Bloom Where You're Planted. Please.

Ambition, thy name is woman!

Today is the day, my friends. I am on a mission to beautify the dirt patch on the side of the house, even though my plans don't include any corn (at least not this year).


Believe it or not, this dirt patch used to be a wilderness of weeds and half dead creeping juniper. I think there may have been some burrows of some kind in there as well. I was fairly content to just not look at the whole hot mess while I was pregnant. And since I was pregnant for two springs in a row, the garden was allowed to sink happily into entropy.


We spent the better part of Saturday ripping out weeds and tearing our hamstrings. It's helpful that we live at the edge of the PA Slate Belt, so we have beautiful, rich, rock free soil. Ahem.

I offered the kids a penny a weed if they got in on the action, and they took me up on my offer for about eleven minutes. I'm surprised they lasted that long. Before they got called away by the siren's song of the swing set, they managed to rack up a whole sixty seven cents. I hope they don't spend it all in one place.


On Sunday, I took the older two to our local nursery to pick out some plants chosen to die a parched, weed-choked death that were clearly marked as HARDY and DROUGHT-RESISTANT and ABLE TO SURVIVE THE MINISTRATIONS OF CHILDREN. So we basically came away with some cacti and some plastic flowers.

Coreopsis, Maiden-hair, Salvia: we hardly knew ye.

Now all we have to do is dump a ton of some kind of rich, NON-ROCKY soil into the dirt plot, and then carefully pick out a spot for each of the lucky plants. Oh, and I want to design a sort of dry riverbed of egg rock around the air conditioning unit so that no one will kill any plants when the air conditioner is serviced.

I certainly wouldn't want anyone to step on my plants when we all know that the right way to kill them is to let them wither on the stem.

Dead plants rolling!