Did I mentioned that we moved over the summer? From a rental house to my own sweet little house in an amazingly central location. I searched for reasonably priced houses in our very expensive, small school district and the one I found is truly great for us. I begged borrowed and came darn close to stealing to buy this little house but its mine and im proud of it and we are all loving living in it.
At this house I have three small outdoor areas, probably 30 feet squared each. When I moved in these areas were covered in some wilting variatal of grass. Now, 5 months later the grasses has moved on to other (greener) pastures and dirt, just plain old dirt has taken it's place. I got a gardener to come and plant some veggies in a side pot to bring on some lush. That investment has yielded five narly looking dead plants and one sweet red pepper that was so gorgeous it got placed in with our toy food and rotted there.
The theme here may be that I'm not a gardener. In fact, I am so not a gardener that I actually have decided to intentionally grow weeds on those mini-plots of land because weeds like to grow and are simple to keep green. I am calling it alternative ground cover but it's weeds. And I plan to fill the vegetable bed with rocks and call it zen. The gardener that I hired to pretty things up around here doesn't ever come around anymore - I think that my lack of ability to keep any of her creations alive may have been a turnoff.
But our public school has a rooftop garden that they keep fresh with composted peanut butter sandwiches from kids lunches and that is cool. Because maybe my kids could figure out how to grow something and cultivate that skill in the back yard - I will take any help that I can get. Over the summer I volunteered to water this garden and now, during the year, the kids tend to it on a rotational basis - each class every other week.
So tending the garden is off-routine. Well, one day it was garden time and my older sons class wasn't aware of it. Someone came to get them in a hurried fashion and they all lined up and rushed up to the rooftop. The frazzled teacher who's primary advantage is her love of my hair trailing (in my imagination since I wasn't there) behind in a harried fashion.
At 4pm that fateful Friday I received a note from Frazzled Franny saying that, unfortunately, when they left for the garden, my son had been in the restroom. And it was not until their return that she discovered his absence. This was discovered not because she looked around and found him missing upstairs, rather because the class returned all fresh and sun beaten and sitting at his place, tears in eyes, he looked at the teacher and said "where were you guys"?
I'm, as mentioned, a black thumbed person. I can grow people but not plants. I'm a decent pet nurturer but water, prune and tend as I may, I have never met any success at growing plants. Growing up we had massive potting areas in our front room - four of them so large that there were aisles between them. So large, in fact, that the living room that they occupied barely had room to contain it's brown and white striped sofa. I remember being fascinated with these plants, even watering them once in a while.
Growing kids is sort of like growing anything really. When you are responsible for them, you sort of have to, well, remember them. Plants and people seem to feel sad when they are neglected and left in the bathroom. And, sadly, this day of the garden-bathroom incident was as much an indicator of things to come as the slightly wilted grass at my new house was.
Nurturing plants is simple but there are bugs, rainfall, destructo-dogs, all sorts of obstacles that a skilled gardener should avoid. So too with a skilled teacher or professional of any sort. Avoid the pitfalls, water the lawn and count your kids often. But I'm clearly neither teacher nor gardener so what do I know?
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