[this one needs lots of relinking]

It’s spring. That means that it’s that time of year those of us who are foolish enough to insist on heirloom plants and organic gardening techniques basically go out and spend hundreds of dollars on things like poop. Husband likes to go along on these adventures just so he can deliver Beavis and Butthead-esque monologues about excrement. I put up with it because he’s the one with the station wagon.

And he gets to do the heavy lifting.

And he’s really cute.

As you can imagine, there was much of the traditional earthworm angst today. The wildflower beds (which you can also read about at that link) look amazing and the only tricky thing today was deciding whether a few mysterious plants were invasive weeds or flowers.

(Oh, and should you go read that link and wish to lecture me about worms, you should first read the follow-up worm post from last years episode of annelid-mania).

In a bit of what seems to me like extreme silliness, I dug up and trashed a large expanse of dandelions today. This is extremely silly because I buy and cook with dandelion greens a lot. (Well, that’s not that often since I rarely cook, but lately it’s been fairly often because I’m addicted to this tempeh dish and it rocks with dandelion greens). I can’t bring myself to clean and eat the ones in the yard, however, because they thrive in a spot that’s, um, very popular with the neighborhood dogs.

It’s too cold to plant basil this weekend, since this is the weekend I set aside time to put in the herb garden. Nevertheless, overall it was a good day for gardening. Not hot, minimal sun, nice damp ground. The snakes were sluggish, which was good because I was in their habitat and I don’t think they were happy about it. Or maybe they were unhappy because when I found them I picked them up and threw them over into the park. I’m not sure garden variety snakes like flying.

No sign of Walter, though, which concerns me. I haven’t seen him since the day I stepped on him (barefoot) on the front porch. I know I didn’t hurt him, but I must have upset him. I can’t say I feel bad, he doesn’t belong on the porch and he knows it. The herb garden is as close to the house as he’s supposed to get.

Yeah, I know, last year he was only allowed as close as the wrought-iron bench. We renegotiated in the Fall. He looked at me with those big black eyes and I just couldn’t say no.

I really don’t want to recap who Walter is or why gardening is stressful and although it’s part of a longer post I already linked to, I’m going to repost the pertinent bits here and save you some surfing in case you don’t want to read about the wildflowers:

Now here’s the thing you have to keep in mind: gardening stresses me out. Gardening is not relaxing to me. Not the planting part, anyway. It’s all rather violent, if you think about it. When you plant seedlings you have to pull them out of those little plastic pots, you can break their little roots. I get very distressed about that. And then there’s the digging.

You have to dig little holes to put in the plants. And there are earthworms in the ground. I get so upset if I injure an earthworm. I make little offerings to them to appease their gods, but I still feel bad about it. I don’t feel bad about fishing with worms though. Fishing with worms is different than mowing them down in a drive-by trowelling accident while you’re planting phlox. Don’t ask me why. It just is. I’m the arbitrary sort-of Buddhist.

Grubs are another story. Again with the arbitrary rules…I toss the grubs I find to the cardinals. Nasty things. The grubs, not the cardinals. From a distance I must look like Snow White out there, with my cute little flock of birds following me around and singing happily to me. It’s the grubs. Make no mistake, those birds only love me for my grubs. I always feel bad about the grubs later though, because they’re immature scarab beetles and all – but they’re destructive, and I like the way the cardinals sing to me. It soothes me a little bit as I go about my unholy rampage of worm-decapitation and mayhem.

Since I was working out back I didn’t run into Walter, which is good, because there’s a whole other set of arbitrary rules for our friends the snakes. When I encounter a snake I try hard to repatriate it into the wild (okay, the neighbor across the street’s yard) but if they startle me I can make no promises. I know they’re beneficial, but I hate them. Walter lives in my next door neighbor’s front yard. Sometimes he comes over and suns himself on the rock border around my herb garden, even though he knows he’s not supposed to. He and I have discussed this, you see. He’s very pretty, actually – a brilliant emerald green. Next time I catch him on that rock though it’s into the shoebox with a one-way ticket out of town. I didn’t encounter any snakes yesterday so I don’t know how I got off on this tangent.

Randomly, my brother-in-law explained to me that most people never realize their attics are infested with rat snakes. I wish he hadn’t done that.

But enough about serpants. It’s time to confess that I may have lost my mind, I’m now running with a very bad crowd. Yes, it’s true. I put in a rose garden. Does this mean I have to quit mocking people with rose gardens? Or does this mean I can now mock with impunity?

I didn’t plan to buy a bunch of rose bushes, but I was at the nursery and there was this really cool-looking one and when I read the description I found that the nursery tag described the blossoms as gaudy. I found that appealing. Plus, they were called Peace Roses. How could I resist that? And once you pick out one color you realize that a lone rosebush is kind of sad and lonely and, well, let’s just say that This Way Lies Madness.

I managed to plant them without scratching myself once. I’m very proud of that and it was no easy task, these are pretty good sized bushes. Now, we’ll see if they survive. They’d better. I had to displace a lot of earthworms to dig holes big enough for those bigass rootballs.