Over the years I have passed many yard ornaments consisting of ladies with very large derrières facing the street while in front of their flower garden. They always brought back memories of my own mother bent over at the hips pulling weeds. II wondered why do they do that? Wouldn’t it be easier to kneel down and pull weeds that way? Today I realized the answer to my question. I attacked our small vegetable patch with a vengeance removing two seasons worth of wild growth. My advice to gardeners is this, never, never, never, never allow a garden to go wild for two years. Nature has a rule which is to recover from man’s attempt to over rule it in any way shape or form as quickly as is possible.
I thought I had the problem solved when I first initiated the garden plots. I boxed them off from the lawn to slow the growth of grass and weeds into the valuable vegetable space. Slowed is putting it mildly. Within one season the grass had grown under the wooden framing and was taking over the interior. To make matters worse there were a few trees that had started from seed that had roots nearly to China, and in between patches of bluegrass were tough wild specimens of thistle. In the middle of it all stood three clumps of green onions the last reminder of anything edible within the borders of our meager vegetable patch.
Digging and pulling weeds firied up the neurons within the nervous system through my back, knees, hips, and neck. A reminder to never, never, never, never allow a garden to go to weed for two years. It took me about an hour of said exercise to remember why my mother bent at the hips to pull weeds. I chose to go down on my knees, but getting back up became more strenuous and my knees screamed at me for doing so.
By the end of the pull, I too was bent at the hip with my butt pointing toward the sky reaching to tear the grass from the ground. It is time to fill the jacuzzi with TBD oil and to jump in for an hour.
And, that is my story of how the term “butt up time” originated, and I’m sticking to it.
Filed under: Aging, Garden, Gardening, Humor | Tagged: Jacuzzi, Spring Clean up, TBD | 2 Comments »
