Beware The Man With Garden Tools In His Hands

My philosophy, when it comes to yard work, is "Why should I pay somebody to do a lousy job when I can do the same for nothing?"

Actually, that's not quite true: I will gladly pay someone to do the mowing and edging. (I did that enough for $$ when I was growing up...and this was BEFORE the days of warnings pasted on mowers that said, "Do not use as a hedge trimmer.") I, though, insist on screwing up the flowerbed work myself.

The irony is that I bought my house, in part, because of the very nice flowerbeds. But what do I do? I let my dog dig in them, lie down in them, and otherwise invariably let all kinds of Cichorium intybus, Iva axillaris, and Amsinckia intermedia establish themselves, only to wrest them from the soil with a set of tools.

Now, so I'm digging away, leaving a trail of herbaceous corpses behind me in front of the flowerbed. (I never clean up the dead until after they've withered so much that I decide, "Hey, let the lawn guy chop them up!")

And, I'm doing a great job of uprooting these really tall leafy things that are embedded among my lillies. Or, irises? Or whatever.

Anyway, I've got a nice pile of these weedy-looking things in the yard and a neighbor walks by and says, "Hey, if you're going to throw away all those flowering bulbs, can I have them?"

(I was wondering why the roots of the "bulbs" were so different from those of the other "weeds.")

So, I replant them all.

Then I remember...I had done this same thing last year.

Mike Sledge