I love gardening. I hate weeding. Thankfully, I have a fix for my garden grief: a stirrup hoe.
I started gardening just about four years ago. Before then, I was a garden mooch. I selfishly enjoyed lazy summer evenings on my parents’ back porch, surrounded by stunning native perennial garden beds lovingly established by my mother. The vibrant colors, alluring fragrance, and charming hustle and bustle of wildlife offered a much-needed reprieve from my otherwise technology-fueled existence. But the thought of exerting such effort to plant a garden of my own? Hard pass.
Then the pandemic happened. I was miserable. The world was often miserable. I needed something to pull me out of my funk. I became determined to convert the charred hellscape that was my 0.27-acre turf lot into a biodiverse, pollinator-friendly paradise designed to shelter and feed butterflies, bees, and birds native to my region of the United States. In May 2020, I officially became a gardener.
