Before I go any further, I have to explain something. Keith and I are avid gardeners, but trying to get anything to grow down here is as difficult and frustrating as...hmmm....no, it is the most difficult and frustrating task to accomplish. Period.
Our soil is clay. Our clay is saturated with salt from the tidal flooding that inundates our yard about once a year. Fall through spring, our water tables are so high, walking in our yard is like walking on a soaked sponge. Water literally squeezes out from underneath your feet. And that's not fresh water. Yup, it's salt water.
Some plants we can absolutely not grow. Phlox, for example, collapses within a day after salt water has touched it. The plants we can grow struggle and don't quite reach their best potential. As long as the ground is wet or moist, they can handle the briny water, but when the summer dries out the ground, they burn and become stunted from the crystallizing salt in the soil.
Despite knowing how much salt water is in and under our yard, somehow we have frogs, and lots of them. This fact never ceases to amaze us. We thought frogs were strictly fresh water creatures, but they thrive down here. The only explanation we have is our water isn't salty like the ocean. It's more briny, but has just enough salt to damage a lot of plants people in the high country have no problem growing, and yet fresh enough to support a healthy frog population.
Despite all the frustrations and obstacles, we're still determined to get things to grow and splash our yard in color. Every fall, we go to Lowe's and buy hundreds of bulbs, but we wait until around Thanksgiving when Lowe's reduces the price by 75% off. We save a lot of money that way. Nothing like getting a bag of 25 daffodil bulbs for a buck!
Last spring we were rewarded with a colorful April showing. Encouraged, but worried that maybe the bulbs didn't survive the harsh conditions of our clay and salt, we added hundreds of bulbs last fall. We crossed our fingers and hoped for the best.
Mother Nature more than cooperated. By February, not only were the bulbs we planted in the fall coming up, but most of the bulbs we planted the year before were coming up. In fact, some of those bulbs were starting as early as December and January.
March didn't come in like a lion. It came in thinking it was April. The warm weather brought out the best in our bulbs. Our yard came alive with color for the first three weeks of March. The color burst came about a month earlier than normal because of the unusually warm month, but we enjoyed it all the same.
Because of a few warm days near eighty degrees, March brought us another early treat - frogs. Frogs are usually hibernating during March, but what amphibian can resist eighty degree days? We had a couple of nights of their chorus before the weather turned cool again. They'll be back out in full force in a few weeks, but their performance was a nice preview of their annual show.
So far, April is more like mid to late March, which is fine for gardens, but we are concerned about the serious lack of rain. The water tables are down like they are supposed to be, but that allows our ground to dry out. Our seedlings for the late spring/early summer color are starting to sprout, but if we don't get rain to keep the salt down, we may have a bland garden after the mid-spring bloomers are finished blooming.
Keith and I decided we could never be farmers. The weather is too fickle and we're sure Mother Nature is getting ticked off with our constant cussing her out. Oddly, we have some healthy cacti growing in our yard. Our native prickly pear cactus and it's Texas cousin thrive down here. If Mother Nature decides to get even with us for our cursing her and turns our yard into a desert like she did last year, we'll always have the pretty cacti.
Enjoy the tour of our spring yard. We open the tour with a minute chorus from our frogs and finish the tour with color and the music from Pink Floyd.
© 2012
Mark Darien
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