Mary Mary Quite Contary

How does YOUR garden grow??

I'm about to make a very Un-Canadian confession -- I don't particularly like gardening.  I say that's an un-Canadian thing to say because here in the great frozen north (or the great soggy north in my case), we are supposed to rejoice when the ground thaws and rush outside to get out hands into the soft, warm mother earth.  I see my neighbours outside for hours on end bent over their little weed patches, wide brimmed hats firmly in place and frankly, I just don't get it.

Sure, I love a beautiful garden and home grown vegetables as well as the next person.  And I go through the motions every year.  I plant the flowers.  I plant the veggies.  I weed, I prune, I dead head, I fertilize.  I curse the plethora of neighbourhood cats that use my gardens as their personal litter box and spend my gardening time plotting all manner of revenge.  But do I enjoy it?  Not really. There are just so many other things I'd rather be doing.  (And not all involve the aforementioned cat revenge.)

Think of it this way.  We get, what?....three -- maybe four if we're lucky -- really nice months of weather. We look forward to summer all winter long.  Just so we can get outside to work, work, work??  Just so I can set out a very tasty smorgasbord for the deer??  By the time we clean up from the winter, put out the summer patio furniture, plant the gardens, care for the gardens and mow the grass ad nauseum, it's time to put it all away and wait, noses to the window, for the next summer to roll around so we can do it all over again.

Maybe it's because I'm not very good at it.  I grow great daffodil leaves, but no blooms.  Same for tulips.  My hanging baskets are limp and pathetic.  The petunias are straggly, the roses forlorn.  My lilacs hate me.

But I think I'm coming up with a solution.  Grasses.  They're beautiful, perennial and the deer don't eat them.  I have a New Zealand sedge grass that looks dead before it's even planted.  And it's supposed to look that way.  Now, that's my kind of plant.

For my next blog post I'm going to tell you what I really think about weeds.