Tell me I don't exercise.

Go ahead.  Really.  I dare you.

See, I love to garden.   Absolutely love it.  There's just something about weeding that lets me get all my grumpies out.  (Someone remind me to vid that song ... according to my husband, it's incredibly cute.)

Then once the weeds are all ... *cough* relocated...  (Picture me attacking two-foot tall weeds with a mad cackle)... there's the peaceful planting and watering and waiting for stuff to grow.  Generally food.

Yeah... not really into growing flowers just for the sake of growing flowers.  When I do, it's things like Russian Sage that take pretty much zero maintenance. 

Oh, I have had my decorative flower beds, but they generally stay that way only as long as those few flats of "4 for $1" flowers manage to survive the summer heat, then they get converted to more useful things.  Herbs.  Radishes.  Carrots.  Stuff we can eat.  Because what is more awesome than realizing you want salad on the table for dinner, walking out into the yard, and harvesting all the ingredients ten minutes before you eat them?  Not much, I say.  Not much at all.

Where is this going, you ask?

Don't mind me, I ramble a bit when I've been out in the sun.  

Right, back to topic.

It's GORGEOUS outside today.  Moderate breeze, high sixties, not a cloud in the sky.  But JJ has had a rough couple of days, and I'm trying to give him one that's as obstacle-free as possible so he'll settle back to his usual nap routine.  This means no long walk in the early afternoon.  So once he's down for nap number two (right on schedule, bless his little heart), I grabbed my sneakers, hat, sunblock, and pestered John into finding me appropriate tools for attacking the weed bed that used to be his grandmother's garden.

Ended up using a Garden Claw.  Ever seen one of those things?  It looks like a garden fork/hand rake tool had an unfortunate encounter with a corkscrew, and maybe some growth hormone.

Yeah, that.

Don't let the commercials fool ya, that thing is WORK... but it's very effective.  I now believe that you can do everything from break ground to tilling to aerating to light weeding with that sucker, because I've done the breaking ground part, and that's the hardest, to my mind.  You shove it into the ground as deeply or shallowly as you prefer, and you twist.  Stand as close to it as possible when doing so, your back will thank you later.

That's what it looked like when I started, except taller, 

because I forgot to take a "before" picture, so this is actually 

the next section down the fence and it has different weeds.

That's what it looked like when I stopped.

That's about a six foot by three foot section that was two feet high in weeds, easy. It is now largely weed-free, loose, soft, and in need only of cleanup weeding, plants, and water. That nice rich brown stuff? That'd be soil. Not dirt. Soil. I officially take back anything bad I ever said about the midwest. It's worth the humidity and the unpredictable weather for decent soil and a growing season that's not limited to the latter half of June through the first two weeks of August.

So yeah... I'm tired... hot... sweaty... probably sunburned... and I have 18 square feet of plantable garden space.  Took me about an hour.

So go ahead.  Tell me I don't exercise.  

*snort*