Come into the garden, Maud

I have five medium sized pots on my patio and have started a decent-ish container garden. The year before last I tried tomatoes and discovered that my condo-ghetto neighborhood is actually just crawling with deer. Hungry, tomato-eating deer, darn them. The parsley and the spinach did pretty well, though.

This year I left one pot lie fallow, filled one with rosemary, and one with moss roses. One has the day lilies that Stacey gave me from her yard, which bloomed beautifully. And the last has the lilac that I bought not long before Mollie and I left the house on Pierce Drive. I had meant to plant it to replace the hideous thing I had cut down but we ended up moving before I could so it spent several months living indoors in a pot, which is not to the liking of most lilacs. It should have died, but, like Tiny Tim, did not die. All right, lilac!

I planted the moss roses pretty late, but they are doing just fine and growing like Topsy and the rosemary has really taken off as well. I'm on a big rosemary kick right now (along with ginger), so it's nice to have some fresh to use when I cook. (When, of course, I'm home to cook...). And it just smells nice out there. If I'm home during the daylight hours - which happens about as often as finding money in the street - I open the sliding glass door, let the cat roam about a bit, and do some garden maintenence: I pull the grass out of the pots and out from between the patio bricks, deadhead stuff that needs deadheading, throw stuff into the compost that needs composting, turn the pots a quarter-turn, and brush Pekoe so that we can have orange cat hair all over Aspen Hill instead of all over my condo. Or rather, in addition to all over my condo. Pekoe eats grass, wanders and sniffs around the condos on either side of me, and flops over on the patio for a stretch out on the warm patio bricks.

I'm not using anything like Round-Up on the patio bricks because I'm encouraging the moss that is considering growing between the bricks. There's no mortar there and the moss looks pretty, so why not. At some point I need to make some moss starter which is sort of like sour dough starter - take a good sized handful of moss, break it up, and dump it onto a bucket of warm water. Let it steep, maybe adding a bit of yogurt to encourage the whole process, and then sluice it over the bricks. Add time and rain and voila! Nice, moss-y stuff between the bricks. (Thanks, House and Garden channel!)

I started the compost by scavenging some bricks and bits of two-by-four on my walks around the neighborhood and marking off an area under my dining room window and next to the patio. It's not very large, maybe 12 x 24, but I'm only one person and I'm never home, so 'twill serve. Anyway, I toss anything compostable there and the maintenence guys mow over it when they forget it's there but they mainly leave it alone. I don't add chemicals or turn it because the secret to my gardening is benign neglect. Thrive or die, that's the rule here in Leta's Little Green Space. So far, so good.

One of my co-workers grows lovely basil every year, so I don't have to grow basil, I just wait for his to appear in the office. I think I'll take him some rosemary. And Cate, too. Cate, Brett, and Charles are having me to dinner next week and fresh-from-the-pot rosemary is such a lovely hostess gift, don't you think?