Garden fairies here.

We are garden fairies and we have decided to provide a report of Carol’s grand plan to do a little gardening every day in September, for at least an hour or so.

What we have to report so far is, unexpectedly, quite positive.

Granny ‘Gus’ McGarden could not be happier with the vegetable garden right now, with how Carol has faithfully cleared out the dead squash plants and pulled so many weeds.

Well, Granny could be happier if—or shall we optimistically say when—Carol pulls the weeds that are hiding behind the zinnias. We heard her mutter something about how trying to get behind the zinnias next to the fence would likely result in her knocking over a bunch of the zinnias and besides, you can’t really see the weeds unless you look real close.

Well, Granny can see them but honestly she’s so tickled by how the rest of the garden looks that she’s willing to look beyond the weeds and even forgive Carol for blaming the garden fairies when she lost her digging knife one day.

As it turns out, garden fairies were not involved in the missing gardening knife this time. We graciously accepted her apology for thinking we would take her precious gardening knife and hide it. Carol left the knife in the wheelbarrow under a bag of potting soil that she was using when she potted up all those pansies in the picture above.

We are garden fairies. You knew we would eventually get around to those pansies. And there at the very end are some violas, the Sorbet series of violas, to be exact. Do you know that her local greenhouse brought in 30 pots of those violas?

Would you like to know how many of those 30 pots Carol bought?

All 30 of them. One day she bought 12. The next day she went back and bought ten, and then finally she went and got the last eight of them. Then the owner of the greenhouse joked that someone said they needed to get more violas because they were selling so well, and she laughed and said, “It doesn’t count when Carol buys them all.”

Anyway, we are garden fairies, and we are pleased that she bought them all. She’s hoping they will overwinter and come back in the spring. We shall do all in our power as garden fairies to see that they do. They are planted in the ground and the pansies are in containers.

And we don’t know what’s gotten in to Carol but she planted them all right up without delay.

Well, we do know a little about what’s gotten in to Carol. She issued herself a challenge to garden every day. To keep track, she drew up a little calendar for September and every day that she spends at least an hour productively in the garden—and just sitting and mulling over the garden does NOT count—she gets to put an ‘X’ through that day.

So far, every day has an ‘X’.

Ol’ Tangle Rainbowfly is pretty sure Carol’s going to get to ‘X’ out every day in September and hopes she does the same in October. Seedy and Soddy agree. Honoria and Hortensia are still wondering if this “new” Carol is going to last and have yet to be convinced.

We are garden fairies. We will keep watch and report back if there are any new developments.

Submitted by:

Violet Greenpea MayDreams, Chief Scribe and Head of the Viola Overwinter Committee.