Gardening Lesson

I was out in the yard, assembling one of those hardware store decorative garden fences.

The panels sort of resemble this. you are supposed to shove a panel into the ground, then working left to right, position the next panel so the hooks on the left slide into the little cylinders on the right.

It took four attempts. The second to last time, I attached all the hooks and eyes, then lashed it together with zip ties, and then tried to hammer that into the ground, and that didn’t work any better than the previous attempts.

Here is the trick. Plant your garden fence into a new garden. Probably not where you want to plant it. Not clay that has no wiggle room, not a lawn, not an existing bed with roots that throw everything off, just six inches of virgin topsoil. Works like a dream.

But, no one needs that advice, because — as I discovered when I tried to look for a replacement panel — they don’t sell this hellish puzzle any more. (They’ve moved to a new puzzle that seems easier: there are just rings on both sides and you hammer a stake through the rings.)

It was a long five hours out in the yard, with breaks the three times I got hot and my eyes got blurry, but once I found the secret I got fifteen panels lined up in five minutes. They just aren’t where I need them or want them, but like the wallpaper and the stenciling, it was so hard to do it will have to stay forever.