I can accept that I have reached the senior stage of my life. I can accept that my spouse passed away far too young. I can even accept having to move from paradise where retirement offered a myriad of things to keep me happy and busy back to my hometown. Heaven help me though, I am having a tough time turning to gardening for ‘fun’.
You are reading about a woman who could not wait to get back to the city and away from country life the moment she discovered her parents moved to the rural life permanently! I do not like the dirt between my toes, usually because it comes attached to bugs of every variety.
Vegetable gardens often sprouted snakes that hunted families of mice living off the fat of the farmer’s land. Even having a tough little Boston terrier that insisted on running ahead of us, in hopes of finding those snakes, did little to deter my feelings of despising gardening.
As Fate often does, it giggled when my oath to never return dissolved into an urgency to move right back to the country in my later years, back to my childhood home. It is a place where the main forms of entertainment are gardening, yard sales or bingo for a roll of paper towels at the senior center. I kill rock gardens, can only buy so much stuff cast off by others and prefer bingo for cash.
However, needing something to keep me busy, I watch my brother, an avid gardener, lovingly plant everything from grape vines to Japanese maple trees to every flower, for which he finds a spot, in our small yard. This year, into the third one since returning home, I gathered my courage to attempt planting, without destroying, something green.
Here are a few things I discovered:
- Plants require water more than once a month;
- Plants also require food other than that naturally occurring in soil.
- Aphids, snails, and marauding deer attack plants. The only time this is welcomed, in any form, is deer season.
- Plants cannot survive in the tiny plastic pots in which they rest at the store. They grow and require a larger home.
- Brown leaves are not a sign of health; nor are falling leaves, except in the fall.
- Being overrun with the lawnmower is not healthy for plants.
- Plants do not survive weed whackers any better than they do the mowers.
- Plants that require lots of sun do not last when made into houseplants.
- Brother gets very angry if I let the dogs out and they immediately head for his flowerbeds to tend to their business.
- Brother may grow green things, but when he is protecting his plants, he turns an alarming shade of red when anything threatens them.
Perhaps this is not my forte as a retiree. Maybe yard sales selling the items I bought from other yard sales will be a better fit.