Gardening - More Than Food and Flowers

“Nothing is more memorable than a smell.  One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town.  Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years.  Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once.  A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.  ~Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

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We say we garden simply to provide food for our families and flowers to decorate our living spaces. Yet there are more senses we seek to satisfy and conjure up memories of former days and events.

Scents, once fixed in our minds, never go away, and remain as fresh as the day we first learned them. And along with those scents we remember when and where we first became aware of them.

I smelled my first cornfield on Uncle Charlie’s farm in the White Oak Creek bottom. The corn was tasselling and the leaves were rustling in the wind. Both that sweet scent and the sound of that sea of rustling leaves are seared in my mind. My memories were vivid as my own sweetcorn tasseled in early May this year.

Momma loved flowers. The rich scent of her petunias and gardenias will always be with me, as will the acrid scent of her marigolds. Each is unique and firmly fixed in my mind.

A scent of any of those takes me back to those places and times.

Honeysuckle blooms can scent a wide area. One cannot smell their aroma and not remember riding along country roads with the windows down. Travelling those same roads we loved the petrichor smell of wet dusty roads. It’s almost the same smell of a rain dampened door screen.

In the last few years I have learned the rich sweet smell of Winter Daphne in midwinter just when I need a reminder to start planning for warm weather. She blooms when the air is dense and brightens my whole backyard. Some say she has the sweetest scent of any flower. I agree, though gardenia is a close second. But they are distinctly different in my mind.

Basil is a herb which graces my garden and an occasional Italian dish. She has the added benefit of repelling unwanted bugs in my garden.

I expect each of us has most if not all of these same wonderful memories deeply etched in our minds, and many more.

Aint God good!

Carl Wayne Hardeman

MG'05

Winter's Blow by Carl Wayne Hardeman

Winter's Blow 

The wind doth blow, the rain doth sweep, relieving dry and hot.

Campaign signs, laying down blown away, I like that quite a lot.

The storm doth show, with a mighty blow, Nature cleans her own front yard.

Yesterday's leaves, dead weak limbs, felled by winds so hard.

My garden says, that's OK, though I've lost leaves and shoots,

Onions and garlic, carrots and beets, are growing new long roots.

Me and Belle, no season has rest, we're planning next Springs' work,

Reading catalogues, ordering seeds, we need a new garden fork.

While we plan, recliner laid back, Mimi thinks we're both asleep.

But I doth plan, and Belle doth dream, of squirrels chased up a tree.

Aromas waft, from Mimi's kitchen, a rich stew is getting hot,

Turnips stewing, sweet taters baking, natural beef in the pot.

A gardeners work, is mostly done, until Winter ends at last,

But Mimi has, only brief respite, twixt cleanup and next repast.

Bare ground is bad, so I doth grow, collards and kale alike,

My garden grows, hardy winter crops, no break in the cycle of life.

So I praise Him, who made it all, though winds cut like a knife.

Since after all, that's His way, of renewal by bringing new life.

     -- Carl Wayne Hardeman

Carl Wayne's Zinnias

Carl Wayne sent us this video slide show of his 100' zinnia bed planted in the median of Peterson Lake Road in Collierville.  Laura Ruth from Baptist Hospice is going to cut some for arrangements at the hospice and Carl Wayne will share those photos later.





Click HERE to read the Commercial Appeal article that Christine Arpe Gang wrote in July about this garden.

More poetry from our own Carl Wayne

Oh my gosh!  No posts here for soooo long - sorry, we've been vacationing (right at prime gardening season, but more about that later.)

Here's a poem from Carl Wayne:

Expensive Mater Pome

Carl Wayne June 14, 2006

Organic gardening is a beautiful thing
Taking care of Mother Nature's good earth
Growing maters and taters with taste and smell
Whatever it costs it is worth.

But organic gardening is not cheap my Dear
If you want that good old taste
My price per mater has risen too far
I tell by the look on Mimi's face.

A five dollar pot and 4 dollars of mix
Wire cages and cute two dollar stand
Expensive crystals supposed to retain water
Mimi said it's getting out of hand.

But I had not finished my buying spree
I bought gallons of expensive soil soup
And SeaTea and bone meal and various sprays
Composted chicken and black cow poop.

For a ten dollar bucket and 9 buck bag
Of organic alfalfa pellets
I could brew my own tea for almost free
But Mimi said she couldn't tell it.

I'm hoping for a large mater harvest
Maters that smell and taste so sweet
And accept the fact that they cost me
Somewhere around ten dollars apiece.

Maybe next year I'll plant in the ground
And have more maters to glean
And reduce my cost to less than a buck
And fertilize with triple thirteen.

A LadyBug in My Garden

A LadyBug in My Garden

A ladybug flew in my garden,
Looking for something to eat.

How dainty in her polka dot dress,
She landed on a leaf.

But ladybugs don't eat leaves at all,
She hunts and eats aphids,

And rids my garden of sap sucking pests,
She bites off they little heads.

Soon she's filled her natural role,
And spreads her wings in wind.

Off she goes to another garden,
To make another friend.

Carl Wayne  April 2010

Early Spring at Collierville Victory Garden

CVG 3-27-11

“Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.”  ~Rainer Maria Rilke

Now is the time to visit the Victory Garden - an official Tennessee Master Gardener Demonstration Garden. The rich dark humus and heavily mulched raised beds are not yet obscured with thick foliage.

Swappin the Chicken Yard and the Garden

(Carl Wayne Hardeman is a Master Gardener and a wonderful speaker and writer!  Need a speaker?  Click here.)



doin' the chicken dance!



“Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching for what it gets.” ~Henry Ford

It’s windy this morning here at the Snappin Turtle Farm in my dreams. The wet ground is cold, and the damp air cuts me and Mimi to the bone. But they’s work needs done, and days are getting longer and warmer.

We got most of the spring garden planted. We transplanted cabbages, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, Texas and Georgia sweet onions, and a few red cabbages. I guess they taste like the Bonnie and Dutch Flat cabbage. The garlic we put out last November is about a foot tall and has survived several freezes over the winter. The old collard green stalks have begun to grow new leaves.