Once again, I find myself in mid-May with nothing pretty planted in front of my house. Well, except for the peony bush that comes up no matter what I do. Right now, there are so many gigantic weeds surrounding the peonies that it’s a little tough to see them.
I find that I move through several mindsets to get to this point:
- The Seed Stage – This happens in the early spring when it’s just started getting warm. I look at the bare, empty flower beds and think, "If I tilled the soil now, I could plant $5.00 worth of seeds and have the best flower garden ever!"
- Potted Plant Stage I – When it’s clearly too late to plant seeds in time to get any kind of flower bed going, I come to the realization that I’m going to need to buy flowering plants. This usually happens when I don’t have any money, so it gives me lots of time to think about what I might want. Marigolds? Pansies? Impatiens? Some kind of perennial so I don’t have keep going through this every single year?
- Potted Plant Stage II – Eventually, I’ll go to the nursery and buy many flats of plants (never enough, though). I always time it so that I can’t plant them right then, but I make plans to plant them the next day…or week…or fortnight. I’m usually pretty good about keeping them watered until they’re planted, but sometimes a few of the plants die before I can get them in the ground.
- The Planting Stage – Finally, I’ll have a weekend day free, nothing much recorded on the TiVo from the previous week and a wild hare to get the flowers into the ground. I’ll pull up the weeds, run the rototiller, haul filthy bags of soil supplements and mulch home from the garden store in my car, and finally get some nice flower beds planted.
Right now I’m in Potted Plant Stage I, but I’ve decided on marigolds. That’s progress, isn’t it?
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