These are the thumbs I have, plants. You are going to have to learn to deal with that.

I am not much of a garden­er, and I’m sure this was a source of dis­ap­point­ment for my par­ents, who LOVED garden­ing… I did ok if the place we were liv­ing already had a garden and all I had to do was main­tain it, you know, weed, add a few plants, move stuff around.

Our cur­rent house does not have a large yard at all. The pre­vi­ous own­ers were an eld­erly couple, and had­n’t done any work in the garden for ages. This is a prob­lem for me because I look out there and don’t know where to start. If a garden already exis­ted I could main­tain that, but to cre­ate one? Mmmm… Not a strength I possess.

Turns out, a friend of my son’s does land­scap­ing, so he has star­ted com­ing over once a week or so and work­ing in the yard. We’re pay­ing him, of course, I don’t expect him to do it for free. We have dis­cussed the things we envi­sion and plants we like, and he has got star­ted tidy­ing up the flower beds, clean­ing up the goo, and get­ting them ready for new plants. We also want to get rid of the grass, most of which is moss and but­ter­cup, any­way. The idea is to have lots of flowers for bees. I want to see col­our out the win­dow, and the more help we give the bees the better.

I will do my best to keep it nice once it’s fin­ished. I keep hear­ing the char­ac­ters from Charlie Brown say­ing, “You’re hope­less, Charlie Brown, com­pletely hopeless.”