With my own two hands

I love flowers... the color, smells, freshly cut grass... I enjoy the views of nature. I try every spring to plant flowers and veggies or prune and weed; but every year all I end up with are weeds and budless shrubbery. Well, this year, my hard work paid off with 2 ripe cherry tomatoes! All I had to do was pay *#)^ dollars for mulching, weeding, clearing and preventative measures against what had plagued my beds for seasons before; plant a tomato plant, cucumber plant, squash plant, forget-me-nots, countless hostas, 10 begonia bushes in my front retaining wall, and a few annuals back 3 springs. What I've gotten are 2 ripe cherry tomatoes! I do enjoy my begonias - they have flourished nicely after a close watch. I read the book, "The $64 Tomato" for a book club recently and I can relate on a much smaller scale. Gardening can be relaxing (when you aren't in the dead of summer midday) but it can also be extremely overwhelming not to mention a slippery slope. One thing truly leads to another after the prepping (which is a job in and of itself), the digging, the planting, the fertilizing, the watering, the weeding, and the pruning. It's almost maddening to an extent - you get kind of a tunnel vision. The gardening started as something for my son and I (the forget-me-nots and the veggies especially) but he lost interest kind of quickly when all that grew in the flower beds were weeds.

I'm proud of my tomatoes and continue to look at the one that remains (a small creature scavenged the first) as a trophy. Did I mention I don't like tomatoes? But I did it with my own two hands and I'm proud of them!