Gardening

Honestly, if you would have asked me a few years ago if I would ever see myself in shorts and a shirt, all sweaty and dirty, crouching under a tree removing weeds or moving the lawn or cutting back bushes I would have laughed at you so hard I probably wuld have fallen off my chair.

Gardening, that means digging up dirt, watering plants, having all kinds of creepy bugs lazily crawl over your feet, mosquito bites, dark rims on your fingernails and lots more...never in a million years would I have imagined I would actually think that is fun, or relaxing, or something I look forward too.

Last Summer, having just gotten over my first bad episode of depression, I found that doing work in our backyard, removing all the weeds that had been annoying me ever since the first few sunny days had started, was actually something that I liked. While doing that you can either think about everything going on in your head, debating pros and cons while violently yanking out those pesky dandelions growing in between the cobblestones on the walkway to your front door, or you can just not think about anything at all, humming the melody to the last song you heard and getting a tan, or more likely in my case, sunburned.

While growing up I never really had to do any gardening. I grew up in a house with a yard in the front and a yard in the back, it was the middle one in a row of Town Houses. The yard in the front had a lawn, some bushes, trees and flowers and a small Hedge in the front so strangers couldn't easily see anything going on in our yard. The back was paved and we had a table tennis table there. My parents didn't believe in doing any work except maybe mowing the lawn. For cutting back trees or bushes and planting flowers the would hire someone. My dad owns his own law firm and therefore worked a lot, around 12 hours a day, 6 days a week.To compensate all the hard work we spend every vacation going to some (far away) place to relax on the beach. Not one vacation was spend at home, so we basically never used our yard.

My husband grew up totally different. His parents lived in a small apartment and owned a "Schrebergarten" (Leo.Org translates it with Garden Plot). I don't really know how common that concept is in other countries but in Germany it is very popular. People living in apartments (some even without a balcony or in the downtown areas) rent small areas on the outskirts of the city as their own yard. These yards are actually quite big and almost everyone has a small Cabin on it, complete with a camping toilet and a small kitchen. Some only have a huge lawn, a small pool, swings and sandbox for the kids or a pond for fishes, some also have plot to grow vegetables and trees to grow fruits. People go there every weekend for barbeques or to relax in the sun. A lot of them have a middle class or lower class income so spending your days in the Schrebergarten is their kind of vacation because they might not be able to afford going somwhere.

My Parents-in-Law grow their own Tomatoes, Potatoes, Asparagus, they have an Apple tree and I think a Cherry Tree too. My husband learned very early on to help with gardening, planting stuff and harvesting it later. So when we were looking for a house to rent he insisted on a yard, the bigger, the better. The place that we live in right now has a small yard, too small for him so he is constantly complaining. In the beginning I didn't really care, I never thought I would every help him do anything and basically didn't care how it looked, if the grass was too long or green enough and if there were weeds and leafs everywhere. During the really hot summer days I preferred to spend my time inside, drinking Iced Coffee and reading.

To me it is kind of amazing how I have changed in the last year, I have started liking things I never would have thought possible.

So what do you do when you need time to think about stuff. And do hey have the concept of Garden Plots where you live. Did your parents have one if you are from Germany?

Irene