Tranquil Gardening: Maybe a Hole to China

I just spent the weekend doing garden work and have come to the conclusion someone has lied to me. Someone has sold me the London Bridge of gardening and I bought it hook, line and sinker. Do you garden? Did you buy into this same tranquility of gardening thing?

I have yet to find this tranquility of gardening and I am beginning to think this was just a sales pitch. I have experienced every motion possible but tranquil has yet to surface. What I have found is a hobby that is more frustrating than a Rubik's cube and cheaper than a gym membership.

Frustration begins when your flowers come up and they look like a prisoner war begging for food, so you feed them. Then next you notice they now appear to be little elderly flowers, losing their hair and wrinkling up like they aged forty years over night.

Totally frustrated because you soon realize plants label “partial sun,” actually means daylight is required. What you now have are plants that look like a modern art sculpture and grow constantly in abstract directions and forms.

Passed being frustrated and now totally irate because you learn weeds come with disguises. Weeds will sprout right next to a plant and wear a disguise that resembles an off-sot of the neighboring plant. It isn’t until it grows to big for the disguise that you realized you have been fooled and now have this huge, hideous monster in your garden.

This where you can throw that gym membership out the door, it is not needed any longer. You will have to rid your garden of these hideous monsters by digging them up and this will require ousting the root as well. You will soon find yourself digging a hole to China and wondering if you should not have taken that foreign language course.

While digging this same hole you will learn that dirt can and will fight back. Try to break up the party of your clay molecules and you will feel the wrath of the dirt bouncer. As soon as your shovel hits the dirt it bounces back and hits you in the chin. Should you feel the urge to use both feet you will now find yourself riding a pogo stick.

So you move on to the gardening weight machines, all those big bags of compost, fertilizer and mulch you are required to use to prevent the need for a back door to China.

Hard as you try, no garden glove will grip these slimy bags. You will forced to lift, tug and empty them using every other part of your body. Should you be able to grip them with your garden gloves the bottom will suddenly spring a leak. This leaves a trail for the weeds to follow and I just know the weeds are in on this.

So “tranquil gardening,” I think I have figured out this so-called sales pitch. “Tranquil Gardening” is when you hire someone else to do the gardening and then take pictures of your hard work. There is nothing tranquil about sweating like a pig or being black and blue like a prizefighter.

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