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| Our kids toast to my own foolishness |
I've planted my garden more than once already. Why? Because I'm an idiot. I was so excited to buy plants and get them in the ground that I didn't want to wait for the garden fence to be built. I bought onion starts from our local hardware store (which also happens to be the only place I've ever seen autographed John Wayne photos for sale....honestly, who would buy those things? This establishment is part hardware store, part garage sale.....odd). I could hear them calling my name in little aromatic onion voices as I looked into the box of plant starts. I couldn't resist. I bought a little bunch of 50 baby onion plants. Excitement began to well up inside of me from the moment I held them in my hands and smelled the sweet dirt clinging to their roots.
Onions are the most instantly-gratifying thing to plant in the garden. You just pop them down into the soil and 'presto!' there's pretty green rows of plants smiling at you. I thought I'd use those little plants as a way to motivate me into building our garden fence. You know, because now I had a deadline. I had to get that fence done before the plants could go in the ground. I was so motivated now to get it done, but several things happened that week.
1- It rained for most of the week. Have you ever tried to do ANYTHING in a muddy, overgrazed pasture? Not happening.
2- I had a lot trouble getting the fence supplies over to the garden plot.
Before I could build our fence, first I had to take it down. Seriously. I didn't want to actually BUY fencing materials (you'd know why if you priced fencing- oh baby!- it's not cheap!). So, genius that I am, I decided to reuse the fencing already on our property. There were two goat pens built into our lawn space. It was good fencing material just sitting there. Those goat pens needed to come down for more than one reason.
1- I could reuse the $150 worth of fencing.
2- More importantly, there is a fantastic tree branch just waiting for a swing to grace it....but it hangs right over the fenceline. We must make way for progress, er....swings. Down it comes! (I'm happy to get that swing off the lawn....it's been sitting there each day, asking me when it will finally be hung up.)
I thought I'd pop into the yard and pull down the goat fencing in one afternoon, then relocate the materials into the new garden plot and install everything in one more afternoon. Two hard days of work and we'd be done! I could just imagine my little seedlings happily growing behind the protection of my fence line.
Um...I had those thoughts 2 weeks ago.....and no, the fence still isn't built.
Ignoramus that I am, I didn't realize how difficult it can be for a weakling like me to wrestle fence posts out of the ground. I spend hours on this darn fence (even spending those most-coveted hours, "baby naptime" on this!). I removed a lot of fencing from the posts, then tried to tackle the posts themselves. I threw my weight against each one, trying to use leverage to loosen it and wriggle it out. After lots of effort, sweat, and panting, all I had were bruised hands to show for my time. Not one fence post had yielded. Erg. This was a job for Mr. Kingsley.
Unfortunately, he gets home after dark (it's surprsing what a hour-long commute does to the family schedule!). This also means it's too late at night to send him tackling a fencing job for me. One day last week he went to work extra early just so he could come home early and work on removing this fence.
Sometimes I tease him that he must have the Jedi force. I feel like he waggles his fingers at a problem, breathes a command, and the offending problem quivers in awe and rushes to obey. At least that's the way it looks to me. Stuck jar lids? Gone. And he only used one hand to do it. Surely it must be the force.
In less than an hour he had a row of posts out of the ground and a roll of fencing ready to be moved to the garden. Thank goodness for the strength of our husbands! (Unfortunately it rained several days right after this, so the fencing materials are still sitting on our lawn, waiting for a sunny day.)
While Mr. Kingsley wrestled fence posts, I had been focusing on building the garden bed. After spending all afternoon digging in the dirt, I could hardly wait to plant something.
Back in the house, the onions were looking wilted...after all, it had been more than a week since I purchased them. They really needed dirt. The fence line wasn't protecting our garden yet.
"Do you think the deer will eat onions? They don't like onions, right? Maybe the chickens won't eat them either. Surely nothing will eat the onions because they taste so bad," I tried to convince myself I wasn't doing something stupid. Sarah tried dubiously to dissuade me as I pushed each onion into the fluffy garden bed.
I was right, nothing ate the onions, but they were still all uprooted in less than 24 hours. Our chicken flock had been irresistably drawn to the freshly-dug soil. It was the perfect place for them to scratch for bugs. They didn't eat a single bite of onions, but flung them all out of the garden in their search for tasty morsels. By the time I discovered them, they were wilted and mostly dead. What would be the use of rounding them up and replanting them? There was no fence yet. The chickens were still irresistibly attracted to the garden bed. Our dog Bella was having a grand time chasing them out of the garden for me, but this was no long-lasting solution.
I learned my lesson the hard way. I have to curb my enthusiasm and sprinkle in some wisdom (I'll even settle for some good ole common sense, since I seem to be lacking that as well) and work. Today it's supposed to be sunny, so I'm heading out to dig fence post holes. Then I'll go buy new onion transplants.
(Editorial update: It's been 2 hours since this entry was posted, and I DID IT! The fence posts are ALL set into the ground and ready for the fencing to be attached. I even reclaimed some more posts from other areas of the property, and uprooted them all by my self (BOO-YA!!) since the heavy rains loosened the soil. Thank you, Rain!)
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