Everybody has their own type and speciality of garden they are especially drawn to.

Vegetable gardening can be as different from a flower garden as night and day. And, so are the practitioners.

An English formal garden is pruned and stately, yet, an English cottage garden spreads, cascades, reseeds and is never trimmed, just deadheaded of spent flowers and divided up  of crowded bulbs.

There are succulent landscapes we add to a xeriscape.

There are shade gardens that rely on moisture and dampness.

There are decorative flowers for show and bouquets and then there are edible flower plots, grown solely for their taste, having the strictest of requirements for organic culture.

Which reminds us, there are organic, small farms and the complete opposite – the harmful reality of commercial, government subsidized, fungicide and pesticide laden ones.

Some of your neighbors may be using Round-Up this weekend instead of pulling out weeds by hand. You can kill weeds between cracks in cement with hot boiling water and a dash of vinegar, there is no need to use chemicals dumped on our society purely for profit without a wit of thought to anyone’s health or the future of our planet.

There are gardens set up, grown, established and maintained to attract and invite butterflies or birds. There are deer and rabbit resistant gardens to ward off pests and keep nature away.

If you are an avid gardener, you may have many types of areas for every interest.

In my own backyard, I have rose, succulent, flower and vegetable/herb gardens.

Every cook or foodie with a decent palate craves a kitchen garden at their fingertips. You can distinguish freshly picked, a moment ago, homegrown from trucked in grocery store produce if you take a simple taste test.

Otherwise, why would you pluck tomato caterpillars and slugs off your nightshade plants, hand water your thirsty herbs during a hot spell and hand pollinate your squash and cucumbers to ensure fruit?

Which, by the way, we get a hoot calling that in particular chore, hand delivering pollen from stamens to receptive stigmas, “sex in the garden”.

I am still in the mountains. The longest I have ever stayed up here. Consequently, I walked with my next door neighbor, chatted with the couple down the block who gave us St. John’s Wort plants as we strode by and was shown what a Manzanita tree looks like.

And that was all before 11 am.

Lots of living to be done here – Meanwhile down at our other neck in the woods, hubby sent me tomato progress!

My husband cleaned up and then reloaded the vegetable garden plots with organic soil and the walkways with new black bark. Then, I planted a variety of organic tomato plants, including eight cherry tomato transplants. I added lemon thyme, Italian and Greek oregano and bell and chili pepper plants. Now it was time to lay the drip hose down and make sure my babies were watered well. Lastly, I prepared stakes around the tomatoes so when they started to spread and grow, I could harness them in with tomato tape and keep them from falling over.

And after Adelaide left, because she loved to jump from plot to plot, I was ready to sow organic seeds. I have it all written down, charted and mapped out and we shall see what develops. Once seedlings come through, it will be time to thin and space them accordingly so everyone’s roots have room. Looking forward to sharing the maturation process as they germinate, sprout, enlarge, widen, bloom, bear fruit, swell and ripen.

Here is our climbing clematis in full bloom. The clematis vine loves cool, moist soil for its roots and sun for blooms. We have ours in the front yard, under a palm, so it gets part sun and not as many blooms or growth as I would like but plants are funny like that. Sometimes they do well where you don’t expect and some, even “easy” plants may die on you for no apparent reason time and time again, as if you were not compatible. I have absolutely no luck with orchids but geraniums ( see pink single petals in picture ) think I am awesome and aloes absolutely adore me, flowering every season, no matter where I transplant them and are just happy campers in my yard.

I walk out to the driveway to say goodby to my walking buddy, M, and lo and behold, another gift for Valentines’s – this time, from nature, which has had its way and regardless of neglect and being run over, a pot of petite, lemony jonquils bloomed.

And, right now, these amazing, huge white flowered tall and bushy trees everywhere!!!!

I have no idea what they are but I am sure they will be messy, when the flowers fall and the leaves furl out.