Gardening is Alive Again

It’s that time of the year again. Gardening season. I’m loving it more each year. Getting to know what plants and flowers are called what. How much water they each like. What blooms in the spring, summer or fall.

It’s fun trying to keep color and interest in the garden going for all three seasons - a challenge in itself.

How much sunlight. How much encroachment from other things planted nearby. How well they handle the Canadian winter…perennials…annuals…grasses…climbers…ground cover. It’s a lot of fun for me.

Is it cheating when you use Miracle-Gro? I hit the garden with it every 7 days.

Because I’m a techie, I earn my living indoors, starting a monitor - all day… often talking on the phone.

So getting out into the garden for me - even for just 5 minutes on busy days - is a very nice break. It helps to clear my mind. I find gardening a very forgiving endeavor too. You don’t have to be any kind of an expert to get into it and I find that it provides much in the way of satisfaction for very little effort.

It’s also hard to screw it up. Maybe you over water, underwater. But it’s all part of the education for me.

…Very likely a lifelong pursuit for me in some way or another.

When I’m stuck with answers to gardening challenges, usually there’s someone in the family or the local nursery who can help. I happen to have two gardening books which are my bibles and a healthy curiosity to learn and try new things.

I’ve also found that gardening is also not that expensive.

Most of our plants and trees were in the ground and with the house when we bought it. Many other items have been awesome gifts from friends and family.

I also have some favorite tools that make things a little easier… and of course, what I think are the best gardening gloves around - Burpees. Burpees are a very comfortable, cotton glove, with a neoprene, rubber like coating that lets you really get into the dirt and feel stuff…without getting your hands too dirty. That’s a good thing for us metro sexual types. The Burpees are also great for protecting you from bug bites.

Speaking of bites, I’ve already had run-ins with two two female black widow spiders in my garden and you don’t want to be bitten by one of those buggers.

Gardening also gives me a great opportunity to combine another hobby of mine - still photography. There’s nothing like photographing plants, bugs and other related stuff with the camera from different angles and different lighting inputs.

Lighting…macro…depth of field…shutter speed. I can never quite get it perfect…but really enjoy trying…to get that perfect shot.

And don’t even get me started on post production, digital editing software - that’s a whole other domain that I have yet to really begin exploring. For the time being, I’m just using the basic tools that come Irfanview.

Irfanview is actually a great digital photo editing software program for the pro-sumer user and it’s free. The menu system is a bit old school. You can check it out here.

Here are a bunch of shots that I took on the weekend … now that we’re coming to the end of spring and summer is just a few weeks away, I thought that the timing was great for a garden photo roundup.

These shots were taken with a Panasonic Lumix DMC LX-1 point and shoot camera, which is great for last minute shots and things that don’t move.

My experience with digital cameras is that as soon as you’re dealing with things that move, point and shoot cameras can’t compete with the abilities found in SLR cameras.

Most of these shots were taken on a macro setting, with Panasonic’s proprietary image stabilization on and none of them were touched up in anyway. The pictures were just cropped to 610 pixels wide and 72 DPI to fit in the width of my website theme so the pages load quickly.

Anyway, see if you can find the baby grasshopper…