WILL THE REAL GARDENER PLEASE STAND UP?

I read many blogs these days about people who are growing their own food, and I want desperately for us to be those kinds of people. There's just one problem. We're not. In order to have a productive veggie patch, someone in the family has to be willing to do a whole lotta grunt work. I'm looking around and wondering, who's that gonna be?

Ten or fifteen years ago I fell madly in love with gardening, because it was a great creative outlet for me. I didn't particularly enjoy the back-breaking labor of digging and hauling, nor the never-ending tedium of trying to keep multiple huge beds watered and weed-free during long, hot Texas summers, but I put up with that facet because I was so desperately happy to be doing something creative.

John didn't fall in love with gardening. He fell in love with me being a gardener. He adored having a gorgeous view from every window in the house, taking his evening stroll along the pathways while smoking a cigar, visiting the fishies in his pond... But pruning? Weeding? Turning compost? Reading up on a plant to figure out how to keep it happy? Fuhgiddabouddit!

My biggest problem was that we kept moving. I'd spend several years landscaping our yard from scratch, get it just to the point where it was starting to fill in and look good, then we'd get transferred, and I'd have to walk away from it all and start again. That, coupled with encroaching age and arthritis, made it harder and harder to get motivated each time. Then, along came Seasonality - our house here in the Hill Country.

When we decided to buy it, we sold our house in the Houston burbs (the garden pictured here), rented a townhouse closer in, and spent every other weekend in Wimberley. I couldn't begin gardening here yet because I had no way to keep things watered, or protected from critters, between visits. So, for three years I was a woman without a garden, and had to be content with container gardening at the townhouse. I had my work as visual merchandiser to satisfy my creative urges, and since I no longer had to spend every spare moment weeding and watering, I was able to take up writing.

At last I am in the Hill Country full-time, but now I have more creative outlets than I know what to do with! Also, my body took a good bit of abuse during my years of lugging pottery and statues into groupings at the nursery, and I am extremely hesitant to do anything that might land me back in physical therapy, and have me referring to Vicodin as "my best friend". So, here's poor John, tapping his foot and wondering when I'm going to come to my senses and go back to being the gardener he once knew and loved - the one who was willing to unload and schlep an entire truckload of mulch singlehandedly. Well Dear, I have only one thing to say. Fuhgiddabouddit!

But wait! What is this I am seeing out the window? Why, someone just spent their entire weekend schlepping mulch to all our beds, without even being asked, and it wasn't me! By golly, there's hope for us yet!