Garden Fun

So it seems that I am taking on this "Summer of Self Improvement" without the help of my daughter. Since we have turned 5 we are no longer the sweet, want to help little child we used to be. We have now transformed into some kind of snobby "too good to help" kindergartener who would rather watch the same episode of ICarly 1300 times than spend five minutes in the garden with me.

I did manage to get her to assist me in making the signs for each of the plants. We went to Michael's and purchased plywood squares, long dowel rods and weatherproof paint and modge podge (love that stuff) came home and googled pictures of each of the plants in our garden and began painting and creating. I thought we were having a nice mother/daughter bonding experience and couldn't believe our good fortune that little monkey man stayed nice and asleep during the entire hour long process. When we were done with the last sign, it had been sealed and dried, I sat back to admire our work and simply stated "we're done" and my little precious princess sighs with a exasperated breath of relief and says "oh thank goodness" as she runs out of the kitchen and back into the living room to find out if Carly really kissed Freddy or not. Little snot.

Now normally our garden is a little 8 X 4 foot pathetic and overgrown sight crammed in the back of our double lot yard. It is not attractive with it's wire fence and the weeds taking over. The plants normally don't have the room to breathe much less grow and I can't even walk into the thing so most of the inner vegetables don't even get picked because I can't find them amongst the man eating plant growth. This year however, I kind of lucked out in a strange way. A few years ago we purchased one of those 18 X 4 foot blow-up pools and my husband decided that smack dab in the middle of the yard was a great place for it. While this was all well and done while the pool was up, when it was down for the season I was left with an 18 foot circle of dead grass in the smack dab middle of my yard. This year my husband decided in early April he was sick of looking at the dirt circle and put the pool up early. A few weeks later he decided to weed whack the grass around the pool..... can you figure out what happened. 100 tiny holes poked around the circumfrence of the pool. Down comes the pool and out it goes for the garbage men. So now I have an 18 foot dirt circle permanantly left in the middle of my back yard.

A garden is born. I have plenty of room to actually leave decent sized space between my plants and can actually plant all the things I normally don't have space for. After a trip to Lansings and Newcombs Farms (where I will also be getting my CSA shares from) I came home with cabbage, califlower, brussel sprouts, zuchinni, squash, green peppers and hot peppers, artichokes (how cool is that!) cukes and pickling cukes, broccoli, green and yellow beans, two types of eggplant, cantalope, two different watermelons and pumpkins. WHEW. The melons and pumpkins will be planted in the back by the fence so they won't overrun the other plants.

Home to start the planting process. I have all our rows schetched out in the already tilled garden, I got Celie a little gardners apron from the dollar bin at Michael's, my mother bought her a kids gardening set with a trowel, shovel and water bottle and our signs are dried and ready to be placed in there specific locations. I am so excited and ready to begin this next bonding experience from our Summer of Self Improvement. I mark out the spots for Celie to begin digging the holes and we start planting our little garden together. One hole, two holes -small sigh, three holes - larger sigh, four holes - huff.

"Celie, what's your problem??!"

"I'm done with this,"

"Don't you want to finish planting our garden?"

"No, I'm done."

"Don't you want to put the signs you made in the ground?"

"You can call me when it's time to do that." runs inside to see who Carly's kissing now. Little snot.

So I finish planting all 15 varieties of plants myself. I stand back admire MY work and call inside to tell Celie it's time to put her signs in the garden. The back door opens, a head sticks out and yells "You do it, I'm busy."

Little shit. Maybe ICarly will plant a damn garden in one of her episodes and then my kid will be interested in a real one, till then I guess it's all mine.