Before we bought our first house in Peoria – way back in 2002 – neither Ajey nor I had any experience with gardening or yard work. Enthusiasm – tons, skill – not so much, landscaping budget – laughably minuscule!! So no surprise that we quite happily agreed to having our backyard seeded – it’s just grass, right? – how hard can that be? Much to our consternation – when our ‘grass’ finally started to grow, our backyard looked nothing like the rolling, velvety, emerald lawn we had envisioned!! Patchy, and the weeds – oh the weeds – we had a veritable sea of dandelions and crabgrass!!
So we found this contraption in Menards to pull out weeds – what we didn’t know is that most weeds are incredibly tough to uproot. A nightmarish month later – I was literally dreaming of crabgrass invasions – blistered hands, sunburnt faces, and the crabgrass still showed no signs of relenting! Fortunately, we discovered weed-killing chemicals – all that backbreaking, manual labor when a spray bottle was all we had needed!! Even after we won the hard-fought weed war, our labrador Snowy soon put to rest any residual ambitions of perfect grass – all the years we lived there, we never did have our dream yard!
And who am I kidding?? A perfect yard does involve a lot of hard work – not just mindlessly pulling weeds out, but tons of TLC and that elusive ‘green thumb’! Mine, regretfully, is the far-from-green kind! I have lost count of the number of ‘impossible-to-kill’ plants that I’ve killed had to throw out!! And there was that one potted plant Ajey bought from Ikea – I watered it assiduously, thrilled that all it’s leaves actually stayed green – can you guess where this is going?? Here it comes – I had been watering a fake plant. Apparently, I’m unable to tell a fake plant from a real one! So no real claims to being an avid gardener – or any kind of gardener at all!!
And now this beautiful house, with its beautiful landscaping!! We moved in December, and wasn’t until a couple of months ago that our garden started revealing itself. I hadn’t realized that I still had a bit of residual anxiety – was waiting with bated breath for the tiny new leaves to unfurl on all our trees!! And it has been such a pleasant surprise, watching all the perennials come up! My favorites are the rose bushes – absolutely laden with buds now – it’s going to be a riot of color when they all bloom!! I’m just a teeny bit anxious about keeping the garden blooming – I’m hoping that all these plants are quite well-settled and will continue to flourish under my dubious care!! Fingers crossed!! For now, I’m happy to enjoy my new perfect garden – it truly is a dream come true!!
A place called home... 