A few weeks back unLibrarian invited me over for a trade: she made sushi and I took a look at the irksome HTML messing with her blog. In between the two, she gave me a tour of her garden.
For starters, she put in her backyard fence herself. Let me repeat that. She put in the fence herself. A privacy fence. Oh yeah, she says, I put that up. A fence. My fence skills are such that I am already fretting over having to weatherproof my fence in two years.
Then she shows me her garden. She has both a vegetable and a flower garden. In her vegetable garden she grew corn, beans, tomatoes, carrots, rhubarb and some other things. I tasted one of the tomatoes. Edible produce. And she grew it. Hubby has been trying to get me to grow tomatoes in a bucket and I always manage to slide out of it. The idea that edible produce would proceed from me is laughable.
But it was the flower garden that blew me away. It is a bright, lush, cacaphonous square of flowers of all dimensions and heights. Oh yeah, she says, I bought some 99 cent flower packets from Wal-Mart, mixed them together, raked, and watered them every day for a week. That’s all there is to it.
I stare at her. Stare at the flowers. My mom bought me a hanging basket of annuals which I promptly killed with over-watering when we first moved in (“But you can be assured they didn’t die from lack of attention!” I told her). unLibrarian repeated that there was nothing to it.
We go back inside for dinner. I tell the woeful tale of the dead refrigerator. unLibrarian laughs kindly. She had, like, 6 major appliances die in the first year in including the stove, the fridge and the hot water heater. But she still found time to lay a new floor in her master bedroom.
All hail unLibrarian, master homeowner extraordinaire.
Plum Librarian LLC 