Garden Notes

Harriet having a bad hair day in the garden

I have a few small, fun pots that I plant and move around the garden to fill in holes left behind by daffodils and other early bulbs. One of my favorites is the gray toad I call Harriet.

Over the years I have planted shamrocks, impatiens, geraniums or petunias in her based on whether she would be hanging out in shade or sunshine. This year I thought I would try pink geraniums and for a vertical element – what about onions? I had a few onions left over from planting the vegetable garden, and since onions grow easily and like sunshine, they might be just the thing to add a whimsical element to the arrangement and then in the fall, we could actually harvest and eat them.

In my mind, this was a great, low cost idea and I placed my 4 small geraniums and 3 onions in the pot, watered Harriet and set her in the sunshine. The geraniums grew happily and the onions came up as expected looking pert and vertical. Then the hot weather hit. We had temperatures of over 100 degrees on 5 separate days and a lot of days in the high nineties, quite unusual for our Milwaukee area. Of course I watered every day, but a weird thing happened to Harriet. All of the onion tops in her  arrangement started to droop. One day I realized that she looked like I felt, and just like the rest of us, she was having a really bad hair day!