Chick Wit: The pleasure and pain of putting in a garden

I just put in a hundred perennials, which, if you're not familiar with gardening terms, means that I never have to do this again for the rest of my life.

Because perennials are supposed to be automatic, in that they come back every summer.

Like a yeast infection.

It took me three days to plant a garden, because I made every rookie mistake possible.

First, let me just say that I had no idea that gardening is so much hard physical labor. I toted sod, plants, and big rocks, in 90-degree heat.

Gardening isn't a hobby, it's a chain gang.

My back, legs, and shoulders ache, my leg is swollen from a sting, and I got scratches from rose bushes I bought when I was temporarily insane.

There can be no other explanation for buying a plant that bites.

The problem with gardening is that the very term is a euphemism.

It fools you into thinking that you'll be swanning around a bunch of flowers.

Wrong.

Remember when you delivered a baby? It was called labor for a reason, so you had fair warning. Because it's work. There's pushing and pulling and yanking and profanity.

And that's just conception.

Sorry.

Anyway, back to my mistakes. Second mistake, I bought plants online because they were cheaper, then I found out that the nursery near me is going out of business and everything there was 40 percent off.

What I had already spent.

The online plants didn't come when they were supposed to, so I started thinking I'd need more plants anyway, and I could get them cheap at the nursery. I read through my new perennials books, went to the nursery with my to-buy list, and they had none of them.

So I bought whatever perennials they had on sale.

It's the Going Out of Business Garden.

And for what these plants cost, it's going to put me out of business.

Anyway, the books said I had to take the grass off and make a bed.

I had no idea. I thought you could just plant flowers in grass. I should have known I'd screw up. I never make my bed.

Third mistake, I thought the garden was a big area, but I'm not good at eyeballing it, as my father always said. Of course, I know there's tape measures, but how would you know how many plumbago plants you need to fill a foot of garden? Until yesterday, I thought a plumbago was a back problem.

Now plumbago is giving me a back problem.

Bottom line, it's a big garden, so I got a great handyman, Dale, to help me, which is what you do when you're divorced.

You hire a husband.

Anyway, the first thing Dale said was, "There's a machine that takes off sod."

Oh.

So we found out the machine was called a sod cutter, and we rented one right away and started cutting the sod, which is the garden equivalent of scalping your grass.

It took all day, cutting and hauling the sod, then raking the bed so no grass seeds were left. Then we started putting in plants, with Dale doing the manly work of digging and me doing the girlie work of putting in the potting soil and covering the hole.

I was a cover girl.

Yay!

Next mistake, we used up all the plants I had bought on sale, and still had two thirds of the garden left. The online plants still hadn't arrived, so I went back to the garden center and bought more plants.

Three times.

I no longer consulted the books.

I bought any perennial that wasn't nailed down.

I would have planted a file cabinet if they'd let me.

But now I'm finished, and it looks beautiful, and it was worth all the trouble, like a brand-new baby.

Who remembers their labor anyway?

OK, I do.