Now that the Cold Muthas hockey season has come to a close, and I’m in between training rides with my Lost Riders mountain bike team, I’m doing something truly brutal. Gardening. The mental and physical anguish of garden work has always put me over the edge. So this year I’m carefully following the every move of Podunk’s supreme and master gardener, who for the purposes of this blog, I will call Garden Yoda.

Two weeks ago I went to Garden Yoga’s place where she was digging up over-wintered carrots. I went back to my garden to see if I had anything over-wintering there, and I found a rather vigorous uprising of quackgrass.

I asked Garden Yoda to prescribe an ointment to rid myself of the evil weed, fully expecting her organic self to recommend some combination of vinegar and baking soda concoction. I was prepared to do anything.

“Dig it up,” she instructed. Apparently rototillers create a “starfish effect” that exacerbates the situation, and no doubt would leave me with salty ocean soil and probably a lot of starfish arms.

I found some primitive garden tools and started doing as I was told. I know from painful experience that stooping over my garden for long periods of time causes me to walk like Fred Sanford of Sanford & Son, so I plopped myself down in the middle of the dirt to reduce stooping.

That’s when I discovered that I had also over-wintered a thriving red ant condominium in addition to my over-wintered grassy blanket with rhizomes reaching to the state line.

After wheelbarrow number three full of quackgrass, I had cleared a spot in my garden large enough to grow enough peas that they would fit into one of the small frozen bags in the grocery store. How very satisfying!

And not that I agree with these tactics, but I must say I understand why humans adapted military-grade chemicals meant to inflict pain and suffering on our fellow man to garden applications.

More sessions with Garden Yoda are needed.