Secrets

The door creaked as I slowly opened it, announcing to any who might be inside the shed that someone was entering. I could imagine garden fairies scurrying to their hiding places and actually saw a few meadow mice as they disappeared through a small hole in the wall. Who knew when sunlight had last lit the interior of that shed? It had just one window covered over by an old piece of burlap, the kind used to wrap newly dug trees. I entered for only one reason. I wanted to leave a copy of the … [Read more...] about Achieving Happiness in Your Garden: The Conclusion

I was going through a big stack of clay pots one day, sorting them by size and wondering where they all came from. Since most of the plants I’ve purchased in the last umpteen years were generally grown in plastic pots, I found it hard to believe that I had so many of these clay pots, but I did. Some I got from my Dad. I remember stopping once at an old dilapidated greenhouse with him when I was a kid and buying a whole bunch of four inch clay pots. I think I have most of them now. My sister in … [Read more...] about Achieving Happiness in Your Garden: The Fifth Secret

Having found three of the five secrets to achieving happiness in your garden, I was on “high alert” for signs of the fourth secret. As I walked around the garden each day, I found myself stopping to look under every rock for signs of a piece of paper, a box, something, anything that might contain the fourth secret. Whenever I picked up an old magazine or gardening book, I caught myself not necessarily reading it, but instead looking in the margins and between the lines, hoping that the fourth … [Read more...] about Achieving Happiness in Your Garden: The Fourth Secret

I couldn’t believe I had been so careless, so cavalier, about one of my old hoes! Normally, I don’t try to use the older hoes for any actual hoeing, especially those with their original wood handles, for fear that the handles will snap off. But for some reason, I felt almost compelled to try out this one particular hoe. I still can’t explain why. I carefully took it down off the pegboard and proceeded to sharpen the head using one of my sharpening stones. Then I took it out into the vegetable … [Read more...] about Achieving Happiness in Your Garden: The Third Secret

One early spring day a few years ago, I was sitting in my favorite spot by the window lazily browsing through some very old issues of Horticulture magazine. I came to own these magazines when someone I once worked with paid one dollar for a big box of them at an auction and then gave me all the issues from 1959. As I casually flipped through the pages, I happened upon the classified advertising in the back of the August 1959 issue and began to read some of the ads. Lloyd Kyler of South Whitney, … [Read more...] about Achieving Happiness in Your Garden: The Second Secret

One fall day, when the sky was quite blue and half the leaves were still on the trees and half were on the ground, I went out to the garden with rake in hand. I wasn’t planning to do a lot of raking, but merely wanted an excuse to be out in the garden on a beautiful day. As I poked around at the leaves, raking up little piles here and there, my rake suddenly got caught on something. At first I thought it was a tree root, but when I got down on my knees for a closer look, I could see that it was … [Read more...] about Achieving Happiness in Your Garden: The First Secret