Gardening for a Lifetime

I'm traveling for business this week to a warmer climate and can't help but to think about my home and garden back in Massachusetts.  I'm a homebody by nature and enjoy nothing more than puttering around the flower beds and tending to the vegetable garden.

Photo Credit:  Better Homes and Garden magazine

Lately work has consumed most of my time and when I'm not working life just seems to get in the way of what I really want to be to doing, which is diving into rich garden soil and letting all of my senses par take in the glory of mother nature.

Photo Credit:  Country Living Magazine

To pass the time on the plane ride I poured over gardening magazines and dreamed of a life where my only cares are deadheading a shasta daisy and pulling up weeds.  Right now I'm a bit of frustrated gardener as the vegetable seeds I intended to sow indoors have yet to be sown, the milk containers I collected for winter seed sowing sit empty in a back bedroom, and the tubers and summer bulbs I bought at the flower show have yet to be buried in potting soil.  Is it too late?.... Too late and the season hasn't even begun yet?  I know it's not, but I feel that way sometimes especially when I see the blogs of my gardening friends whose seeds have already sprouted and whose gardens are already bursting with blooming color... granted they are in a different zone, but I feel behind all the same. 

Am I alone in feeling so anxious? Do you feel that way as you peruse the blogs of others?  Do you wonder how they have time to do it all?  How everything seems to be done on schedule without life ever getting in the way?  Why should something that I enjoy so much make me feel so filled with angst? 

Then, in the throes of my anxiety I read a review of a gardening memoir, "Gardening for a Lifetime," by Sydney Eddison.  Althouth it focuses on the challenges of maintaining a garden as you get older, it's message is clear....  gardening should be enjoyable and easily fit into your lifestyle and if it's not... well for God's sake change it and don't worry about what other people are doing.

I can't wait to buy this book and dive into its pages.  In the meantime, I need to resolve myself to the fact that although I bought 15 seed packets for veggies and flowers not a single one may get sown.... and, well that's OK... because I can still garden and still have delicious veggies this summer.  Our local gardening center will have some fabulous seedlings in about another month and I can enjoy planting them all the same.  I may not have raised them since birth, but they will be my adopted rescues that I'll love.  After all my little dog Ellie is a rescue and look how wonderful she turned out to be!