Today's project requires a drive from home to Jefferson City, accompanied by 550 plus of our most fragrant and tender friends in the back of the Explorer, thirty or so flats of Matrix Mix and Matrix Ocean pansies. Their blooms are three inches across and, if you'll forgive my fancy, their "faces" seem to be frank and open and unswerving as the break of day. They spent the night exhaling in the car, greeting us with a warm breath of fragrance and humidity in the morning.
We drove in driving rain for three hours. It drained away before our destination, but my spirits drooped when I saw geese swimming on the pooled waters on the Missouri River bottom outside Jeff.
On the surface, the flower beds looked pretty good!
But reality set in as soon as my spade bit into the ground. Every hole for a plant became a...
..... pansy pond.....
Now I'm a long ways from my college soils classes, but even a wee bit of gardening experience, much less the decades I've accumulated, tells me these are not ideal planting conditions. Saturation, compaction, collapse of soil structure? Let me count the ways.....
And...oh yeah, I planted them all anyway. Every passerby told me what a nasty day it was to plant,but I didn't choose the day; it chose me.
Like they always say, you fight with the army you have. May my pansy volunteers overcome the odds against them, flutter their brave spring flowers against the elements, and cheer all that pass through...
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