Rosalie

     
     This is my niece Rosalie. I was six years old when she was born, the first child of my older sister, Velma. So we are close like sisters. She loved my mother and came to stay at our house as often as she could. 

     As adults, we both followed our own paths and had families, but always, always kept up with each other. I  knew where there was a bedroom and a kitchen table when I went back "home" to visit family from one of the many states I lived in.

     When Rocky got sick a few years back, Rosalie and her husband, Leslie, who live in Ohio, came a couple times a year to help us out. She and her daughter, Annette, came to visit and help last April less than a month before Rocky died. Then she and Leslie came again for Rocky's memorial service in May.

     Last Friday they arrived again to visit and help me in my flower beds. They more than helped. They did most of the work, not only in the garden but some odd jobs in the house, and together we found time to cook. 

     It was delightful to be with one of my family in two of our favorite places, the garden and the kitchen.

     

     Here's the words that came to me when they left to go home this morning.  

Proust had it right when he remembered things past,

He must have had a rich family--rich in living, that is,

We are aging now, but rich in memory,

Rosalie has come to help me with my garden,

and we pat the coneflowers into the earth 

and recall our child labors from the past,

We pull out weeds and speak of losses we've had,

We prune out dead branches and toss them
into the woods to transform,

And on the knees of our Levi's

we kneel and hope and plan,

And wear out our garden loving genes.

Mimi Rockwell

April 20, 2011

Mimi and Rosalie taking a break from weeding.

Day Lilies 2009

MimiRock at Castle Yonder

Upside Down Tomato

 I've always grown tomatoes--well, maybe not every year, but most years even here at Castle Yonder as soon as I got enough planter beds in sunny locations.

With our new handicaps, health-wise, I can no longer tend a veggie garden. I'm not planting many annual flowers, either. Arthritis combined with lack of breath does not react well to bending over, kneeling, hoeing, or spading. 

But I've been intrigued by the catalog pictures of the kits they're selling for "upside-down tomato" plants, so sent for one. Rocky and I started working on it Sunday. We are so slow these days, but we managed to get it all unwrapped and read the directions on Sunday. On Monday, we put the green bag into the wire cage, and I went to the nursery to buy a tomato plant. I couldn't narrow it down to one, so I bought two, one for the bag and one for a flower bed that had just the right space open where I had pulled out a dead rose. (Roses don't do well back here in the woods.)

Yesterday, Tuesday, we mixed the soil included with the kit, put it into the bag, and planted the tomato, a determinate variety, called "Patio," which was the recommended kind to use. We put the water reservoir on top, filled it up, and Voila! we have a tomato garden, if you can call one tomato a garden. 

Well, I'm the proverbial farmer who closes the gate after the horse has gone, because I started watching our chosen spot for the amount of sun it gets. This deck that you can see in the above picture (that's me pointing at the top leaves of the tomato hanging out of the bag) is off the basement and has another deck off the Master bedroom up above. We hung the tomato from the rafters of the floor of the upper deck.  You don't know how many times I've sat back here and kept moving my chair to get out of the sun. Well, evidently not at this time of the year! Yesterday, I discovered it's pretty shady back here and I don't think our tomato is going to get the required 6-8 hours of sun a day. I think the overhang provides too much shade. Notice all the shade in the photo which was taken around noon.

So, I'm looking around for another place we might hang this. Problems...problems...hmmm...gives us something to think about besides ourselves!

A Recommended Ground Cover

These were small plants freshly planted last summer. I predict that they will cover this small terraced planter by the end of this summer. This is Spotted Deadnettle, a member of the mint family. I first heard of this plant on a landscaping show on Home and Garden TV. Its scientific name is 

lamium maculatum. There are two varieties here; the one with purple flowers is "Purple Dragon," and the white flowering one is "White Nancy."

It is shade loving and deer resistant. I love it for the dark shady areas we have in abundance living in the woods.