Random acts of violence: Gardening on borrowed time

OK folks…your eyes are not deceiving you. This is my husband actually spray painting the grass green after going hog-wild with Roundup^® the other day trying to kill some weeds. Of course, he plans to reseed, but the house next door is up for sale and they were about to have a showing. So, he reasoned, green spray paint looks better than dead grass.

I think that's debatable. But hey, real life is messy. I can laugh at my husband all I want, but I'm my own whirlwind of destruction when it comes to gardening with little time.

Exhibit A:

This is my husband's Miami Dolphins birdhouse … after I threw it across the yard yesterday. I'd just smashed my head into it for the fourth time while trying to dig up some hostas and irises in the 45 minutes or so I had to myself while my husband and 3-year-old daughter ran to Target for "together time." The sweet little welcome sign that used to hang over the front door is now ripped off and flung across the stones. As of this writing, I still haven't told my husband…

And this….

 … is the carnage I left behind … I was trying make room for new easy-care gardening plants in the only full-sun spot left in our yard. It was frustrating work, since I only had leverage with the shovel from one side. I just kept flinging clumps of greenery and clods of earth onto the nice landscaping stones surrounding the pool (my husband, incidentally, was none too pleased about that – or the about the fact that I ripped up beautiful, full, mature landscaping around the deck of our new home. But the Mad Plant Collector in me must have more!) 

I've only planted irises before, never dug them up, and I have to say, I felt like a deranged killer hacking away at them in their prime. A pang of guilt ran through me as my shovel cut through each rhizome, leaving behind a pink, fleshy cross section looking not unlike a piece of raw meat. And as I pulled on the carcass to drag it to the stones, its clear, gooey juices ran like blood across my hands. I ran to the pool to wash off the guilt … 

Since, according to this GardenWeb post on irises, I CAN transplant irises after the last frost date in my area (which is now), I'll have to do this soon. But they won't be all nicely clumped together and may not bloom for another year after being moved… Plus, I have limited direct sun and these guys need at least six hours of it (according to the same post, above). They may have to go in the front yard, which my husband would like left alone, since it was professionally landscaped and I've already torn apart the back yard.

Meanwhile …

Here sits the spaghetti factory of bajillion-foot hose my husband ran out to get for me the other day, after I planted Flower Carpet^® roses in the back 40 of our lot and then realized I had no way to bring water to them. Notice the nice housing unit with reel that he got and fastidiously set up, winding the hose perfectly around the reel. (The face-down Dora the Explorer doll is also a nice touch, I think). Of course, as soon as I tried to use the hose to water the roses yesterday, the connector in the housing unit came apart and all that hose was too heavy for me to unreel with the little hand crank on the side. So, the bull-in-a-China-shop that I am, I just tore back the lid and started yanking out hose like a clown pulling scarves out of a hat.

Also note the nice, red sprayer attachment my husband dutifully attached to the end of the hose. Well, with the connector piece (black and white, connected to the black section of hose in the foreground) disconnected, water started coming out of that end, instead of the sprayer end. So I figured, just twist off the sprayer attachment and put it on the connector thingy. Which I did, turned on the hose and the water pressure blew the sprayer right off, along with a nut that makes the trigger work. "Darn it all," I said (not actually saying "Darn it all" but something much more offensive). After searching in vain for this one little part, I ended up throwing the sprayer next to the bird house and using the connector end (and the short run of hose with actual water running through it) to drizzle a few sploshes over my newly transplanted lettuce. 

And that was it…Bzzzzzz! Time up! My husband and daughter came strolling across the lawn. Another gardening session done on Mom Time. But hey, that's life. You gotta do what you can do in the time that you have. And today, I'll do it all over again – as soon as I glue my husband's birdhouse back together.