Well, I should have known better than to brag to the blogosphere that I was keeping up with my garden. It pretty much guaranteed my imminent failure. Now, under normal circumstances, I would be feeling really, really terrible, but as anyone in Alberta knows, this summer has brought anything but normal circumstances. I think I can at least partially blame this garden failure on good ole Mother Nature.
Let me break it down for you…
July saw me start a new job with a daily hour round trip commute (that’s a green failure for another day…). With said new job, my available garden time dropped dramatically. But there was still time available. Unfortunately, Mother Nature has a serious hate on for Alberta this year. It’s been wet. Really wet. After years of near catastrophic drought conditions out here on the wide open praririe, we’ve had the wettest spring/early summer that I can honestly remember. While this certainly has benefits (woohoo for recharged aquifers and easy watering!), it also has serious drawbacks (massive mosquito infestation).
Rainy weather and mosquitoes that swarm thick enough to form clouds that actually show up on weather radar have made for incredibly soggy and uncomfortable gardening. One particular trip for watering had me wearing a hoodie in 27°C with mittens to avoid being completely drained of blood. Another saw me almost lose a rubber boot to mud the consistency of quicksand (it looked solid, I swear to God).
To put it lightly, this garden season has been a challenge.
But things are growing alright. Weeds. Lots and lots of weeds. And not just little ones either. Giant Friggin’ Weeds. And they are everywhere.
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| Before weeding - but after pre-weeding... |
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| After 3 hours of weeding... it's better right? Right?! |
This has led to a whole new kind of guilt. Forget green failure guilt. Bad gardener guilt is 10 times worse. The rapid expansion of my weed garden and a lack of viable weeding time combined to form an epic disaster. I even resorted to visiting my garden under the cover of darkness to pre-emptively weed before having to show my face in the daylight among all the other, infinitely more responsible super gardeners.
If I thought I’d escaped Keeping Up with the Jones’ syndrome by my resolution to buy less stuff, I was friggin’ delusional. Forget the Jones’. Whoever these super tidy garden freaks are, I need to at least pretend I’m trying to keep up with them.
