My love/hate relationship

I finally got my garden planted today.  Actually, I shouldn’t use the word finally.  I’m right on time.  As my great great grandma used to say, don’t ever plant before Mother’s Day.  Since Mother’s Day was only two weeks ago, you could say that I am right on time.

I decided that I have  a love/hate relationship with my garden.  That may surprise some of you that know me.  I love to garden, right?  Well, mostly.  I have decided that to love my garden, conditions need to be prime.  And unfortunately, conditions are not always perfect.

For instance, the temperature needs to be about 75 degrees for me to be happily outside pulling weeds.  During the heat of the summer, I need to be outside first thing in the morning to achieve that goal.  The problem is that I try to get out and walk or run during the cool part of the morning, and by the time I am done with that and have taken kids to school (part of the beauty of year round school!) I have usually missed that window of opportunity.

I also like to hand water the garden instead of stick a sprinkler on it.  I like to think that if I only water the plants, and not all the bare dirt, I keep weeds downs just a bit.  We have secondary water that we use on the garden, which is great because it’s not metered, but it’s also just great because I think sometimes there are weed seeds in the water.  (I have heard that from others, not just solely my opinion!)  Since I don’t like to be outside watering during the heat of the day, and have usually missed the above mentioned cooler window, I just put the watering off till the evening. 

The problem with putting off so many things till the evening is that our evenings are usually pretty busy.  So, half the time the garden doesn’t get weeded or watered.  Well, I should say it gets watered, but sometimes not till 9:30 at night, and it’s dark, so I can’t really see what I’m doing.  It’s loads of fun watering in the dark and hoping that you got the plants well enough!

I guess with this love/hate relationship, the love part wins out.  Even though it takes up time, I still plant one every year!  I guess I just have too much Iowa girl in me to give up and not plant anything!