cutting back cottage pinks

Being Snippy

June 9, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I took a day off to recuperate from working too long in my yard two days running, but I went to town with a friend and ended up buying more plants, mostly plants for my “farm” garden rather than my flower garden, though I did buy one dianthus to fill in a blank space in one garden.

So, of course I spent yesterday planting all those new starts, not just the dianthus, but one pumpkin, one tomato, one watermelon, one cantaloupe. Sounds silly written out like that, but I don’t eat much of any of those things so one plant each should do it. Besides, the main reason to get those particular plants is that they take up a lot of room, and I have a back section of my yard that screams for green. I want to see if those vines with their pretty flowers will fill the area as I hope. And who knows, I might get an edible treat or two out of the deal.

There are several plants, mostly the cottage pinks, that are overgrown, and I’ve just let them go. I have a really hard time gathering the ruthlessness necessary to do such hatchet jobs, so I wait until I have a lot of aggression I want to bleed out. Well, yesterday I was feeling snippy in the meaning of short-tempered and irritable, so I got out my pruning shears and, closing my ears to their silent screams, snipped away as much of those poor plants as I could. I was going to wait until they went to seed, but apparently yesterday was the day I needed to get rid of some aggression.

I’m not sure why I was so disgruntled — well, I certainly spend too much time paying attention to what’s going on in the world as if it were a thriller I was reading in real time, and that makes me worry too much about things I have no control over, and for sure I’ve been stiff and sore after working so much.

Apparently, my revenge on my poor body for giving me grief is to give it even more grief because yesterday, once again, I overdid it. With any luck (and a bit of discipline) I might manage to take it easy today, only watering my newly planted gardens and closing my eyes to the work still to be done.

One benefit of having been so ruthless yesterday is that I was able to clear out around the daisies. And oh, aren’t they glorious! I might even snip off a flower or two to liven my kitchen.

Sometimes being snippy is a good thing.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in being me, gardening, home, life. Tags: being ruthless, being ruthless in the garden, cutting back cottage pinks, Daisies, flowers, planting one pumpkin, planting one watermelon. 5 Comments »

Decision, Decisions

May 26, 2026 — Pat Bertram

During the past fifteen years or so, I’ve had to make a lot of decisions. Life and death type decisions. (Other people’s deaths, my continued life.) Decisions such as how to get through the next minute, hour, year. Decisions such as where to go, what to do.

My decisions today are trivial compared to those decisions that had such far-reaching consequences. In fact, these current decisions don’t really have any close-reaching consequences, either. I suppose in the long run, today’s decisions could have consequences since almost everything does, but anything that might come from these decisions is more a matter of taste and perspective than anything else.

For example, some of the flowers I planted in my raised garden a couple of years ago went to seed, and those flowers did well and they too eventually went to seed and filled in around the vegetables I planted last year. Since I can never count on any seed sprouting, instead of simply watering the raised garden and seeing what would happen, I planted petunias. Shortly afterward, a huge number of seedlings from previous plantings appeared. I hoed them under, not wanting them to compete with the petunias, but then another crop of seedling appeared.

Some of these seedlings are grass, I think, and those I can get rid of as soon as I know for sure. Others are marigolds and still others are moss roses. One decision to make is if I want the orange from the marigolds to break up my color scheme of pale yellow, bright pink, and dark red petunias. Another is if I should just let the seedlings do what they want, and if they end up interfering with my artistic sense, I can transplant the mature marigolds into empty garden spots. Or I could eventually move the petunias. Or I could . . .

See? Decisions. Decisions.

I’m not one for making decisions anymore, not that I ever was. By the time I look at every side of an issue or a problem, I usually come to the conclusion that either way has its good and bad points and makes no difference which I choose, which ends in a decision-making stalemate. (If there’s a major benefit to one point of view, then obviously there’s no decision to make. It’s the evenly balanced choices that get to me every time.)

Luckily, I don’t have to decide anything. I can wait to see what happens, but I also know that once the plants take hold, I won’t want to get rid of them. Transplant them, yes. Treat them as weeds, no.

Meantime, there are plenty of other things to do in the yard, things that need no decisions made about them. Well, that’s not true. The cottage pinks in the wildflower garden need a “haircut,” but do I do it now or wait until they’ve gone to seed? Or do I do it now and leave a few stalks to go to seed. More decisions!

I know one thing that doesn’t need any decisions made about it. In fact, I completely forgot about this dwarf evening primrose until I saw it in my predawn watering cycle.