Sharon Lovejoy - A Blessing of Toads

Many of these books overlap with reminisces about the past, and I find them all fun to read. I regret when I let one slip by, since they are often regional favorites and hard to find later.

Picking up this book at the Barnes and Noble made me certain to buy it later. I was hoping for a Kindle version, but the paperback is well designed and easy to read.

As I wrote before, most gardening books repeat the same old errors and have nothing useful to say, only ways to mislead people into working too hard and spending too much to interrupt the methods instilled and managed by the Creator.

Albert Howard came to India to teach them Western methods, but learned they often knew more than he did. However, he worked to establish composting and said  "the health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible." 

Lovejoy's first chapter is a work of art, so it is easy to see why she has made a career of her love of gardening. Sometimes people grow into their names, as my archeology teacher did - Lawrence Toombs - pronounced tombs.

She was going to clean up the garden for a visit from an important gardening expert. Instead, Lovejoy watched the birds harvest seeds from her mature plants. She eventually concluded that a seedy garden was good for the birds and everything else. Her advice on growing plants for seed is packed with real information rather than copy and paste truisms.

She loved going to her grandmother's garden each day and has the same reaction now - cannot wait to get into the garden. One plot of land, no matter how humble, can elicit the same joy as it develops. Mrs. Wright came over and said, "Your bulbs are coming up." Since I overplant everything, we are planning how to share flowers and vegetables as they develop. Altar flowers often go to her house and she takes them to a patient who is in hospice care. Today we received a thank you note from the family, about how much they enjoy the flowers. The latest were the Valentine's Day flowers on the altar.



Our garden now includes many families, through distributing roses, extra seed, and - this summer - vegetables. We collect newspapers and turn them into flowers.

Neighbors are learning how to garden more productively, spending less money while getting better results. The veteran is gong to prune my trees, and he is adopting Jackson Mulch for his rose beds. He admired my roses last summer, and I admired his crabgrass.

We had some patches of healthy, tall-growing crabgrass doing to seed, so I pointed out to our helper that crabgrass is a grain brought to America and harvested in the early days. We mulched on top of it later, and the straw bales are on it now. But I have no grudge against a certain amount of crabgrass in the right places. The birds which eat the small grains enjoy it, and people go to the store to buy similar grain to replace what they just destroyed with Roundup.