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Hello Everyone--
We have lived on our little patch of ground here in Northeastern Wisconsin for a little over 12 years now. The zone chart tells me that we are a 4, but let me tell you it is June 24th and 41 degrees outside right now. I just took a walk to look at my garden and the petunias all turned their backs on me. My sunflower seedlings have stopped in their tracks and look like they'd like to crawl back in the ground. BBBRRR! I have had my ups and downs with gardening in this unpredictable climate for a long time now and have finally decided to concentrate on a beautiful perennial garden with the hardiest varieties I can find, short of plastic. I have enjoyed my quick visits to this site and have decided that being a member is the way to go, because I'm going to need a lot of help. I consider what I do here to be sort of guerilla gardening. If I'm not dealing with a 90-degree drought, I'm trying to get rid of slugs or caterpillars or omnivorous grasshoppers without turning the garden into a toxic wasteland. Spring seems to come whenever and winter particularly enjoys one last nasty shot of freezing temps as an early May surprise. To round things off nicely we live in a picturesque hollow, where the dew comes early and stays late and the begonias rot as fast as I can replant. Did I mention the soil? When we were house hunting here, our real estate agent smilingly told us that the former owners had been corn farmers who had partitioned their land off into this subdivision. He forgot to mention that the soil had not been enriched or the crops rotated in recent known memory. To get anything to grow requires mountains of peat and manure and compost and more manure. Directly below the imported topsoil is a layer of sand (the remains, I am told, of a glacial lake), below that is a layer of dense red clay that would make any sculptor proud, and below that is an impervious granite shelf. Actually, it is only impervious if you are trying to drill a well (it laughs at everything except blasting caps); otherwise it insists on breaking off and sending up the most amazing rocks that miraculously appear whenever I till the soil. So, you see how badly I will need all of you. I think this is going to be a lot of fun.
Lee ::))