double standards...

I could've sworn this lilly was white when I planted it! It was a potted plant that I got for mother's day last year and after it had bloomed I popped in the ground to see if it would come back. It did! And it's red! And it's twice the height it was last year!





The other day 2 guys from the shop were outside on their coffee break. Commenting on how it was too bad that the plants had been stolen, one of them scuffed the corner of the dirt with his shoe and out came a needle and a crack pipe that had been burried in the soil.

I have had to fight the temptation to get casual about gardening at the shop. Sometimes I stop but the shop and see a weed. I pluck it, and then I see another one, and then suddenly get sucked into this netherworld of gardening and get dangerously cavelier... but no more. This latest discovery in the soil has served as a very effective warning. I have a husband and kids. I don't need to come home with HIV/AIDS.

A funny thing happened since then, a sad thing, really. I've gotten so used to treating the soil at the shop as diseased or dangerous that when I was weeding at home, I noticed that I was gardening so carefully, paranoid that I might get pricked with a needle.
I'll have to develop two minds about gardening to deal with these different worlds--one to stay careful and appropriately respectful/fearful at the shop, but still able to love the carefree feeling of plunging my hands into the soil at home.

(Inevetably when I'm in the yard with my toddlers I can't resist gardenign something and them suddenlyu someone needs lifting etc and they get covered in mud--at very least under the armpits!!)