Reluctant Gardener

Year by year, I gain a little ground in the garden. I have no real drive to grow things; the best I can hope for, it seems, is a feeble urge in the spring time to do what is necessary to keep from being overtaken by weeds.

2008

2012

I don't consider myself a real gardener as I don't actually "garden". I do yard work. I weed. Sometimes I pull stuff out and put other stuff in. Maybe I am just a fair weather gardener or a gardener with a bad attitude. Maybe a half-baked gardener? Yard boy?

Every year, I vacillate between hopeful enthusiasm and disappointed resignation. Magazines and seed catalogs display lush images of lavish flower beds, rich with color, and bountiful rows of plump, shiny vegetables, and I get lured into believing that it might be possible to create that here. But, really, I am too lazy and cheap and too easily confused by my failures. I also give up quickly. Once the seeds are in and the new plants settled into their spots, I expect them to thrive and then produce. Give me flowers! Berries! Fruit! Food! Instead, the bunnies and deer and slugs sneak in and interfere with the bountiful harvest I have imagined. There are insects, there is wind, the soil pH is too high or too low, and who really knows how much to water and when to fertilize. Not me.

Smallest tomato ever!

I could keep learning about it all and I could build a animal proof fence to protect the vegetable beds (see above - cheap and lazy) but really, I am shooting for a yard that takes care of itself. The poppies have taken hold in the spot for poppies and there is progress in the raspberry patch. Sedums do well (eventually) and I like to grow beets and tomatoes. I will embrace my own procrastination and admit (reluctantly) that my so-so yard and my good enough garden is really just fine.