Mom gets compliments on her gardening skills every time spring rolls around and the flowerbeds explode in a variety of greenery and blooms.
I mean, I’ve had people even asking me what some of her chosen plants are and I have no clue!
There are very few that I could even attempt to name and that’s only counting on one hand.
In the grand scheme of things, it just isn’t my forte to hold space for a lot of flora or fauna in my memory bank.
In fact, I’m not really the gardening or landscaping daughter – that title is reserved for my younger sister Ashlee.
Ashlee attended Texas A&M to pursue her degree in landscape architecture back in 2009, but her love of plants started before that.
Personally, I’ve never been too interested in botany beyond appreciating how something looks or if the plant in question is crucial to our food chain.
I mean, I’ll have an opinion on something if the proportions or layout look wrong and I can tell if a plant is struggling, but that’s about it.
I’m also better off left tending to succulents and cactus derivative plants than most others – and that’s only what I have to thank my grandmother for teaching me about.
See, my grandmother was also a lover of plants and we spent plenty of time helping her tend her garden or the kaleidoscope of potted foliage and flowers clustered around her yard while growing up.
So, when I say that Ashlee comes by the fascination for landscape genetically – I’m pointing at both our mom and grandmother.
I’m more than alright with tending to my few aloe vera varieties and other succulents and relegated to heavy lifting for anything else.
Which leads me to dreading mom’s wishes for yet another vegetable garden being planted before it gets “too hot outside” – her words, not mine – since I think it’s plenty hot enough already!
That means we’ve been working at tackling the overgrown weed problems along with playing “I Spy” with various tomato cages, raised beds and PVC pipe markers or support before trying to mow things to ground level.
Then we’re supposed to kill off the weeds entirely, but I’m not having much faith in managing that any time soon.
Not to mention the walk behind tiller has seen better days and I’m not looking forward to having to drag it out to the garden plot either.
Plus, I know that Ashlee and mom want to plant enough vegetables to at least make several dozen batches of salsa again.
But, I’m not excited to have nightmares of peeling tomatoes and trying not to get jalapeno juice in my eyes accidentally again.
Still, those prospective plants hinge on getting enough water and right now things are looking pretty bleak, so, we’ll have to wait and see if the effort of clearing the garden out is worth it or not.
Either way, I don’t have much say in what goes on in the landscape or garden front – I just follow mom’s and Ashlee’s orders!
