After three months on the road, we’re going home.

I’m ready.

Our home is a safe place that allows for nestling into a familiar and comforting routine. After 25 years we know every nook and cranny. We have our favorite spots for projects  reading, and watching TV. My kitchen is just the way I like it with everything in reach.

Then there are the flowers. I will be home just in time to get my beds ready and to watch my spring gardens bloom. Daffodils, peonies, irises, and lilacs. I love every moment of spring.

First there is the composting, mulching and edging. Cutting plants back and watching for new growth. It takes about 4 or 5 days and I am ready to sit back and enjoy.

I don’t want to romanticize gardening though. Its trial and error and some of my errors are reborn every year to remind me that I know nothing about gardening.

Those errors are largely in my miserable, weed-infested back garden.

When we inherited this garden 25 years ago it was gorgeous. It had and still has Japanese Irises. A tree peony, rubeckia, daylillies. It was designed and planted by a young man who worked at our town garden store.

Twenty years ago I made the mistake of fertilizing it with aged horse manure. The compost was still ripe. The seeds in the horses’ hay hadn’t burned away yet.

A beautiful garden became riddled with nameless, miserable, propagating weeds.

I have no idea what to do with the bed of thorns except turn it over, seed it with grass seed, and mow. (And save a few of my favorite plantings.)

Keith won’t hear of it. Ever the optimist, Keith thinks that some day in the not too distant future I am going to bring it back to life.

I have other challenges in my gardens. Now that I think of it, too many to enumerate in short post.

Gardening is my pleasure and my pain. Two sides of one coin.

Do you have a bed of thorns at home? Vent here.