Just Start, Part Two

I refreshed a very overgrown flower bed today. With the help of a three year old. 

My original strategy was to pull out all the weeds, lay down a stone border, and then start planting the 32 perennials that I had shelled out good money for. 

But in addition to a collection of ferns, brunnera, liriope, and vinca, I had also bought a pair of Paw Patrol garden gloves made for three year olds. And my niece loved them. 

She donned the gloves early and stomped out to the flower bed. 

“I wanna help.” 

It was hard to get her interested in pulling weeds or lining up stones to form a border. These tasks didn’t really appeal to me, either, but I felt as though they were the things I should do before getting to the more interesting task of actually planting flowers. 

“I wanna plant flowers.” 

And to be honest, that’s what I wanted to do, too. 

So we abandoned the tasks that felt like prerequisites and got to the good stuff. 

We dug holes, plopped in plants, and filled them up with dirt. 

Along the way, we did actually pull weeds. That stone border somehow got built. But we did it in between the good stuff. The important thing, though, is that we didn’t let the weeding and border-building hold us back from getting started on the stuff we really wanted to do.