Opening Day

This blog is for me and only me to keep track of my gardening adventures and travails so that, hopefully, I can learn from my mistakes from year to year. Maybe other people will want to pop in and have a good laugh at my gardening mishaps. Hey, who am I to deny someone a chuckle at my own expense? But maybe I should then explain the name of the blog. My husband's nickname for me is Fussy Britches, based in part on the line from Shawshank Redemption where the warden questions the poster of Raquel Welch in Andy DuFresne's empty cell ("What say you, fussy britches? Feel like talkin'?") and partially because when I don't have something to do, I tend to get a little fussy. Thankfully, gardening takes care of the idea of never having something to do because there's ALWAYS something to do with the garden--even in the dead of winter.

My gardening background
I'm two generations off the farm (this particular farm was located in Granite Falls, Minnesota). My mom always kept some kind of vegetable garden while I was growing up in Michigan, even if it was just tomatoes. (Her mom left the farm and moved to the city when she got married, but lived on 1/4 acre lot and kept the most ridiculously large vegetable/fruit garden that you've ever seen). My mom grew things to eat--pragmatic gardening only.

When I was 14, I went to work. Michigan is state that depends on agriculture and their child labor laws are a little more relaxed than most states' when it comes to that industry. In Michigan, you can work 40 hours a week during the summer starting at age 14. So, I worked fulltime at a plant nursery during the summer. The nursey was primarily a perennial groundcover nursery and didn't get into your fancier, fussier plants like roses (though they did have some miniature ones). The work was grueling. You were usually standing all day, doing the same thing over and over again, sometimes for weeks at a time. When you fell asleep, you'd dream that you were still doing it. If you weren't standing in puddles from soaked cuttings with sticking powder constantly tickling your nose, you were covered in dirt from potting, or had an aching back from working in the fields. I hated that job and I hated my parents for making me work there. I never had any interest in plants or growing anything of any kind. You would have thought I'd have left as soon as I turned 16 (where you can work full-time in the summer in other industries), but I stayed there. The work was backbreaking, but all my friends worked in the same place.

Fastforward 10 years. I'm married and I desperately want a house for no other reason than I want to plant something. I've been living in apartments since college and just want to grow tomatoes that actually have flavor. Standard lots in Chicago are 25'x125' (no, that's not a typo) so we specifically looked in neighborhoods where lots were slightly larger. That meant neighborhoods either on the South Side (I'm not living anywhere that I have to dodge bullets) or on the very fringes of the city of Chicago. We chose the latter.

This is our third year in our house on Nagle that has a ridiculous amount of landscaping in the front and back and we're finally doing something with it this year. Clearly, the former owner thought it was okay to get the landscaping done and forget it, but that's just silly. If you want nice plants, you're going to have to work for them.

Some facts about my area
I'm in USDA zone 5b. Find your zone and what it means!
Our frost/freeze date is around May 12. Find your frost/freeze date! But be leary of these dates! If you've lived in a location for a couple of years, you probably have a better gauge of what date you can expect the temps to dip below freezing at night than some random website. We have landscaping and vegetable gardens and I vastly prefer vegetable gardens to ornamental gardening.