My mom loved the garden, but taking care of it as a chore was something I always hated. Weeding? No way! Now that mom’s gone, last year and this year on Mother’s Day we made up the garden for her, but despite the sentiment, I would pretty much do anything to get out of weeding.
Luckily, this time, we worked smart instead of working hard. Dad has this “claw” that is used to till the soil, so I went through the garden doing that to the whole thing. Then we could just rake out the weeds, including roots of weeds we’ve probably missed for years, and it was so much easier to plant the new flowers without having to dig into hard dirt. So it was actually a pleasant experience overall.
I also used my planning skills to design the garden, because the more time I spent on that, the less I had to spend on doing actual hard work.
(That’s it for today. If you want some math or pedagogy, please see my last post – I was very excited by it!)
James Cleveland-Tran
The Roots of the Equation 
Comments on: "Gardening" (2)
Ah, I hadn’t read this post when I was reading your tweets. I was thinking you were working on some kind of garden where you live with the other tenants or something. Despite your dislike of gardening, it’s nice that you were able to do this in memory of your mom.
That being said, I have to say it’s strange to read a gardening story right now because we’re pretty much at the end of being able to plant new things here in Texas. The 90-100+ degree temps are moving in fast, which wipes out any plants that haven’t had a couple of months to establish. My current gardening project is installing soaker hoses around our trees to help them survive our current drought conditions. Being a homeowner is exciting stuff, let me tell you.
ROOTS of the equation! Ha ha….ha….heh.
::slinks away::