HouseWorks: Catalogs hold no attraction
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By STEVE BATIE / Lee Newspapers
Tuesday, February 6, 2007 11:04 AM CST
LINCOLN, Neb. — It’s a sad thing to be inundated with nursery catalogs — as I have been since the Christmas catalog flood finally turned to a trickle — and have nothing to order.
It’s not that I don’t want to buy anything.
No one is more swayed than I by picture-perfect catalog photos of the latest petunia or zinnia or dianthus. I lust for every fruit tree, for every freshly bred strawberry, for every shrubby blueberry (even though I know from past failures that they simply will not thrive in my “sweet” soil).
I cannot help thumbing their glossy pages — sometimes even as I make my way from the mailbox directly to the kitchen trash can.
But I cannot order.
I cannot order annual flowers, you see, because the bunnies think they’re salad.
Wire fencing has been an effective weapon in the bunny war being waged in the vegetable garden, but that’s a confined space. It was a fairly simply matter to fence off each of the raised garden beds against them.
The flower garden, however, is another matter. Bigger, for one thing, and sort of sprawling.
To protect it from the bunnies’ depredations I would be forced to erect something like a giant chicken wire igloo, and I can’t see how even the brightest peonies and yarrows could make that look anything but ugly.
Instead, I have been forced to plant the flower bed with species at which the bunnies turn up their pink noses: sedums and ribbon grass, daylilies and irises. I’ve had some luck with canna lilies and cosmos and even some fierce-smelling marigolds.
But no pretty summer flowers.
Nor will I order fruit trees from the pages that set my mouth to salivating.
I’ve been tricked before by the mail-order promise of backyard bounty. I’ve planted my share of apple and cherry trees, peaches and plums.
With the exception of the single year when that peach tree produced literally barrels of fruit (and promptly died two years later), I have harvested nothing.
I have only myself to blame, I suppose, for in each case I picked up and moved on just 10 years or so after planting those trees.
Even so, I no longer have the patience for long-term fruit tree planting. I want results now — and the neighborhood grocery supplies all my needs.
So no spindly fruit tree saplings.
Nor even vegetable seeds.
It’s simply not economical, you see, to order by mail the few packages of cucumber, green bean and snow pea seeds that I’ll need.
I can pick all of them up locally — at the hardware store or the grocery or the nursery — when I’m shopping next spring for the tomato and bell pepper plants, the onion sets and the seed potatoes.
And then there are many mail-order offerings than I will not need to order simply because I’ve ordered them in the past.
I will need no more Russian olive trees because I’m babying along four of them already.
I have about 80 feet of privet hedge, and I’ve already filled in its holes.
I’ve planted the raspberries and the rhubarb, the spireas and the junipers. I simply need to coax them into adulthood.
So no mail orders this year.
Still, spring planting catalogs are very nice to look at.
A fine way, all in all, to pass a frosty winter afternoon.
Send your home repair and remodeling questions to: HouseWorks, P.O. Box 81609, Lincoln, NE 68501, or e-mail: houseworks@journalstar.com.
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