Working in the Yard
I come from a family of gardeners. My grandparents were farmers; they grew cash crops and a full array of vegetables for their family. My mom brought the same mentality into her suburban home. She had a strawberry patch and two different veggie beds in the backyard. Flowering plants are her primary love and she devoted her evenings and weekends tending them. She allocated the kids a whole section of the yard as a"dirt pit" -- clearly in the hopes that we would start our own mini-garden -- but instead we spent gleeful hours digging and dumping water and making rivers and pushing around little dump trucks and just getting dirty. I loved the dirt pit but viewed the rest of the yard and garden as a chore to be avoided, and I was mostly successful.
My adult life has had a similar mentality. Eric and I bought the house when we were 24 and we inherited a "professional landscaped lawn." It really was lovely, but we did nothing to tend it and it has gone to crap in the 9 years since. We added a tree to the backyard (Fred, the American Sycamore) and a tree to the front yard (Red, the Red Bud), but that has been the full extent of our plantings. My mom, of course, was horrified that we had not transformed our yard into anything but grass, so she transferred all sorts of plants to our yard (peonies, rose of Sharon bushes, columbine, lilies, irises, lily of the valley). I'm pretty confident she brought other things here, but I never tended them so there's a "survival of the fittest" mentality in terms of what's still around.
Overall, my interest in growing plants has been rather low. In the past two years, though, I've discovered a new joy: yard work. I really delight in taking my clippers and cutting plants down to size and I LOVE ripping weeds and other plants out of the yard. It's ridiculously theraputic to destroy, and I've averaged 2 hours a week destroying and restraining all sorts of plant growth on the property.
I'm slowly feeling the inclination to plant something on my own. I checked out some gardening books from the library and I've brainstormed some ways to eliminate the grass altogether from my yard. Today I committed. Samantha received a lovely hydrangea potted plant for Adminstrative Asst Day, which she promptly gave to me. I brought it home, spent an hour digging and preparing a space for it, and put it in the ground. The girls were THRILLED. They supervised the digging, squealed with delight each time a worm was revealed, and they took turns watering the plant. Lola literally shook with joy and exclaimed "I SO EXCITED!" when she was given the water cup. She watered the dirt about a foot away from the plant, but who cares?
Raina has been an active member of Gardening Club at school; she's really enjoying the whole process of encouraging vegetables to grow and we've had lots of botantically based conversations in the last few weeks. I think it's time for the Whomptons to switch mentalities; it's time for us to become gardeners. I'm honestly looking forward to the enterprise, and I too am excited to see what Raina, Lola, and I create over the next few years.
My adult life has had a similar mentality. Eric and I bought the house when we were 24 and we inherited a "professional landscaped lawn." It really was lovely, but we did nothing to tend it and it has gone to crap in the 9 years since. We added a tree to the backyard (Fred, the American Sycamore) and a tree to the front yard (Red, the Red Bud), but that has been the full extent of our plantings. My mom, of course, was horrified that we had not transformed our yard into anything but grass, so she transferred all sorts of plants to our yard (peonies, rose of Sharon bushes, columbine, lilies, irises, lily of the valley). I'm pretty confident she brought other things here, but I never tended them so there's a "survival of the fittest" mentality in terms of what's still around.
Overall, my interest in growing plants has been rather low. In the past two years, though, I've discovered a new joy: yard work. I really delight in taking my clippers and cutting plants down to size and I LOVE ripping weeds and other plants out of the yard. It's ridiculously theraputic to destroy, and I've averaged 2 hours a week destroying and restraining all sorts of plant growth on the property.
I'm slowly feeling the inclination to plant something on my own. I checked out some gardening books from the library and I've brainstormed some ways to eliminate the grass altogether from my yard. Today I committed. Samantha received a lovely hydrangea potted plant for Adminstrative Asst Day, which she promptly gave to me. I brought it home, spent an hour digging and preparing a space for it, and put it in the ground. The girls were THRILLED. They supervised the digging, squealed with delight each time a worm was revealed, and they took turns watering the plant. Lola literally shook with joy and exclaimed "I SO EXCITED!" when she was given the water cup. She watered the dirt about a foot away from the plant, but who cares?
Raina has been an active member of Gardening Club at school; she's really enjoying the whole process of encouraging vegetables to grow and we've had lots of botantically based conversations in the last few weeks. I think it's time for the Whomptons to switch mentalities; it's time for us to become gardeners. I'm honestly looking forward to the enterprise, and I too am excited to see what Raina, Lola, and I create over the next few years.
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