Miss having a garden

When the summer comes I always miss having a big garden again, forgetting all the downsides of it.

I enjoy watching all the flowers, tulips and daffodils in the early spring, apple- and cherry-trees blooming, the roses, having your own strawberries, gooseberries and currants of all colours. The elder bush blooming white in the garden, hops clinging high around its’ pole and every spring bringing out the geraniums from their winter hiding in the garage and having the same ones in pots for many years.

Having a couple of beehives in your garden and your own honey and the barbequing, oh, I just love to barbeque. We used to begin the season every year on the last weekend in January, no matter if it rained or not.

And I always forget about moving the lawn, and being allergic to grass and suffering of hay-fever, well that is not a good combination, and the hay-fever having advanced into asthma, well, gardening is not one thing I should have. The lawn is nice to play football or badminton on, spending warm summer night in the tent but now with the off-spring growing up; well the lawn would not be to any use anyway. Except for the cats to stand on one leg trying to avoid getting their tummies all wet and cold after it’s rained. All the leaves falling out of the trees in the fall having to be collected, pruning in the orchard, roses bushes to only mention a few more back sides of having a garden.

Living in an apartment in Finland you are only allowed to use an electric barbeque on the balconies and there is only space enough for some geraniums in pots to make it cosier. There is no room where the geraniums could be stored over winter so new ones have to be acquired every spring with only a couple of the rarest and oldest ones surviving in the pitch black cellar store room.

In beginning of June there always are a couple of nights with night frost when the flowers have to be taken indoors in order to not freeze to death and the season always ends too soon. Geraniums can only take a couple of degrees below zero, and one year I did the miscalculation to leave them out here in Finland when hit by a sudden early snowstorm in September as we were having some visitors from abroad. Well the geraniums turned all black and it was in vain to even try to save them for the following spring.

So, living this far up north with such short summers and with the global warming makes me once again wonder, how ecologically correct is it to have someone to grow your flowers to have on the balcony and just chuck them away in the fall? What waste of energy is that? And all the fertilizers and pesticides used in order to acquire healthy plants to sell? Or do these balcony flowers do any good for the greenhouse effect at all?!? Some small addition to oxygen production to balance the carbon oxides?

Anyway, off to the garden centre to acquire this summer’s balcony garden. Geraniums in pots of course.

Today is nice weather and the off-spring will be off celebrating finishing school with their friends. Mummy is no more needed until graduation in a couple of year’s time, but then the whole family is invited to get as many graduation presents as possible.

Are the kids of today getting greedier than we were or do I just not remember how we were in our time?