Gardening is the worst, isn't it? I really like flowers and plants, but I really hate having to mess with them. My end goal is that my gardens will be sort of self-sustaining. I don't want to have to water them, much, or weed them, or do extensive pruning sorts of things all the time. So to make that work, we're re-doing our front garden.
When we bought the house, we put in a lilac shoot from the house I grew up in, two small rose of sharon bushes, a bunch of tulip bulbs, and some hens and chicks. We covered all of the bare dirt with a layer of red rubber mulch, so we wouldn't have to re-mulch every year. Since then, the rose of sharon bushes have quadrupled in size, the lilac is much bigger but still looks a little like we stuck a stick in the dirt, and the rubber mulch has mostly sunk into the sandy soil and has done precisely nothing to keep the grass and weeds from taking over.
Today we pulled out the two rose of sharon bushes and sent them over to live in my parents' yard, where they will thrive. I spent several hours (and several fingernails) pulling up as much of the rubber mulch as I could, so we can put it on Craigslist and try to get rid of it. Over the next days and weeks, we are planning to relocate the lilac, lay down landscaping fabric, and add several varieties of native-type flowering perennials that won't require too much maintenance. We're going to get some landscaping stone to border the whole garden thing, so we won't have to spend so much time cutting the grass that always creeps up around the edge (which right now just lines up near the front walk.
I'm going to go relocate the hens and chicks to the backyard (we have this weird gap between the house and the patio that we filled in with flagstone, and the hens and chicks are going to fill in the cracks), then I'm going to take a shower, then probably a nap. Because it's a holiday weekend, damn it.
Are you with me that gardening is the stupidest of chores??
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