Guess who's fired (again) – and who's gleeful about a new garden

June 18

As springtime's final week blew away under blue-gray skies and chilly winds, I spent some time making a short list of garden projects for the rest of this month. My husband, Lee, has set up the connector hoses for the drip-watering system in our raised vegetable beds. My job is to bury the hoses an inch or so under the soil, so they'll water the vegetables' roots. I have a good reason to keep the hoses on the beds' surface, though. My chief garden staffer, Benjamin BadKitten, used the lettuce bed recently as his personal outdoor hygiene site. Maybe I could rig up a squirt gun linked to a BadKitten motion detector. Knowing a hose could spew water at him, just as he's taking care of business, might motivate him to find an off-site pooping patch. Unless I decide to follow up on this ingenious invention – or replant the raised bed and drape it with protective plastic netting, – I'll be buying my lettuce for awhile. The possibility of E.coli. is never funny. And I have fired that cat. Again.)

When the hoses are buried, my next task will be dead-heading the flowering perennials in our front garden. Most of the tall, flamboyant oriental poppies' petals have dried to fragile tissue-paper wisps of red, pink, orange, white and purple. I will clip some of their seed pods and let others dry and scatter. There is always room for more poppies in my garden. The roses will need care, too, and I will remember to prune off each dried bloom down to a cluster of five petals on the cane. That's the best spot to encourage more buds. The Canterbury bells will re-flower after a dead-heading, and some of the sweet williams will need snipping, so more of their spicy, fringed flowers will bloom deep red, purple and pink through the summer.

After the flower dead-heading, my list includes weeding the backyard flower beds. Then, I thought, I'd be looking at a summer of simple garden maintenance, with plenty of time to stop and smell the roses– literally. I told Lee recently that I'd decided to be sensible and not expand the flower garden near our front walkway, (even though I could easily imagine a lovely froth of delphiniums, roses, and Canterbury bells around the plum tree.) Last autumn, I wrote in this column that I would not plant another tulip or daffodil bulb anywhere, especially not in our backyard garden, (even though there's a perfect planting strip in front of the peonies, and Lee and I could look out at a blooming springtime flower show from our living room window.)

But last weekend, Lee came in from mowing the grass and said maneuvering the mower around three tiny quince bushes, and the flimsy white fencing around them, is a pain. So is trying to squeeze the mower down the narrow path between the raised beds and the climbing roses, sweet peas, hollyhocks and honeysuckle along the fence. So my husband wondered if I'd be interested in expanding that garden a bit, from the fence line, to include the quince bushes and the pear tree at the front end of the raised beds. My eyes brightened and my tail started twitching, as if Lee had just told Benjamin BadKitten we were thinking of getting a flock of canaries and letting them fly free in the house.

Another garden. The sunlight is great for planting roses there, and a flower bed would be a welcoming entrance to the vegetable beds.(I could also plant some tall delphiniums and sunflowers, which might hide evidence of another epic vegetable failure from passersby.) In my imagination, I was doing a wild happy dance, but I remained outwardly calm and mature. Sure, I could make us a small garden there, I said. (I know Lee will offer to dig up the sod for me, because my knees are not always trustworthy. But his to-do list is longer than mine. I'll wear a knee brace to keep my digging leg strong and steady, and will remember that I don't have to shovel all the sod in one day. I can dig a bit each day – and when the new patch is ready, I'll have my reward: buying a flock of canaries. Pretty, petaled canaries, with a fragrant song and graceful wings of leaves and flowers.

Later this summer, after I've made and planted our new garden, I might take a little walk in our backyard and wonder, just for fun, how many tulip and daffodil bulbs would fit in front of the peonies.