"Tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed"

 For people who enjoy fresh herbs and garden vegetables as much as J and I do we are pretty terrible at gardening. 

Some of it is not our fault. For one thing, we are both really busy. It's hard to weed the garden on days when you are out of the house to go to work before 8 AM and won't get back from your concert until close to 11.

It's also really hard to summon the desire to go weed your garden when you get back from a Sunday morning of church rehearsals and services. You don't need to go work in the garden, you need a nap.

There are some other factors as well. We have very sandy soil in the backyard and not a whole lot of direct sunlight in places that are convenient for a garden. There are bunnies and birds and rodents that live in our backyard and help themselves to whatever does grow up. Our hoses all leak and our sillcocks are temperamental. 

But maybe we just both have brown thumbs.

I put in our first attempt at a garden before Felix was born. James, Owen, and I made a trip to Lowe's and picked up seeds and topsoil. We excavated a little rectangle of earth on the western side of the house and made a crude mound that was enclosed by old bits of baseboard that we'd pulled out of one of the bedrooms.

Unsurprisingly, nothing but mint and one sad, anemic-looking carrot every grew there.

Last year J's mom gave her a fancy spinning planter pyramid. I filled it with topsoil, planted herbs, peppers, and salad greens, and watered it every day when I got back from my run. But I also never thinned any of the shoots or did any weeding. We had a few useable basil leaves that came out of the top and might have pulled out a handful of thyme once.

What we really need, I think, is to get a child interested in gardening. Like Owen with his typewriter, James with his smoothie-making, or Felix with his lying around and ordering other people to pour him drinks, we need a child that will become fascinated with the art of gardening for its own sake and look after it on their own without any prompting or reminding. 

This is the year that we're putting the pergola in the backyard. Maybe, since we'll all be out there anyway, this will be the year when we finally get around to doing the weeding.