Cultivating Children and Weeds

An old adage suggests that children grow like weeds, and for the past three-and-a-half years, my daughter and her little brother have been doing just that in the figurative sense. But in that same span of time, my yard has been doing the same, literally, because tending to the growth of kids and working full-time outside of the home has meant that I have very little time to groom a garden.

When we became homeowners in 2006, I had visions of small scale Martha Stewart-style garden blooming in our postage stamp of a yard, with impeccably maintained annuals and perennials bringing a punch of color to the green shrubs and bushes that would serve as a backdrop. Truthfully, I never achieved anything Martha-worthy before the kids came into the picture, so it’s not like I can really blame them for the jungle in our yard right now. But before they were born, I planted new things every spring and the weeds were at least under control.

Today, that’s not the case. Last summer, I was home on maternity leave and that’s when things in the yard started to slide. Last year’s gardening was mostly of the theoretical variety, planned in my mind while my feet were up on the couch with a baby in my arms and HGTV on the screen in the background. The most I did last year was to buy four small impatiens that I was going to plant in two plastic flower boxes on the back deck, but even that half-hearted attempt wilted. I got as far as placing the plastic pots inside the flower boxes on top of the dirt leftover from the summer of 2009 and managed to keep the flowers alive all summer. But I just removed what remained of their withered carcasses last weekend.

That was when ambition and a ride to Home Depot showed up on my doorstep in the form of my mother-in-law, who has an SUV suitable for hauling shrubbery and a green thumb. So I bought six small bushes for the front of the house, along with some New Guinea Impatiens and Begonias.

To keep the momentum going, I planted the flowers right away and a guy is coming soon to pull all the weeds and plant the bushes out front. Hopefully that will be the end of my summer yard work – besides copious watering – and I can return to monitoring the growth of two weeds named Lucy and Isaac.