Heather Barton

I waited 40 years and fought the knowledge tooth and nail but I have learned how to garden and how to enjoy gardening, my way.  I have two tiers of what they call “English Garden” in my front yard.  When we bought the house it has just a slope with dying daisy bushes.  My Brother, bless his hardworking soul, turned the slope into two level tiers, which was the idea of my brilliant Mother…the gardening queen.  We gave a garden store employee carte blanche to pick plants for us and then I got the joy of placing and planted away.     Wheee, yuck.

And I was introduced to gardening.   Because once you plant it all…then the real work begins.  The constant maintenance.

At first I was a little stressed.  The pressure of making sure this thrived because we had spent so much money on it.  I knew how to weed…doesn’t everyone?  But sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between a wanted plant and an unwanted weed.  I had to let the occasional green shoot grow until I could tell it was grass or dandelion or whatever it was.  That’s how I learned.  Turns out weeds pull out easier when they are long enough to grab and that no matter whether you get the root or not, they are always coming back.

Then I had to learn how to do what’s called “dead-heading”, cutting the dead flowers off the plants so they could flower more.  How far down to I cut?  Pretend I’m taking a cutting for a vase?  Pretend I’m a goat grazing in my garden?  Again I learned by doing, wrong or right.  But what I really learned was “Who cared where I cut it, it was my damn garden!”

Then some plants grew and grew and grew and others didn’t make it no matter what I did.  And I learned how to prune.  By now I was familiar with my style of gardening and what I would like my garden to look like.  So I hacked and hacked and hacked until I had much smaller mounds of the out of control growing plants.  If I hacked too much and it died, I didn’t care; I planted a new plant in its place.  Again…my damn garden!

How do I now enjoy gardening?  I like to purge things and I purge the overgrowth and weeds and make my garden as neat as a wild English garden can be.  I keep trying to plant more color but it’s a hit or miss on what survives, this being Southern California and my slope getting constant direct sunlight.  Yet I’ve given up trying to get it perfect.  I’ve learned to take it in stride when something I spent money on dies in the place I planted it.  Maybe it was in the wrong place or just the wrong plant. 

The full frontal

Life is like that.  I can choose to obsess or fret or get upset over shit that’s happening how a plant is doing.  Or whether I’m tending my garden well, correctly or like an idiot.  Or I can shrug it off, let it go and admit deep down inside its not worth the stress I don’t really give a fart.   They’re plants and I’m an indoors, let someone else cook for me, lounge on the couch kind of woman at heart.  The garden is like the knick knacks on my bookshelf…happy to be ignored, dust me occasionally.  Or trim & weed me in the case of the garden.

It’s been at least 4-5 years since we put this in and believe it or not all you see are mostly the original plants.  Sometimes I’ll rip something out because it got too wild and too full of weeds and guess what…I must never get it all because it comes right back…nice and trim and neat.  It’s not the way I would like it to be exactly…but it’s the way it wants to be and sometimes that’s just what you gotta accept.

Not only do I get compliments…as if I really do any work anymore…but neighbors come over and steal clippings!  Now that’s the ultimate compliment!

My gardening secret… Conscious Neglect!   Think it works on kids?

The close up

When my oldest was about 6 was when I started to realize I wanted to really crack down on the whole chores issue.  At that time my 3 boys were 2, 4 & 6.  I was getting lost of interesting kid toys catalogs and I found a little chart of what kids can do at what age and a chart to keep track of chores.   So I bought one and went online to discover what they could do and at what age they could do it.

In that first year I put easy chores on the chart that they could do.  Empty the silverware, make their bed, feed the fish (we didn’t have the dog then), etc.  They loved the chore chart (which now has double the spaces for chores on it as the picture because I added more with a Sharpie about 4 years later).  The chart came with 3 different color stars to put on the spaces when each child completed that chore.  It was mostly filled with Luke’s stars because as the oldest he loved it.  I put stars on each chore they did at the end of the day and we counted them all up at the end of the week and I gave them a penny a star.  Participants immediately got piggy banks to put their pennies in. 

Now to be clear, I had to supervise almost all of the jobs until the child doing them got comfortable with it.  Just a pinch of fish food, please, no…too much, no…too little, yes…that’s perfect.  Day after day until they got it.  Did this add to my work load?  Yes.  Did all my chores take just that much longer?  Oh yes.  Was it worth it?  OH YES! (see next blog)

The beauty of this system is the chores are dry erase.  I can change, reword, add to and remove chores as the children get older.  I can add chores like “Practice something” and “Make an observation in your Journal” or my favorite “Be Mom’s assistant”.  I will note that after two years I retired the “stars” because they stabbed under my fingernails every week when I took them off the chart (Ouch!) and switched to dry erase pens, where I entered little E’s, C’s and L’s every day.  Now they are old enough to enter their own chore accomplishments and when they don’t, guess what, they don’t get paid!

So the “when” answer is really, “Anytime”.  The real key is that kids change as they age and chores and motivations must change with them.  But the ultimate parenting goal remained the same:  teach them the value of money AND how to do all the household chores at the same time.

My personal goal…NOT to be doing any housework, cooking, etc. by the time they are 14, 16 & 18.  Hey don’t mock me…a girl can dream!  And boy can my youngest scrub a toilet.

A lot of people have different opinions about kids and money.  Should they get an allowance or not?  Should we as parents control what they spend?

When I was growing up we had chores and got an allowance.  It was a pitiful amount of money, our allowance.  So at the earliest age possible I got a job.  I was paid with checks.  I had to get a checking account to put it in and use it.  I then had to learn how to balance that checkbook (mostly because my Dad was an accountant and insisted).

What did I buy with my money?  Junk food!  My mom was a health food nut, but not until I was 6, so I had my sweet tooth firmly installed and then went into withdrawal for 10 years until I could afford to buy my own.  Ahhh, Sara Lee pound cake, come to me!  I swear during those years I put our local ice cream man into a higher tax bracket.  He once played Led Zepplin down our street because my brother gave him the tape!

So here I am with my own kids, deciding how to instill a good work ethic into them.  My parenting motto is “You are adults in training.”  With that in mind I realized my kids needed to know about money because it was necessary for adulthood.  I wanted them to know that everyone had to earn money to buy their desires.

Lucky me I ended up with 3 boys and after dating men who didn’t know how to cook, clean, bake, iron and sew (o.k. maybe they don’t need to sew) I wanted to teach ALL household skills to my boys, not just the exterior ones.   My fantasy goal was to do only 1/5th of the household work by the time the oldest was 18.

So suddenly I had two reasons to have the kids get an allowance; 1. Payment for work and 2. Education on correct household skills.  Oh, and the beautiful by-product of less work for me!  Now my brother does not pay his kids an allowance and we’ve had our discussion on our reasons.  He feels that as part of the household they need to pull their share without monetary justification.  I feel that is a noble thought, but that the real world does not work that way.  I think it falls into the category of enforced volunteering or charity.

Son- Why am I doing this, Dad?

Dad- Because you get free room & board and should help out around the house as appreciation.

Son- How about you pay me and I’ll buy my own food.

When a person chooses to do something it is out of the desire to be rewarded by something; money, gratitude, their own sense of fairness or justice or happiness or whatever motivates them.

When my boys were infants I always taught the older that if you want something you’re younger brother has, then you must either wait your turn or TRADE them for the item.   Because our world runs on Trade and we use money to do it.  As preparation for adulthood our children need to realize that and be able to work it.  Adding charity and volunteerism is an added bonus to shape their character.  But if all you teach them is charity and volunteerism and they go out there expecting the world to be run as rosy as their childhood where everyone is giving and fairly doing their share they will get a rude awakening.  Will they be able to successfully negotiate that raise?  Will they overspend and run up huge credit card debt at a young age out of sheer inexperience?

I want to prepare my kids for adulthood because I want to kick them out or into college at 18.  Yes and watch them flounder about but learn to swim because I gave them enough practice with the basics.   So that’s the WHY.  I’ll give you the WHEN and the HOW in the next few posts.  And you can all either cheer or laugh at me in 10 years…we’ll see then.