Not My Day

This is a tale of woe.  From the depths of despair and stupidity.  

Woe.

Woe to him who reads it.

Woe to her who lived it.

We have a 27'X27' (as in a 729 square foot) plot at the community gardens.  The cost of this giant plot is less than it would take B.daddy to build a tiny raised bed, not to mention saving him the labor, and it is along our favorite walking path.  There's a pond, wetlands, SWANS!  And so our story begins.

We've had the plot for a few weeks but were informed that most people don't plant until after Memorial Day because our cold climate is unpredictable.  (As if on cue we had a cold, rainy Memorial Day weekend.)  Before the plots were divvied out, the city had the ground tilled, and it looked great.  Dark, soft dirt everywhere.  Hardly a weed in sight. We didn't visit the plot between claim staking day and yesterday.  Why did I choose the first heat wave of 2013 to do my planting?  Well, because I'm a genius.  That's why.  After going all the way back to our house to retrieve the map to find the plot belonging to us--hiccup numero uno--this is what we found:

Hiccup #2

Okay.  I can handle this.  I can do this.  All I can do at this point is do this.  We pulled on our work gloves and got to it.  (B.daddy was at work making the money.)  The kids helped as best they could, and they complained a lot.  They observed that--except for Li'l Bit--they in fact did NOT want to be farmers, and they would even rather be at home doing school work.  This was after a full day of school work.  But after a few hours, we had pulled all the mammoth weeds and leveled the field so to speak.

We still had a lot to do the next day (today), but we had accomplished a great deal and had the achy backs and dirty knees to prove it.  I couldn't plant yet.  I was so anxious to get those plants into the ground yesterday, but I had no idea how much work that would entail.  The longer these plants are in containers, the greater chance they will die.  I can't seem to keep anything alive unless it is in soil that God Himself has put in place.  I.e. In the ground.

So we left our sad little plants on our plot to spend the night alone. (Trust me, they're better off that way.  Black thumbs, people.  Black thumbs!)

On the docket for this morning: rake and hoe.  Rake and rake and rake and rake, and if I'm lucky I'll get to hoe.  The morning was going well.  The kids had their picnic breakfast in the designated kid corner, and we even remembered sunscreen.  Their complaints--they weren't even working at this point--were shut down by some mean lady who showed up and said, "I do not want to hear one more complaint THE ENTIRE MORNING!  BUTTON IT UP!"  Weird.  Don't know who that was.  About fifteen minutes into my raking I heard a rustle in the weeds beside me.  Knowing for sure it would be a snake, I was pleasantly surprised to see this big dude:

Aww, how sweet.  He's like our very own garden pet.  Maybe he'll come cool himself near our plot all Summer. (Wait for it.)

The kids adored him, of course.  (As well as the rabbit and groundhog we saw.)  They tried to feed him a cracker.  He didn't bite.  He eventually burrowed under a pile of weeds and slept.  By that time I wanted to join him.  I was crazy hot.  I had been up since 4:30 for my morning workout, I hadn't eaten a thing, I have a highly pressurized head cold, but I was going to get my plants in the ground dadgumit!!  So I kept beating the ground.  Lift, whack, pull, lift, whack, pull.

I finally had enough weed-free ground for two or three rows, so I got to hoein'.  Much to my chagrin, hoeing is exactly like raking.  Same exact muscle movement being executed by the same exact muscles that the good Lord must have forgotten to give me.  Somehow, someway I hoed three sides.  My arms were spaghetti and I went to Kid Corner for cold water and a sit down.  Now B.daddy and I had met a guy on claim staking day. A very nice guy, he's running a nonprofit for kids and he was getting plots for them to work on together.  Well, as soon as my tushie hit the picnic blanket, I hear, "Oh, are you here to help?"  I look up and I see that guy.  In a split second, my brain--which should always work so well but DOESN'T--connected all the dots and I realized.  I'm on the wrong plot.

Talk about deflation.  I was so proud of all my hard work, only to find out I can't find one square plot on the simplest map known to mankind.  I had been to the plot before.  B.daddy held the map before me and explained exactly how to find our plot when I returned.  But did I find it? No.  I poured sweat over someone else's land.  

We can't switch plots.  His organization has four connected plots, and ours is too far away from it.  He did say they would help weed our plot tomorrow.  He has a few volunteers coming in for a work day.  Sometime between now and then I need to convince myself that I can get back out there and do the whole thing over again.  The thing that really, really stinks:  our plot isn't nearly as weedy as this one was.  I could have been so much further along.  I should conclude this paragraph with a metaphor pertaining to wishing for what you can't have.  But I screw those up all the time, too.

So I'm sitting here in front of my A/C.  I'm drinking ice cold lemon water, blowing my nose constantly, and rubbing Mentholatum on the raw skin.  I'm pouring out my far too wordy tale of woe to any and all who care to hear.

In short, I'm licking my wounds.