SOLUTION
Here’s our sampler-pack. We have more in the back, if you don’t see what you need. Let me know if I can help you reach the high ones— I have a special grabber behind the checkout counter which can also pinch people.
PROBLEM: The children have abandoned their meal.
SOLUTION: Eat it.
PROBLEM: The fort the kids have built takes up the entire dining room and they’re crying that the yoga mat isn’t staying up as a wall
SOLUTION: Add firewood
PROBLEM: The neighbors have started an Airbnb, you don’t have curtains on your windows, and you tend not to be reliably clothed while walking around.
SOLUTION: Buy four baby arborvitae at Agway and take six hours to dig holes for them in the rocky clay of your yard. In fifteen years they will be large enough to block some of the view.
PROBLEM: You hate your garden.
SOLUTION:
Mow it down
Ask your husband to make big garden boxes
Specify again that they should be “oh, I dunno, BIG.”
Realize when the materials order arrives that this will take a long time and they will be very large and this has already cost a great deal
Lay expensive ground-cloth for an afternoon, being sure to set up a drinks and snacks table to fuel the people helping you. Tell jokes while you run out of cloth about three feet before the final corner.
Lie in the box-in-progress for a while where no one can see you
Enlist a small enthusiastic person with a large bottle of wood glue
Remember that glue can be peeled off the floor once dry
Realize the boxes now have to be filled with something and it can’t be the dirt from Agway because that costs more than drugs
Haul downed wood full of ticks from the forest to your front yard using a large garden cart and the exploratory, volatile, and deeply temporary goodwill of two six-year-olds
Heave your punky harvest into the boxes for a week or two until they’re about half full
Accept surprise miraculous delivery of four bales of straw from your parents and throw that on top of the tick hotels
Order the top ten inches’-worth of dirt from Agway. Be sure to order probably the wrong thing and worry about it for days.
Realize that “organic,” when not preceded by “certified,” means absolutely nothing, and all you’ve just been sold is something that is technically not plastic.
Have intestinal upset
Realize you’ll need a tarp to put the enormous delivery on, borrow one from an obliging neighbor at the last second, sprinting to get it laid out as the giant beep-beep truck crests the hill
Manage your anxiety about the beep beeps while the enormous truck backs into your driveway, eclipsing the house and your life
This is not the fourth of July, don’t worry, there will be no explosions, if all goes well, just the loud beeps, you poor shelter animal
Talk nonchalantly to the dump-truck driver when he arrives, pretending to know what he means, nodding and laughing when he does, throwing out some keywords you hope you’ve picked up correctly
Hope that the driver doesn’t wreck the barn, yard, and boxes with the pyramids-of-Giza-sized delivery
Close one eye and most of the other while he dumps the stuff onto the tarps
Shovel for the rest of time.
PROBLEM: The children are eating your hostas
SOLUTION: This too is vitamin K
PROBLEM: The children have ground up a bag of Goldfish crackers and dumped it all over the couch
SOLUTION: Take a picture and post it on Substack Notes
PROBLEM: The children are fighting and one is yelling that it won’t go to school ever again and the bus comes in ninety seconds
SOLUTION: Suddenly look absolutely horrified that there’s a groundhog in the yard and yell that someone needs to chase it away
PROBLEM: There are nine generations of groundhogs making lace of the back yard
SOLUTION: Name them all Thaddeus
PROBLEM: It is very hard to get the children onto the bus; they have begun dragging their feet so hard their shoes come off, stopping traffic for several minutes while you work to load them and their kid-chowder into seats and do the buckles which are too hard for six-year-old hands to pull and click.
SOLUTION: Supply them with gifts. Jam, hosta leaves, the best of the driveway rocks. Tell them people will be pleased to receive these gifts. Watch them hustle.
Problem: opening phone leads to doom scrolling on the regular.
Solution: subscribe to Dishwasher Cafe for tick hotels and a proper supplement of vitamin K. Mood improves dramatically.
Having immediately recognized the dramatic number of solutions (22!) required by your 4th problem “I hate my garden” I am moved to opine that this is a problem likely preordained by your genetics …on BOTH sides, one side leading to the perceived need to plant things, the other to the hatred. Her gardens have now been determinedly grown on ALL sides of her house, south side for vegetables, west side with raised bed for mushrooms, abandoned after one season, northwest side with 3 duly installed raised beds, each with 2-part protective cages perpetually needing repair and the most beautiful east side, street-facing, flower and ornamental tree garden. So successful has she been that we now combat being totally overgrown by her own plantings as well as all those Mother Nature (and the previous owner) has seen fit to bestow upon us. Your hatred of the garden you wanted is what we in the business call an "overdetermined” problem and it goes back at least 3 generations. We’re SO sorry but plead heritage.