Chandra Clarke

Award-winning entrepreneur. Author. Professional Optimist.

All Green Thumbs

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Image Credit: Pixabay

It’s winter — well, it is here in the northern hemisphere, anyway — and that means it’s time for all good homeowners to plan out their spring home and garden maintenance. I mean, how else do you get through a winter except by anticipating greenery to come?

Your local newspaper will probably print a spring section, but since I didn’t write it, clearly it’s no good. What follows is *the* definitive guide to yard work.

Day One

1. Start first thing in the morning and attempt to get outdoors. Remember, too late, that the door opens inward. Find you now have a large mass of leaves, twigs and plastic grocery bags (which piled up against the door over the winter) in your foyer.
2. Crawl over pile and survey lawn and gardens. Feel warm sun. Sit on stoop to assess the situation and devise a plan of action.
3. Determine situation much better assessed with drink in hand. Walk to corner store to get one.
4. Return to stoop. Continue assessing.
5. Wake up hungry; realize it’s time for lunch.
6. After lunch, head to garage in search of gloves, rake, and bags.
7. Wait until family member realizes you’re missing and comes to free you from tangle of Christmas lights left near the garage door.

Day Two

1. Shove pile of leaves from foyer out onto lawn. Retry your search for gloves, rake and bags, this time armed with a pair of sharp scissors as defense against Christmas lights.
2. Start raking. Sip tea as you go.
3. Chat with neighbours who stop by on way to store or work.
4. Realize it’s lunch time already. Nip in for a bite.
5. Rake more. Drink more tea.
6. Step on rake. Spend 10 minutes looking for bandage for nose.
7. Keep raking. Take another hit of the tea.
8. Keep raking. Do a quick calculation and realize that the one metre by one metre corner patch you’ve been working on all day has enough leaves in it to fill approximately 35 bags. This is known as the Law of Winter Compression/Expansion, which in turn is based on the Theory of Disbeleaf.
9. Realize — very suddenly — that you’ve had way too much tea. Sprint for bathroom.
10. Finish bagging up that area as the sun goes down. Crawl into bed.

Day Three
1. Attempt to get out of bed. Stop screaming only long enough for spouse to administer muscle ointment to your arms and shoulders, which feel like they’re on fire.
2. Spend day watching TV, as it’s the only thing that doesn’t require much upper body movement.

Day Four

1. Drink about three cups of coffee to try and shake the daytime-TV-induced stupor you acquired yesterday.
2. Wonder if those people that threw the studio chairs at each other really had extramarital affairs with the stepbrother’s cousin of their tattoo artists while wearing vinyl hats.
3. Discover that half of the bags came undone in the night, and that the leaves blew across your neighbour’s lawn.
4. Do a quick rake of the leaf path to hide the fact they came from your yard, but leave the rest on neighbour’s lawn.
5. Start on a new patch of your lawn. Rake slowly.
6. When coffee wears off, call it a day.

Day Five

1. Go outside and discover that your neighbour put all your leaves back on your lawn.
2. Suspect he put all of *his* leaves on your lawn.
3. Suspect he put his other neighbour’s leaves on your lawn too.
4. Hit by sudden inspiration, drive to hardware store, buy industrial strength leaf vacuum.
5. Come home, let fly with a “Mwa ha ha ha ha!” and start the vacuum.
6. Get half the lawn done before you hear a MEOW! followed by a loud *thuck!* and a *whump!* and the vacuum stops working.
7. Spend the next two hours extricating Muffles.
8. Spend the next four hours getting stitches.
9. Return cat to neighbour with apology. Try not to fume when he says, between gasps of laughter, that the video he made of the cat extrication makes up for it all, because it went viral and now he’s got interviews booked with several daytime TV shows.
10. Call a lawn service.

Spring Forward, Fall Back

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spring forward
Tax day hasn’t improved with time. (Image credit: Pieter Brueghel the Younger)

Ah, spring. [Cue the music from Beethoven’s Pastorale.] The snow is melting, the birds are chirping and [cue the horrible sound of a symphony grinding to a halt] your taxes are due.

Here in Canada, we are being inundated with cheery television advertisements showing us how easy and fun (fun!) it is to file our taxes. According to these ads, all you need to be able to complete your return is:

1) A shiny new computer, which you will not be allowed to deduct.
2) A super fast Internet connection to the government web site, which, if you live outside metro Toronto, you won’t have until the government uses some of your tax money to provide one for you.
3) A cute 9-year-old daughter who will sit on your lap to demonstrate both family values in Canadian society and also explain the Internet to you.

Okay, really, for most people, filing taxes is fairly easy, mainly because their employers do most of the work. Deductions are taken off your paycheque all year ’round, and then at the end of the year you take the papers the employer hands you to an accountant and they figure out the rest.

For the self-employed though, there is just one word that accurately describes the tax process, and it is: AARGH!

This is because it is one of those immutable laws of the universe that tax law can never be simple. Historically, any country that has ever attempted to enact a simple “tell us what you made and send us X percent” rule was immediately invaded and stomped out of existence by hordes of marauding tax specialists bearing WMD (weapons of mass deduction).

Indeed, speaking of laws of the universe, there are an astonishing number of similarities between tax laws and our theories of how the universe began. (Which means that theoretical astrophysicists are just tax specialists gone horribly wrong). Consider:

Big Bang: What we think our universe started with. Also the noise your brain makes when you find out how much you owe the government.

Inflationary theory: Theorists believe that our universe is expanding, and that the stars and planets are moving farther and farther apart. Your tax bill typically expands, when the government denies that deduction for the wild toga party, and your target retirement age will seem farther and farther away.

Big Crunch: Some theorists speculate that the universe will end in a big crunch, when everything collapses in on itself. Your tax bill will also lead to a big crunch, as you attempt to pay it and your regular bills off.

Assuming you have a rudimentary knowledge of quantum mechanics then, it is possible for the self-employed person to work out his or her own tax return. However, even following the letter of the tax law precisely can get you into trouble.

For example, where I live, self-employed people have until June to file their return. However, your actual taxes are due in April. This means that the minute you work out what you owe, you’re already two months late and now owe even more, thanks to a concept called “interest.” [Cue the big bang noise in the brain.] That is, the government takes a great deal of interest in someone who is late in paying their taxes.

Even worse, the government here has taken to sending out notices to self-employed people that say, “We notice you made X of dollars last year, and that your current tax bill is Y. If you think you’re going to make X again next year, you must also start paying Y again. Now.”

To which I always want to reply that I’m probably not going to make X next year, because I’m too busy trying to pay off Y. Unfortunately, it is one of those great cruelties of life that taxes are not, in fact, tax deductible.

Yes, they say that taxes are the price of civilization, and if that’s the case, things are going to be very, very civilized here this year.

Mainly because we can’t afford any more of those toga parties.

Down The Garden Path

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It seemed like a good idea at the time.

The first item on my “to do” list today was “fix up garden.” Having done most of the hard work last fall, it was just a matter of clearing out winter debris, pulling a few stray plants, and planting the spring bulbs.

Two hours work, tops, right?

That was before my kids got involved.

I figured this was one of those projects my children and I could do together. So, first came the prep. My family is fair-skinned, so I broke out the sunscreen, sunglasses, and a hat. My kids took the slathering and accessorizing without complaint. I was lulled into a false sense of security.

Then it was off to the garage to get the tools. You should know my youngest son has a fixation with buttons; he is particularly fond of the garage because the door is automatic. It’s big, it’s very noisy, and you operate it with a button.

Twenty minutes later, after thoroughly exploring every angle at which you can halt the progress of a garage door, we managed to get the tools into the front yard. Among other things, I brought out two rakes: one was toddler-sized, new and bright green, while the other is ancient, unwieldy, and held together with duct tape. Of course, they all wanted mine.

They picked up the knack of raking in no time. Unfortunately, there being a great deal more rake handle than kid, their technique left me with a cauliflower ear, a bruised elbow, and a poked gut. They weren’t particularly interested in the patch of lawn I’d shown them either, preferring to rake the garden just like mummy. Sadly, the lily of the valley fared worse than I did — it’s just as well I was pulling it out anyway.

I finally convinced them to switch rakes, and I thought we were making good progress. Then I realized they were taking great armloads of leaves and throwing them *back* into the flower beds and dissolving into giggles. I decided it was time to demonstrate how much fun bagging leaves could be.

That was when they decided to explore the juniper. Juniper are not nice bushes. They’re very prickly and scratchy, and they have thin branches which make it impossible to push off and stand up. Toddlers are not very patient about this sort of thing. Fortunately, my daughter is not allergic to them; me, I get a bright red, stinging rash on contact. We won’t go into how I got the black eye, except that it has to do with impatient toddlers flailing about before they realize they’ve been rescued.

After fishing her out, pausing for a snack, finishing the raking, stopping for a nappy change, bagging the leaves, and feeding them lunch, it was time to plant. I gave each of them their very own pot full of dirt and a trowel, which they thought was great. And for fifteen minutes, I was able to work quickly and quietly, digging holes and dropping in bulbs according to the pattern I’d plotted out in my head.

Did I mention toddlers have the ability to teleport?

One minute she was happily flinging dirt onto the grass; the next minute she was beside me, having already rearranged all of the “onions!” I’d just planted and added a few choice items of her own. I will have anemone squeezed in between the freesia, tigridia mixed in with the mirabilis, and tulips shooting up beside the Fisher Price gas station action figure.

I will not say much about what happened when it was time to water the garden, except that I learned three things:

1) My shoes are not waterproof. 2) Diapers really *are* very absorbent. The brand we use can hold approximately 38 lbs of water without falling off. 3) Upturned pant cuffs, pockets and sleeves are apparently great places to hide handfuls of dirt.

So here I sit, bruised, battered, itching like mad, and contemplating an evening of mud-caked laundry … after I’ve dealt with the bathtub, which now holds most of the garden’s topsoil.

Would I do it again?

Only if I can find where they planted my rake.

Photo by John-Mark Smith on Unsplash

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

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Rose Garden

They arrived last month.

Evil, seductive things that they are, they started showing up in my mailbox, unbidden, but promising miraculous results and weeks, nay, months of gratification. And I am powerless to resist.

I’m talking, of course, about flower catalogues.

Spring is finally here in the northern hemisphere, and that means every nursery from here to Guadalupe wants to lead me down the garden path. Which wouldn’t be such a bad thing, except that I’m a lousy gardener. Never mind having green thumbs, I’m all thumbs when it comes to flowers, bushes, and even vines. It’s true what you’ve heard — I’ll never make the ivy league.

I start out with the best of intentions. I look over all the catalogues, looking at every gorgeous full-colour photograph at least twice. I get silly about shastas and I fantasize about phlox. Then I open my wallet, make a ridiculously large order and from there, well, my plans go to seed.

The first time around, for example, I ordered several trays of annuals from a German-owned greenhouse in a nearby city. I also bought a load of topsoil, figuring that the garden dirt looked pretty depleted. After two days of planting, I had a magnificent garden.

Until it rained.

At that point I realized my topsoil order also came with approximately 6,756 crabgrass and dandelion seeds. The little plants struggled valiantly, but in the end I had to bid them auf Weedersehen.

My second time out, I decided to try perennial flowers like dahlias and daffodils. That was the year it hailed, and the lilies, being dim bulbs, didn’t have sense enough to lean out of harm’s way. With the mixed glads looking very sad, and the rest of the garden looking like so much mulch, the dandelions moved back in. In fact, the tulip section got so bad that a smart alec neighbour posted a sign there that read: Weed my `lips.

I considered planting wild flowers this year, but I’m not sure that even they would be tough enough for a rumble with that rough bull thistle gang that moved in last fall. Besides, I’m sure the people across the road would vetch about the late night ruckus — I’ve heard those purple coneflowers can throw one heck of a garden party.

I even thought about doing the trendy thing and installing one of those elaborate ponds. However, with my luck, I know that one of the following would happen: A) The store clerk would sell me coy fish instead of Koi fish, and I’d never be able to find them in the pond, B) I’d find the neighbourhood dogs doing laps around the water lilies or C) the heron that lives at the nearby creek would take one look at the pond and think: Sushi bar!

With that in mind, I figure I might hedge my bets this year and plant some really tough flora. None of those prim roses, bleeding hearts or pansies this year, no sir. I’m thinking of something with some real flower power, like a mean dogwood or a snapdragon. Or perhaps one of those shady characters called white edged hostas — so it could say `hosta la vista, baby’ to the weeds, and mean it.

Or maybe I’d be better off taking the sage advice of a frond, erm, I mean friend: pave over the garden. I suppose with a few strategically placed garden gnomes and a pair of rose coloured glasses, it might make a credible substitute Eden.

Until the next time the catalogues arrive of course, at which point I’ll be green with envy all over again.

Photo Credit: “Roses-rosengarten” by Croq – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons