on gardening

I used to silently make fun of people who said that gardening was "exercise." I now stand corrected. Gardening is hard. Hard.

For example, we've got a giant magnolia in the backyard that just finished blooming. All the petals dropped a week or two ago, and I thought I could just leave them. Turns out, dead magnolia petals will kill brand-spanking-new grass seedlings. Which means that dead magnolia petals need to be raked up.
Gross.
{and I thought raking was something you only had to do in the fall.}

But yardwork is also really fulfilling. I just planted a peegee hydrangea in the front yard. It's a little baby tree right now, and hopefully I didn't kill it when I tried to pry it out of the pot {amateur gardener here}, but I'm so stinkin' excited to watch it grow. We're growing some veggies, and flowers too. I'm up to my elbows in dirt these days, and loving it.

Note: our yard is not yet anything to be proud of. In fact, it's the antithesis of "awesome." Thus, I live vicariously through friends who do have pretty yards. For example, I've got a neighbor {hi Petra!} with such a talent for growing things. Her yard is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful -- gorgeous flowers, all summer long. There's a woman a few blocks over with an incredible bed of wildflowers. In the middle of the summer, she has scores of lilies all over the yard. The smell is incredible. A few years ago, I would have never noticed clumps of stonecrop, or barberry, or wildflowers, or whatever. Now, I'm starting to learn the names, and fall in love with plants. It's weird, and wonderful.

Here's a picture of us, right after we finished prepping the backyard for grass seed:

I've got a full post coming up on the state of our jungle, er, yard.

In the meantime: today, I pulled 292 weeds.

Only 60,404 to go...

**Edit**
Coincidentally, my friend Monica just blogged about yardwork, too. She's another one of my friends who happens to have a very pretty yard :) Check it out here...