Mulch doesn't hide onions, and other life lessons

It is one of my great joys each year- planting vegetables, choosing annuals, watching everything come to life.


I have given much thought and time to the arrangement of my perennials...some people move furniture, I move perennials. I am on a mission to have color from April-October, so choosing the annuals is an important task...and lots of fun. My grandmother and mother passed on their flower gardening knowledge and tricks, and I humbly say I have a proficiency for the flower gardens.

Vegetables and I have a more contemptuous relationship. After many years of struggling with soil conditions, the garden was reduced last year to a 4x8 raised bed, surrounded, of course, by a new flower garden.

It worked well, and the new look received many compliments. The only problem was the onions.

Two years ago someone gave me a LARGE set of onions. I planted the whole set, and as in past years, the return was less than stellar.

Who knew they would thrive when covered with landscape fabric and mulch!!

So now, at least once a week, I attempt to evict the onions from my flower garden. They stubbornly remind me that I put them there, and thus am responsible for slowing digging them out. I tried more mulch, to no avail. Nothing seems to sufficiently cover them.

And then I remember how much I dislike when that happens in real life. Don't you?

Don't you hate when the unwanted onions in life won't just go away?

Sometimes you forget they are there, sometimes you simply WANT to forget. So you buy landscape fabric, and mulch and beautiful flowers, hoping no one will ever see the onions again.

When they start to poke their heads up, you immediately break them off - removing them from sight but leaving the root intact. And soon they are back.

Sometimes I have onions in my life. Do you?

Persistent little suckers that keep coming up. The person I hurt with no remorse or apology, the one I haven't forgiven. Things God wants me to do...things he wants me to stop doing.

Am I alone in feeling like that?

I can ignore. I can yank off the top. But none of that works, not for me anyway. The flower garden still looks good. Not great, with onion tails everywhere, but still good. And in truth, you have to be right beside the garden to even see the onions coming up. But they still exist. They still suck up nutrients the flowers could be getting. They still interfere.

The immutable law of nature, of God, of the universe is that sow = reap. Always.

Sometimes I like that law.

Sometimes I don't because it reminds me that I need to make adjustments, make amends, do some digging. Or accept the same result over and over. For me and the people I hurt.

So I gotta go now...have my digger in hand...the onions are doomed.