I do not have a green thumb. Often it is soft from a lack of callouses and painted with black nail polish. I don't get my hands dirty. I don't do yard work. But when Jacob and I bought our first home I took pride in having my own yard. It is, after all, what everyone sees when they drive past your house. It's you, in landscaping form, representing your personality and it should reflect who you are.

 

Since I'm ghetto instead of buying actual flowers to plant in my flowerbed I bought a giant bag of butterfly attracting seed mix. I liked the photo on the bag. It looked like a meadow of wildflowers. I have a large flowerbed and I wanted it to have depth and dimension and personality. I wanted it to be different. I didn't want square bushes or the same ol' flowers that seem to be trendy in my neighborhood. Fuck that. We are different and we need our flowerbed to reflect it.

 

So I tilled the soil (which is mostly sand) and scattered the various seeds around the bed. After a dose (or six) of plant fertilizer (organic, thank you very much. I do practice what I preach) I was ready to have flowers bloom after a week. Two, tops. Spring was coming and I wanted flowers. Since I wasn't sure what was in the mix (I'm sure it listed off the flowers on the bag but I threw it away. I didn't need it for reference because I was going to have beautiful flowers any day now!) when the seedlings started to pop up they all looked like clovers. After about a month I noticed some more variety between the leaves but I still didn't have any flowers.

 

It has been three months and we finally have flowers! Little pink ones that grow on a vine that is curling around our bushes and spreading across the flowerbed. It looks PRETTY. But that's it. The rest of the flowers in the mix have failed.

 

Except for one other. These didn't produce flowers, at least not yet. But their stems were HUGE- half an inch in diameter and about three feet tall. I think they would have bloomed sunflowers which I don't think are very pretty but I would have been happy for some variety in my flowerbed.

 

HOWEVER, we received a letter from our HOA with a photograph of our flowerbed. The letter stated that we needed to remove the weeds from our flowerbed.

 

WEEDS? There are no fucking WEEDS in my flowerbed.

 

Oh yeah. Sunflowers are weeds. Shit.

 

I'm usually quite stubborn when I'm being told to do something that I don't want to do but I didn't want to fight with our HOA. I didn't like how tall the plants were getting and probably would have yanked them out anyway.

 

So today I removed them. And you know what? Those fuckers were covered in ANTS.

 

I was bitten. Twice. On my hand.

 

Good riddance, soon-to-be sunflowers. You were supposed to attract butterflies, not ants. You have failed and therefore you must die.

 

Or be pulled out of the ground and put in our composter to be broken down to help us grow USEFUL plants. See? Your life has meaning after all.