Category: Bare

I’ve always loved flowers.

As I have rolled myself into “adulthood”,  I have discovered that I prefer flowers in their semi-natural beds.  A lot of people, and I mean A LOT of people, in my town, are Master Gardeners. I figured that growing my own flowers would be a nice hobby.

Plus, I would have a reason to go outside and get my Vitamin D too. Win, win!

I decided to try gardening.  The key word here is try.

I now understand why gardeners threaten trespassers with their lives. The frustration and anger of one little, beautiful and helpless flower being stepped on is a legitimate defense – or at least it should be.

Dear Master Gardeners, I apologize for dancing on your Daffodils and ignoring the placement of your Irises.

Day One:  First we (me, husband, mother). had to weed and Roto-till the spaces for the separate areas for the different beds. Within ten minutes we voted and all chipped in to hire the neighbor kid to do it. He did. Whew!

Day Two:  Cover all exposed areas with black paper…. “hey neighbor!”

Day Three:  My mother came over to help me roll out pre-seeded lavender bed rolls ordered from Groupon. I supposedly had 50,000 seeds so at least one seedling had to work.

Create amazing decor for the flower beds: ummm… skip.

Maintenance: Keep checking on the Groupon guaranteed Rolls. Luckily I could look into my garden from the air conditioned living room to check on it daily.

Water: We still have our timer from Christmas lights, that will work. Or so I thought… Ok not really… my garden was flooded by; oh I’d say five days into this. We now had quicksand.

I could see the neighbor kids’ foot prints in the sand puddling with water. I simply needed to turn off the timer… Done.

It was supposed to be a very rainy week anyway.

Weeds: The weeds grew and grew. They were taller than me and had nothing to do with or about the water or lavender.

I have NOT seen even one plant of my Groupon 💯 guarantee. My neighbor kid is going to be so mad when he comes back from Boot Camp!

All involved read the directions from Groupon carefully…

My mother and I re-read the directions… no lavender.

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  hoped that there would be a “💥🌿🌱💜 Sea Of Lavender 💥 💜 🌿🌱💥 ” in my garden, and it was going to be beautiful. Alas no purple waves, no sea, no see.

• I waited.
• I watched.
• I asked people who had lavender.
• I traveled to the other side of the state, with my mother to go to a Certified Lavender Farm! http://www.lavenderhill.com.
• I read books 📚.
• I had it all planned!
• Would you believe that there isn’t anything resembling lavender in their area???
• There’s nothing!
• What did I do wrong??

Well… it wasn’t until I realized that I physically couldn’t do much more than trap my neighbor kid, tell him how sick I am, get him to do the hard stuff, and then flood everything while he was in boot camp; that maybe I was a bit overzealous about my new hobby.

I couldn’t muster up the energy to be a gardener. I am just too sensitive to temperatures, brightness, bug bites, bending over and everything it takes to grow flowers purposefully.

I had one job. One ☝️. Discover and create a beautiful garden. I failed. My husband knew how upsetting it was for me. He took me to the cute little store in Bay City and I found a bunch of fake flowers (lavender of course) to purchase and enjoy at home.

Sometimes mental health is brushed aside when a physical task fails. I mean, who goes through the fuss and anticipation of a project wanting to be a failure? It’s a tough pill to swallow. His actions, my mom’s help and of course the neighbor kid were here working their butts off because my symptoms made me miserable while the heat only exasperated them. They did all of that in my best interest. So Thank You!

I guess my body health (brain included) needs some more time to hopefully heal. When it will let me know; remains to be seen.