Spoiler Alert: I’m changing my nature…

I love my backyard garden.  It’s the first thing I see every morning from my bedroom window, soon after the sun comes up over the trees.  It’s where I like to have coffee in the morning and lunch on summer afternoons.  I’ve furnished it with estate-sale furniture and lots of big terra-cotta pots in varying states of disrepair.  The garden houses an eclectic and ever-changing collection of statuary, herbs, flowers and birdbaths. Occasionally it’s raided by racoons or the odd opossum.

 

 

John’s favored Weber kettle grill sits in the corner next to a table made from a salvaged piece of Corian from a long-ago kitchen remodel and a sewing machine base that I rescued when it was about to be thrown out from the Davis building.  We offer seeds and suet to a parade of birds.  A place of honor is given to the Buddha I inherited from Al Baldwin.  Not infrequently his head is a perch for a sparrow or a chipmunk.

I also love my front porch with a meadow view.  It’s where we sit after dinner to watch the whistle pigs, the swallows, the too-frequent deer, the occasional heron, and, once  this year, a bald eagle.

The porch is original to the house.  It’s built over sand, for drainage, and after almost 100 years it is full of cracks and many of the bricks have shifted.  Chipmunks live in it.  We’ve had to evict wasp nests from it.

We had the backyard garden built, first (30+ years ago) the two square patios and, maybe 10 years ago?? the slightly-raised beds, which I had built to celebrate the death of a neighbor’s tree and the new access to enough sun to grow vegetables.  The beds are lined with brick and separated by gravel paths and the center path is stone.

So, with all that brick and stone and gravel, there’s a problem. In addition to the many pleasurable hours I have spent in these two places, I’ve been on my knees pulling weeds for countless more.  We’ve worn out way too many weed eaters on the bricks.  Many years ago, when we let it get out of hand, one of my then-neighbors remarked that the unweeded porch was like a woman’s unshaven legs and similarly unacceptable.

My nature is expressed in my approach to my garden.  I have banned poison.  I have welcomed all creatures, except the deer who I try to discourage with a product based on pig’s blood.  I have patiently hand-weeded.  But no more!  Tomorrow I become the mother of dragons – er, mother of a dragon.  A red dragon garden torch, with which I plan to incinerate every weed and every blade of grass that invades my gardens.  Watch me conquer!

A dragon is not a slave.  Daenerys Targaryen