Garden Work

Oh geez.  'Tis the season for me to be making gardening analogies, and therefore:

In the front of a house a little ways off the road where I go running there is a garden that is probably eighty feet by twenty feet.  According to my inner calculator, that makes sixteen-hundred square feet of ground in which weeds in all their number and variety may grow.  I tend to get about a bajillion weeds in my eighty square foot front garden.  If I do a little garden algebra I come up with this:

1600sq. ft./80 sq. ft. =200 sq. ft.
200 sq. ft. *a bajillion weeds =200 bajillion weeds!!!!!

That means the garden that I run by should have two-hundred bajillion weeds all jammed in together with their green appendages shooting up, out, and down like a commuter-train at rush hour in Seattle. 

But it doesn't have two hundred bajillion weeds, it has zero weeds always and every time I go by.  I've wondered what weed killer the folks at the house are using, what magic, what pixie dust that could possibly leave their ground so fertile looking, yet so enviably barren.

I saw the husband out tilling the garden as I finished my run this morning.  His wife was just coming out to meet him in her knee high rubber work boots.  I am a very shy person but I stuffed my timidity down my running socks and ventured up their gravel drive because I just knew they knew something if not everything that I had to know.

"Excuse me," I said.  "Your garden is so beautiful.  How in the world do you keep all the weeds out?"

The lady pointed to her husband, "By tilling it." 

I could feel the consternation on my face and I'm pretty sure she saw it.  "That's all?"

"He tills it a few times every year.  And then he'll take a smaller tiller and till while the plants are in too."  Then she leaned in all personal like and confessed, "I don't like all those chemicals.  I don't think they're good for you."  I squinted at their garden so weedless and happy, not yet capable of believing the solution was as simple as tilling a lot.

"Your dirt, it's so rich.  It's so pretty."

"Well, we've been doing this for a lot of years now.  We add a little bit of amendment every year you know."

I kept thinking today about how she said that, the bit about how they've been working on their garden for a lot of years and that's how it got so nice - no magic, no mystery, just some steady, determined work.  I thought about it while she showed me their compost pile, their ten different herbs all bunched up basketball size next to the newly turned dirt, their deer gnawed asparagus,  and their already edible lettuce.  I thought about it while I watched General Conference and found that there are an overwhelming multitude of ways in which I want to improve.  I thought about it while I watched my kids.  One was noisily wrestling pillows in front of the TV, one was making loud horse neighing sounds, one was pushing himself into my lap and insisting on a conversation about dinosaurs who eat cheerios, while the last looked for the smallest toys possible to eat and perhaps choke on while I tried to watch General Conference.  I thought about it when I threw together a dinner.  I thought about it when I did my daily ponder on whether or not I'll really ever be able to run with the same intensity that I used to.  I just thought about it all day.  I thought:

Work + Time = The Secret

Work plus time will make me nicer.  Work plus time will make me more patient with my kids.  Work plus time will make me a better runner.  Work plus time will make me a better writer.  Work plus time will make me able to figure out a way not to lose my toenails.  So if I do it, if I do the work, maybe before I'm dead I'll be a good deal less weedy with more healthy pink toe-nails than I have now.

Who knew a little garden math could be so encouraging.