Oh well, it’s been fun! For two of the past three weeks I’ve worked at garden shows, so I’ve spent the weekdays building and planting, and the weekend days talking gardening rather than doing gardening. I’m not much of a people person, but I enjoy plants and I can (and often do) go on talking about them for hours. Eventually though, I must stop talking and start doing.

I’m sure there’s lots to be done in my garden, there always is at this time of the spring. I should have done some of the work over the winter. There were many wonderful days suitable for pulling weeds, cleaning up piles of leaves, and cutting back perennials and grasses, but I didn’t. With so many flowers through the winter I preferred to enjoy rather than work, and was happy to do so, even knowing that I’d pay the price eventually. Now, the bill has come due.

I’ve got lots of catching up to do, so the weather for this coming weekend had better be good. If not, I quit, I’m giving up and selling the house. Let the garden be someone else’s problem. Another delay will put me hopelessly behind, and of course I’ve gotten another year older, so it figures that I must be a step or two slower than last year.

On the weekend between garden shows I accomplished a little bit. The nets were pulled off the garden’s five ponds, with less than half the leaves tumbling back into the ponds (a minor miracle!), which will make the rest of the pond cleanup much easier. Late in the autumn the waterfall on the big swimming pond became chocked with a large iris so that its flow was cut in half, so I had to dig it out without completely wrecking the stonework around the falls. I was careful to explore and clean every nook and cranny to catch every shred of root, so it should not grow back so quickly, and possibly not at all.

If you catch me at a garden show I’ll tell you the importance of ridding the garden of winter weeds before they go to seed, but I wandered around the garden for an hour or two yesterday evening and there are tiny white flowers and seedheads everywhere. Again. I’ll never be rid of these weeds if I don’t follow my preachings, but it’s not the first and won’t be the last time I ignore my own good advice. Now, I’ve much work in the garden to accomplish before the start of April. Somehow it always gets done, or at least enough of it is done to make it look like it’s mostly done, and then the plants grow up and hide the rest.