seed, the morning that, just as you expect to harvest your much labored-over tomatoes, you find out the roving deer herd has had the same thoughts of bounty and beats you to them by an hour or two. And yet it is that very story of the

triumph of that little bundle of sunshine over the obstacles of pests, poor
weather, or the hungry mouths of rabbits, that builds the memories of the garden.  It is a deep, rich story and born out of our shared genetic heritage.

Raspberry Fact:  Raspberries actually belong to the genus Rubus, which is part of the Rose family.  Cultivated raspberries have been derived mainly from two species, the wild red raspberry and black raspberry.  There are over 200 species of raspberries.