The Great Purple Coneflower Massacre
One lesson of creating a huge vegetable garden where we once mowed the lawn, is that while mowing and fertilizing and watering took work, it could essentially be done by one person. It doesn't take a division of household labor to keep a lawn. While it is incredibly rewarding, our 2,500 square feet of vegetable garden is a lot of work. So in a marriage enhancing and stretching exercise Nancy and I have divided up the responsibilities. I grow plants in the greenhouse, figure out where to plant them, attend to their health and growth, trimming, thinning, etc. I also do a lot of weeding. Nancy, who claims to have "zero" knowledge of plants and gardening focuses on mowing the lawn and weeding, harvesting and cooking up the veggies.
We both work hard at it. I would even say Nancy works harder at it this time of year, especially at the weeding. Given Nancy's more limited knowledge of the plants, we've had some hard won lessons on what is a weed and what is not. Last year we lost our crop of Parsnips to a case of mistaken identity and our candytuft had a bloomless spring due to some ill timed pruning. Last week we had the hardest lesson of all on the difference between a perrenial flowering plant and an annual flowering plant.
The Purple Coneflowers are past their prime and flopping over on the lawn. Nancy called me to ask if it was OK to "take them out." I said sure, and in my mind I translated "take them out" to mean, "trimming them back", which is what you do with perrenial flowers like echinacea. That evening as we headed out to the car to celebrate our anniversay I noticed what looked to be every purple coneflower from the yard in the clean green garbage bin. I love these flowers and I thought to myself that they even look beautiful in the garbage can. Over the last four years I have nutured a bounty of coneflowers in the garden I started from seed. They are my all time favorite flower and in my mind the most beautiful part of our yeard. But as I looked closer at the tangle of wilted flowers I saw that it wasn't just the tops of the plants in the bin, it was everything, roots and all. Nancy had literally "taken them out" in a massacre of epic proportions.
After a long heated talk about who was less clear and more clear in our phone conversatoin we settled into an anniversary dessert, grateful for each other, and grateful that we'll never have to make that mistake again.
