Digi Dare #216 (Feb 18) - To Your Heart's Content - Project Idea

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Digi Dare #216 (Feb 18) - To Your Heart's Content

For Digi Dare #216 (Feb 18): {…} to your heart's content (at digidares.com)I started gardening when we bought our first home. The house came with fruit trees. Several 40 years old grape vine attached to a rickety overhead trellis - the branches were over 4 inches thick in places and the trunks coming out of the ground were massive. A MacIntosh applE tree pruned with a huge flat top, almost like a gigantic patio table, that yielded a couple thousand apples which I gave away in masses. A peach tree that quickly succombed to the Peach leaf curl that was entrenched in the neighbourhood. A Bartlet pear tree that yielded far too many pears for me (or my friends at the office) to ever use. Mom and Dad always had a beautiful yard and bountiful vegetable garden, so it was only natural for me to give it a try too. At first I focused on vegetables, which usually lost the battle against the weeds by mid-summer, but then I discovered perennials. That was also when I discovered the annual Canada Blooms garden show, and and then the annual Royal Botanical Gardens plant sale. The Canada Blooms market always had the current year's brand new perennials on sale in various booths. And the RBG sold off the plants that it separated in the spring, so there were always unique and rare specimins for a bargain. After a couple years, my garden expanded, taking over more and more of the lawn and the vegetable garden until the vegetables pretty much had to go! At that point I also expanded our fruit orchard. We added a santa rosa plum tree and several small peach treelings given to us by our wonderful neighbour Joe, who taught me everything I knew about the care of fruit trees: dormant oil, pruning, harvesting. I also added a couple cherry trees - one bing and one van. After a couple years, the Mac tree died (I accidently modified the grading near the back and the roots rotted from standing water), and we replaced it with an apple tree grafted with a main branch each of several different kinds of apples: Granny Smith, Red Delicious, Yellow Delicious, Royal Gala, Spartan, and Fuji. Rob finally had to replace our rickety trellis (I was afraid it was going to fall on someone), and he raised it to about 10 feet tall, so we had a lush spot covered over with grape vines during the summer to cool things off. Over time our gardens, front and back, became a favourite place for kids to play on the slate paths (the slate was discovered buried by the topsoil), and for neighbours to enjoy the constantly changing blooms.Of all the things I miss from our lives, those gardens are what I miss the most. Most of what I cultivated and grew can't survive in our 3+ zone here, and most of my transplanted perennials that I split when we moved back home have long since died off. I've even given up on our small vegetable patch here, because the weeds from the natural park area and pond behind our property encroach further and further and require more and more effort to keep at bay. I'll have to be satisfied with photos from my old garden!Delighted by Allison PenningtonDJB Tootsie Wootsie font (title) by Darcy BaldwinDJB Fonts: Meet the Teacher (Mrs Hunt font shown, journaling) by Darcy BaldwinDJB Woke Up Late font (date) by Darcy Baldwin