{"id":2298,"date":"2007-10-06T05:26:24","date_gmt":"2007-10-06T11:26:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/gardenlog\/?p=2298"},"modified":"2017-02-13T00:35:29","modified_gmt":"2017-02-13T00:35:29","slug":"cultivating-garden-friendships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/garden-essays\/cultivating-garden-friendships\/","title":{"rendered":"Cultivating Friendship in the Garden"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before I met the Austin Garden Bloggers I didn’t have any gardening friends. For years my gardening has been a solitary pursuit. The only person I knew who shared my passion was AJM’s mom, and she lives in England. AJM admires the garden and will pitch in with big projects like cutting up tree limbs but in his spare time he’d rather be training for triathlons or programming or cooking.<\/p>\n

The community I found among garden bloggers has been very encouraging. Kathy Purdy of Cold Climate Gardening<\/a> and bill of prairie point<\/a> were among the first people to leave comments on my blog and we’ve maintained a dialog across our blogs for years. Last week (as most of you already know), I had the privilege finally to meet Kathy in the flesh, reconnect with some of the other Austin Garden Bloggers and meet the latest addition to our informal club. Maybe coming down off all the excitement of last week’s socializing contributed in part to the grumpiness in my previous post. Annie of the Transplantable Rose<\/a>, intuitive that she is, might have sensed it because she volunteered to help me out in the garden yesterday.<\/p>\n

I’ve never had anyone garden with me before. I’m hoping Annie, who brought her garden fork, wasn’t too disappointed when I relegated her to the position of under-gardener. I was just so pleased to have someone to talk to while I was working that I would have been happy she done nothing but sit in a chair and keep me company. Instead she handed me tools and buckets as I gingerly made my way through the stump garden<\/a> trying not to step on any plants and teased bulbs out of holes filled with rock, clay as hard as adobe, and tree roots. And she wrote down the harvesting stats. After four hours, we had dug up only two clumps of about 150 bulbs (60 of which were too tiny to flower). This is not particularly faster or slower than I work alone; however, it was a lot more fun.<\/p>\n

You might reckon that we were easily distracted by:
\n1. conversation
\n2. my difficulty in keeping on task
\n3. my temporarily losing the map which shows where each clump is planted
\n4. my inability to finish a thought without interrupting myself with five other thoughts
\n5. a break for cake and coffee<\/p>\n

And you’d be right on all counts.<\/p>\n

PS. Annie, thanks for the chocolate cookies. They were yummy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"oxblood
2007-10-06. Oxblood lilies sit in glasses of water on the kitchen windowsill waiting to get replanted.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2298"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2298"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5083,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2298\/revisions\/5083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}