My Garden Hates Me

I am sure that my garden hates me.  Every where I turn, there are more and more weeds to pull up.  Finally I just had to stop looking at the weeds and spend a few moments looking up at the sky.  It was a gorgeous sky, so soft and pretty.

Little fluffy clouds kept skitting across, bringing me moments of shade from the sun - whose true purpose is to only make it hot and muggy and humid...and to encourage the weeds to grow.

This week is when we do the "Big Push" for the garden tours.  Everything - and I do mean every thing - has to be weeded and pruned and fluffed.  This is when I question my personal sanity.

I remember gardening as a kid.  I absolutely hated it.  I hated the planting, the weeding, even eating the vegetables that would finally come in.  It was work.  I was a kid and I wanted to play.

I guess I haven't changed that much.  Well maybe a little.  I like the planting part - there's hope in a garden when you plant something new.  You hope that it will do well, hope that it will grow where you put it, hope that it looks okay there with the rest of the plants.

And eating the vegetables is alright.  My DH and I love nothing more than opening up a jar or freezer packet of something that we grew in our garden when it is the dead of winter and we just want to think of the warm days of summer.  So, I like the vegetables now.

But the weeding!?  I still hate the weeding.  They are evil little plants that try to kill all of my nice plants.  They have bugs all over them - which frequently get in my hair. And some of them are slimy or they prick me or they irritate my skin and make me look like I have chicken pox.

Sure, we mulch, we put down landscape cloth, we even over plant some areas just to try to break the cycle of weeds.  But they get through all of our defenses.  No matter how hard we try, they find a way in.

Today I found a horrible weed in my "hospital" bed.  That's where we put plants who need a little extra TLC.  It's far enough away from the gardens that they won't contaminate anything else if they're contagious, but near enough that we can keep an eye on them to help them recover.

This weed was vicious.  It had grown to about 3-feet tall and had nasty spikes all over it.  It also was a "leaves of 3, let them be" weed.  At first I was convinced it was poison ivy.  I called my girlfriend to find out the best way to kill, kill it dead.  We worked out a strategy, this evil weed was a goner.

But I wanted to be sure of what it was, so I did a little checking...wild raspberries!  It's not an evil weed after all, I have wild raspberries growing in my garden now.  I love wild raspberries.  They make a terrific jam.

Okay, so maybe I'll come around to being alright with weeding, after all, you never know what gifts you'll find growing in your garden when you're weeding.

But I think I'll have to wait awhile for that feeling, at least until the first batch of wild raspberry jam is ready.