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Spring is here and I’m waiting to turn the soil to begin a new season with wonderful thoughts of flowers and garden produce springing from the good earth to lend beauty to my yard and grace to my dinner table. 

Ya, like that’s gonna happen!

Turning the soil? Yech! Do you know what happens when you do that? 

Well, I’ll tell ya … worms and dead things like the salamander carcass I buried last fall.

It’s not wonderful, there are wasps there. 

At this point it’s easy to discern I have, let’s say, just to be polite, a checkered history on the gardening front. I have consulted with verifiable green thumbers, but obviously I didn’t take very careful notes … sort of like my reporting skills sometimes. 

Thanks to advice from certified gardeners, three of my four disbarred patches of daisies have survived, even though the soil that holds them appears to have barely survived a nuclear blast. I slam a little peat moss from the geranium pot (that’s a can’t miss flower that I can’t destroy), and they stubbornly resurface in the late spring every year and I wonder why they bother. 

I have tried growing onions on a tiny strip of something that resembles soil in the back yard. Not much happened. I tried radishes last year. Anybody can get radishes out of a garden, they’re like weeds aren’t they? Apparently not. The bride used that strip as her personal ash tray last summer, so it served some kind of purpose. 

She planted a funny little tree in the front yard four years ago. I think it’s still alive. I mow around it and wish it well every time I bump into its spindly little frame. 

The big elm trees on the front boulevard belong to the city, but I’m supposed to kinda take care of them apparently. Good luck city! Mind you, they’ve been there longer than I’ve been there, so they had a head start and will outlast me. They appear to thrive on neglect as does our Virginia creeper vines. Yes, creepy Virginia is another weed-like plant that even I can’t neutralize. 

We inherited three tulip plants located near the front of the house. They now number two. They are also stalwarts who defy neglect and refuse to succumb to the Park’s black thumb school of gardening. I smile when they do surface and shine, even though they are blocked from view by an overly eager cedar bush that I keep trimming to no avail. It took its cue from the creepy Virginia and has a persistent satanic soul of its own. 

I really don’t appreciate gardening. I have other things to do that I can never get around to, so why would I bother not getting around to gardening? 

When my sister and I were kids, my mother had a big plot on a lot she had purchased in our town … just so she could have a huge garden. 

I hated hoeing, seeding, harvesting, mosquitoes, bugs that bit and bugs that didn’t bite and my sister. As luck would have it, she returned the favour. I wasn’t about to sign her autograph book either. 

I hated going down in the root cellar in the winter to bring up potatoes or carrots from the bin, knowing full well that by February, there would be several squishy, eeewie-inspiring tubular root zombie vegetables lying in wait that I wasn’t going to see, only feel, because I was too dumb to turn on the light before I grabbed. 

Gardening is highly overrated and I need counselling or therapy.