My Addiction.

Bachman's.
Uncommon Garden.
Tangletown Gardens.
Even K-Mart has a garden center. I simply can't resist. Gotta have it every weekend. Dirt. Muck. Moving plants from one corner of the yard to another, striving for the perfect balance of color and texture. And rarely achieving it.

Seed catalogs in February are required reading.

A dimestore shrink told me it's because my kids are grown and I need something to focus on. Possibly. I'd rather think it's because plants don't talk back.

It could be genetics though.









Here's my mother in her commmunity garden plot. She's always had a garden growing. Even our Pillsbury Avenue backyard {long, long ago} had a few flowers that survived the wretched children.











Let's go back another generation. Here's my grampa, E.T. Farley in his backyard on Clinton Avenue. A retired teacher, he hung out at home while gramma {a.k.a. The Madam} went to work at Power's Department store. See that cane? He'd usually be sitting in that metal chair and would point at spots we missed with the pushmower. For weeds, he'd bust out the "Killer Kane". A strange device -- a tube filled with water plus a wafer of poison -- that dispensed a shot of herbicide on dandelions. Deadly! And we loved it.

But wait, let's go back even further.



















The Madam didn't have the gardening bug, but her mother {my great gramma} did. And here's great gramma with The Madam's sister Ada, in her California garden.

So, when I obsess on turning this . . .









into this. . .




it's because I can't help myself. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a gardenn to tend.

Slowly catching up on the events in MadgeWorld while listening to: Living on a thin Line by The Kinks from The Sopranos soundtrack.