Posted by Heather Harris

Fall is here and it's gray, misty, and wonderful. I always feel claustrophobic by the end of summer, as if the leaf laden branches, hunching sunflowers, and rotting tomatoes are sitting on top of my chest squeezing the last drops of life out of my overheated, weary body. But once the leaves start to fall and the dead stalks fall over, I am re-energized and can finally start the millions of things recommended by all of the "What To Do in Your Garden in October" lists, which is pretty much everything. The tasks are incredibly daunting and could require a second mortgage on your home as well as hiring a full time gardener. A sampling: Plant a winter vegetable garden, mulch everything, plant all of those perennials you've been drooling over, plant all spring bulbs, reseed your lawn, establish new flower beds, feed soil with bone meal, rake and collect leaves, harvest and dry seeds for next year, clean up the vegetable garden, plant trees, shrubs, and anything except a watermelon. I decided to go with cheap child labor and just shoot for a few of the tasks that absolutely can only be done in the fall. 1.I hear that this can be done in the spring, but I have yet to see that work. To be truthful, this being the first time that I've reseeded the lawn in fall, I have no idea if that works either, but seeing as spring planting has been a disaster, it's either fall or gravel, Those are all the options I have left. It seems that if preschool children can grow grass in Dixie cups in dimly lit church basements, that I should be able to get it to grow in my yard. Not so. We have tried that fluffy green grass stuff that the pros use and factory engineered seeds guaranteed to sprout overnight, all to no avail. Our problem is we always seem to spread the seed right before the one hot and dry week we get in the spring, and I am really bad with watering routines. Or any routine. This time I bought the cheapest grass seed at Bi-Mart that I could find and employed my preschooler, Luke, to shake it out in haphazard fashion all over the yard. I'm very hopeful... 2.As with most gardening tasks, I started with bulb planting in mind, but took a detour down to the vegetable garden (looking for my trowel, which I blamed the kids for losing, but it is just as likely that I left it somewhere) and before I knew it I was hip deep in a pile of weeds, my fingers were caked in dirt (I couldn't find my gloves either) and the kids had rakes and hoes doing God knows what to the areas I had just weeded. Actually, Lily turned out to be quite a raker, as long as she could talk nonstop the whole three hours that she was helping me. On my weeding frenzy, however, I unearthed the crown jewel of my vegetable garden that I have been searching for all summer long: a CUCAMELON! Remember back in seed catalog season when I excitedly expounded on the darling little cucamelons that would be wending their way through my garden, spreading their charm everywhere they went? Well, let's just say that it's October and I have a total of one cucamelon. But, oh it was soooo good! I really shouldn't have tasted it because now I am under the delusion that I should try it again next year. 3.I did eventually run out of weeds, at least in the places I chose to look, and returned to the intended task of planting bulbs. I always forget how long bulb planting takes. The netted bag even has "Easy, Affordable Fun" written right on the front. It's easy, but I wouldn't say it's fun. I had about 100 bulbs. That means you dig one hundred little holes. Ponder that for a moment. That is, unless you buy a lot of bulbs and you can just dig one huge trench and dump them in, but then I would have to question the "Affordable" part. By this time my little helpers were totally bored by the yard projects and were contentedly bickering on a fence just close enough for me to hear, but not close enough to be of much use should I need, say, a another bag of bone meal from the garage. This is, in my experience,the end to every day of gardening with children. I wonder how much a gardener charges?