Hello again, I hope you're gardening

I haven't posted anything for weeks, due to a combination of being very busy and being prostrate from the heat. Please forgive me.

I'm still mildly prostrate, and very annoyed that the big thunderstorms last night passed mostly to the north and neither cooled us off much nor provided our gardens with much rain. We are really short on moisture this spring. I am actually contemplating watering some spots, which on the first of May is just ridiculous.

I've been giving a lot of garden club talks on various topics -- small-space vegetable gardening, the science of spring, bulbs, pruning, wildflowers in the shade garden, greener gardening. I always love getting out there and hearing what other gardeners have to say and the questions they ask -- especially beginning gardeners, of which there are a lot these days.

Experienced gardeners love to get together and swap garden pictures and tales and recommendations. I volunteered yesterday at the Friends of the Oak Park Conservatory herb and vegetable sale (which continues today), and of course gardeners getting together is one of the great attractions of that kind of thing. Another big one today: the Wicker Park Garden Club sale.

But like any group of people with a common interest, from the Tea Party people to my old friend's coven of antique BMW motorcycle collectors, we tend to agree on more than we disagree on and to descend into jargon and what we assume is common knowledge.

It's always bracing, when doing these talks or standing around in an apron that says "Can I Help?", to hear the questions new gardeners ask. So many of the terms and ideas that we take for granted are actually not that obvious.

For example, I really struggle to explain clearly what good soil is. At the point at which I say we want it to both hold moisture and let water drain away freely, people start to look goggle-eyed. Who can blame them? And I've never given a vegetable talk yet where somebody didn't ask me what I mean by "indeterminate" tomatoes.

Or try to clarify, really, what a "native plant" is or what "heirloom" means. It's not easy, because although we throw those terms around and have spread the notion that they are somehow the only right and proper things to plant, even experts haven't agreed on what they are, exactly. The venom that can be spewed between people with different definitions of a "native plant" would make the Tea Party people blush.

Well, enough rambling. I have to run. One note: Even if your soil looks damp this morning, check for soil moisture by actually sticking a finger down in the dirt. My experience lately -- including this morning -- is that it's dry down there.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.