Gardeners Have The Best Dirt

Look, I have hiked the Great Wall of China in flipflops. I have done the 30-Day Shred without stretching first. I have fallen off a ski lift while strapped into a snowboard, and then I was hit in the shoulder by that same ski lift when I tried to get up again (somewhat ill-advisedly, I might add.)

I know post-workout pain, is what I'm trying to say. I know aching and throbbing and moaning and groaning and having to pretend that no, honestly, you want to stay sitting right here on the floor of the library, when actually you just bent down to reach a book on a lower shelf and then your thighs hurt so much you couldn't get up for five minutes.

All this is to say that I woke up this morning feeling like I'd been hit by a truck. I winced when getting out of bed. I sighed with relief in the shower. Had I risen silently in the night, completed a triathlon, gone three rounds in the ring with Mike Tyson, finished it off with a quick rugby match, and then climbed back into bed again?

No. No, I had not. I tell you what I had been doing: I had been gardening.

Gardening, ladies and gentlemen. Gardening has given me my worst morning-after body ache to date.

I mean, really: how un-rock and roll is that? Gardening! Gardening is for old people! My grandma is an avid gardener and she's 83, which really means I can just rest my case right there. Gardening isn't supposed to make you sore, particularly if you're a fairly healthy 31-year old person who makes it to the gym every.....yeahhhhh, let's just gloss over that part. I go when I can, okay? Sometimes I run out of socks. Stop judging. My sofa is warm and comfy.

Anyway, I guess I am kind of a gardener now. It's my new hobby. When we moved into this house, the front yard and back yard were alright: a little scrubby, but nothing too terrible, nothing that would get you hauled into the police station and accused of running a meth lab. (They were, if you remember, bad enough to warrant an anonymous business card, though.) Over time, we just got so busy with the inside of the house, that we kind of forgot about the outside, until one day I got home from work, realized that I was squinching my eyes shut so that I didn't have to look at my pathetic front yard, and decided that something needed to be done.

Apparently, my parents had been listening: for one of my birthday presents last month, they gave me a watering can, a trowel, some other sort of gardening tool that I can't remember the name of (my god, I am obviously a natural already), and two big earthenware pots for planting. It was basically Baby's First Gardening Kit, except Baby was a fully-grown woman who had only lived in cities her entire life and had already killed three decorative orchids. (No, really: I have killed three orchids. Three! There is probably a picture of my face in a big WANTED poster at every orchid store across the country.)

Being such a gardening neophyte, I needed a few lessons before being let loose with my watering can and trowel, so my dad and I drove really slowly along all the streets in my neighborhood while he narrated what everyone had growing in their front yard. (In hindsight, that probably looked really creepy and suspicious.) Then we went to the garden center, where we looked at lots and lots of plants. My parents used to take me to garden centers when I was little and I can remember it being the most godawful boring thing in the world, but this time I found it curiously compelling. "I cannot believe I am enjoying looking at all these different types of shovels," I told my dad. He just smiled. I think he wanted to say welcome to being old and boring! but he was too polite.

After my Gardening 101 lesson, I had a little more confidence. I went back to the garden center a few weeks later and I bought potting soil, a shovel, steer manure, mulch, and two agave plants for the earthenware planters. Of course, I spent an hour there trying to decide on this stuff, and had to have two separate conference calls with my parents to make sure I was buying the right thing ("it's in a green bag, Holly....it should be about $4.97....do you see it?"), but I bought what I needed and felt a smug sense of satisfaction. I may have lived in apartments for most of my life, but I had just bought mulch, damnit! Look at me go!

Of course, that stuff then sat in my garage for the next couple of weeks. Well, all except for the agave plants which I dug out and replanted the next day, to a torrent of self-congratulation. Honestly, you would have thought I had simultaneously re-written the Magna Carta, found a cure for cancer, and stolen Brad Pitt from Angelina Jolie (while blindfolded for all of it, in the snow, up a hill, backwards) the way I crowed over my personal agave-planting triumph. Gardening! Real live gardening! I was gardening! I had soil under my fingernails! 

Tell me those aren't the most beautifully-potted agave plants you ever saw. 

And then over the weekend, shit got real. The front yard was looking more and more bedraggled and so I decided it was time to step it up, take off my training wheels, and join the grown-ups for some Real Gardening, the type where you dig things up and pull out weeds and wear special gloves and stop every ten minutes for a sip of Trader Joe's bottled cider (no? Just me? So cold and refreshing!)

In order to make some sort of order from the chaos, I basically dug up the whole left side of my front yard, and then I was all oh, I just dug up the whole left side of my front yard, but by that time I was so tired and it was so dark and I'd already filled five brown paper sacks with refuse, so I just stopped. I swear to god, I was probably the only person in the whole of San Francisco wearing my Hunter wellies for function, rather than style.

It does look a lot neater. It also looks like I'm a serial killer trying to dig a six-foot trench to hide the bodies I've amassed in my freezer. And the whole tableau would be so much more complete if only I had a rusted car on blocks to park in the front driveway.

But it's getting there. Next time there might even be pictures! We're planning grass and flowers and all sorts of pretty not-just-a-big-pit-of-earth type things. Well, we are as soon as I can walk again. Might be a while.