“Our bodies are our gardens to which our wills are gardeners.” -William Shakespeare

Who needs Spring when you can have Summer. Yep 80 and hot. Well SEARS is selling lawn tractors like hotcakes and people are flocking to Tantaztic to get their base tan.

For us homeowners, the honey-do list just got a bit longer. Mine is self-induced but we all start the yard fix up in one way or another. Spring means preparing and planting the flower beds and vegetable patches, cleaning up the yard, getting your garden ready and maybe even putting in or replacing some trees or shrubs.

Spread over a few days, such activity is invigorating and satisfies the soul. But for people with time constraints who need to work fast, overhauling their small acreage of green over a single weekend invariably results in back and neck pain by Sunday night.

Now if you’ve read any of my previous articles you’ll know I’m a big fan of child labor. Kids need to learn some responsibilities and doing chores to help the family are perfect. They can be relation building and even teach some practical skills for later years, or even to pursue as a profession.

I even try to make smart decisions when buying things. This is the story of my life. So I purchased a weeping cherry tree Sunday but needed to pick it up Tuesday. I showed the young man which tree I wanted, explained that it was in a 20” pot, which meant less digging for me, and it was the same size tree as the others. He met me at the checkout counter and told me he marked my tree.

So I go to pick it up and the wrong tree is marked and mine is missing. So what I get is the 30” pot that 2 guys loaded into my van. Well “one guy” is removing it and “one guy” is diggin’ one     monster hole for it. The hole had to be about four feet across and almost three feet deep. My son asked me what I was doing and I told him I was digging a hole to China because I thought I could get his toys cheaper.

Anyway I focused on what my old landscaping boss told me from my days of building stone walls and planting decorative gardens. He told me there is gym strong and work strong. Take your time and work slow and steady. That means shovels and boulders don’t move like dumbbells. It is much harder work.

Go wrestle a farm boy and find out for yourself. They are strong as an ox. So with that learned guidance I had the hole dug in an