@*#%, Spring!

            While other people curse the snow and long for spring, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand: fly fishing, geocaching, barbecuing, lazy days on the porch swing, being able to drive Potter County roads without studded tires, emergency gear, constant prayer and tranquilizers. On the other, heat, humidity, sweating, allergies, yard work, being enslaved to lawn mowing and gardening, and bugs, bugs, bugs.

            I love gardens. I hate gardening. The first thing I’d do if I ever won the lottery is, hire a full-time yard work person. I’d just lounge on the porch, say, “Roll that area for a croquet court. And do something about the erosion out front. When that’s done, get the garden ready. This year, I want two varieties of slicing tomatoes, early strawberries, butter-crunch lettuce, and lots of herbs.” I’d warn him/her to never start mowing before 10 a.m. I’d instruct him/her to plant a dozen apple trees at the edge of the woods, additional evergreens on the east border, and to surround the flowering shrubs with deer fence come fall. With no budget constraints, I’d never be without crocuses due to deer and squirrel depredation.

            But this is a dream. The reality was getting out for my first yard work yesterday. The ground was soft from rain. In truth, the roads are hub-deep mud in places. I don’t know where the rocks go that underlie the ¼ inch of topsoil everywhere else, but those quagmires they call roads certainly have nothing as solid as rocks for traction as far down as a straining, wheel-spinning pick-up truck can dig. Anywhere else, you can hop up and down on a shovel and its tip penetrates a quarter inch, hits rock, and starts to curl. Therefore, digging even the shallowest hole around here means swinging a pick. The 100-plus bulbs I planted 4 inches deep last fall took all afternoon with a pick, working my hands bloody. Planting trees, however small, is an all-day job, and requires a wheelbarrow full of store-bought dirt. After all, the roots can hardly establish themselves with broken rocks jammed all around them. That’s what came out of the hole, so you need to buy dirt to refill it. This summer I’m determined to renovate the old weed garden into an herb/vegetable garden; to spare my aging joints in the long run, I want to build a retaining wall so I can reach my pot-herbs along the edge without kneeling. That’s 70 feet of trench to pour a footer. Despairing of doing that by hand with a pick, I asked my neighbor for the loan of his backhoe. He doesn’t seem to understand the difference between a footer for a knee-high block wall and one for a structure. I do NOT need it four feet deep and can’t handle concrete work of that magnitude.

            But yesterday was a fairly simple task: to fertilize the trees of my privacy planting. I use Jobe’s Evergreen Tree Food Stakes. If you’ve used them, you know they work well, but pounding them in with the little plastic cap does not work even in normal soil. They end up powdered. So, I make a hole first, then put them in. In our soil, I use a wrecking bar, pounding the pointy end into the ground by whacking the upper, curved, end with a sledgehammer. When I hit a rock, rotating the wrecking bar a quarter-turn usually either finds an edge of the rock or a fracture point to break it. After several repetitions of this, the hole is about 6 inches deep, and I wriggle the wrecking bar to extract it from the soil, leaving a hole the perfect size for a tree stake. The evergreen row has trees 2 to 5 years old that require 2 or 3 stakes each. This took me over two hours and I ended up sweaty (despite a temperature in the 40’s and a light drizzle) and, later, aching.

            Funny thing. It didn’t seem that long. There’s a certain satisfaction to be had from finishing a task like that, too. It’s actually kind of enjoyable in a tedious, exhausting way. But the thing about yard work is, it’s never done. Not in the sense of finished, over, complete, no more to do. As I worked, I was thinking about the spaces where three trees died that need to be replaced before I can move on to Phase II of the privacy planting. I noticed the winter’s debris that will take a full day to clean up before I can mow the first time this year. Oh, and I can’t mow at all with the plow on the tractor and not the mower deck. Will I ever get around to buying fill dirt to level the erosion channels that keep me from mowing the whole front yard, or to re-contour the deep dip in the driveway? What can be done about the cracked concrete pad in front of the garage? Should I buy stone for the drip lines under the house eaves? When and with what money can I get that garden wall done?

            That is why I hate gardening. It’s painstaking, boring, heavy work at a time of year when I have zero energy because I am not heat-tolerant. If I procrastinate it, it not only doesn’t go away, it grows into a bigger job. And there’s always more of it. I can never look at my yard with satisfaction, and say, “It’s done. Now I can kick back and enjoy it.” It’s never done. I may be able to take a day off from it now and then, but a garden makes me feel fettered to it, never able to escape working long enough to actually rest. Those long, hot summer days are mostly filled with me dragging my protesting body through 12 hours of hard work.

            Small wonder that, as other people smile and embrace the summer culture of flip-flops and shorts, I am growling, “C’mon, winter! The sooner the better!”