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I USED TO LOVE MY GARDEN, BUT NOW I HATE IT

WHAT WAS ONCE A PLACE OF PEACE HAS BECOME A NAGGING, NEEDY BEING, WHICH WON'T LEAVE ME ALONE, WRITES FARIDA JONES

FARIDA JONES Column Farida Jones is a columnist and local Realtor. She is the mother of four and lives in Oro-medonte with her husband, John, their teenage daughter and spaniel Bronwyn. She can be reached at faridajonesstories@gmail.com.

I once loved gardening.

As a child, gardening was always a big deal at our house. Then, at my first apartment, my 18year-old self eyed up a barren strip of land beside the parking lot and envisioned a cornucopia of vegetables.

A load of manure, backbreaking digging, seeds, plants and a few sunny weeks later, that soil produced some straggly carrots and tomatoes, which were actually edible. I was hooked.

At my first house in Barrie, under my mother's tutelage, I soon had my own beautiful garden, which I tended lovingly.

Each subsequent house saw a repeat of that first garden until my present home, where I allowed things to get out of hand.

Madly annexing grass for gardens as the hostas and lilies spilled over the edges, I soon had what seemed like miles of lush flower beds and a robust vegetable garden.

The high point came when I returned home one day to find a little gardening award stuck in the front bed.

Things went downhill soon after.

I didn't have time for all those flower beds and soon joy was replaced by resentment as the gardens became a nagging sniping being — always on my back about edging, thinning and weeding.

Once the happily humming lady in flowered gardening gloves pruning the climbing rose, I morphed into an angry black-clad, mud-caked cursing being with a spading fork.

Trying to reduce the load, I became the serial killer of plants — returning flower beds to lawn.

It really came to a head recently with the raspberries.

Several years ago, I was given four straggly raspberry canes, which I planted at the side of my house, imagining neatly growing bushes like you see at the pick-your-own farms.

Five years later, in true The Day of The Triffidsstyle, the raspberry canes morphed into an impenetrable jungle of nettles forcing their prickly spines through a fence and into a basement window well, where they threatened to breech the house; their aim to eventually wrap their tentacles around my neck.

Picking the berries was an acrobatic feat avoiding sharp pointy sticks, the raspberries tantalizingly just out of reach. The scars on my arms and legs will attest to the fact that year after year, I tried to keep up with the bounty, which I gave to my mom for her famous jam.

Last year, I couldn't take it anymore.

Since my son bought me some red and black currant bushes, which would grow in an orderly fashion and be the perfect compensation for the loss of the raspberries, the time was ripe to hit.

Armed with the tools used to tend a garden, I gouged, tore and ripped out the mat of roots as a massive prickly pile rose beside me.

That's when I felt something let go in my right shoulder, and my arm went limp. That's when those damn raspberries got their revenge.

We've reached a truce of sorts. A few canes remain hemmed in along the fence where I can keep an eye on them.

Sorry mom, the red currants will be great in a couple of years.

OPINION

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2022-06-23T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-06-23T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://communitynews.pressreader.com/article/281681143555252

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