My Aching Bones

My parents are in their seventies.  They are both healthy but not as spry as they once were.  They have a rather large yard and garden.  My mom can't do much gardening anymore since her hip replacement. All that bending is painful for her.  My dad has allergies and sometimes breathing difficulty.  They have a rather large vegetable garden.  I never really thought it was that large until today when we went up to help them clean it out.  I brought both the kids, my older sister came and my dad helped.  Mom did as much as she could, mostly directing the kids as to what they needed to pull out and what had to stay.

The vegetable garden had become overgrown with weeds and although the plants still produced fairly well it made it difficult to clean the garden out.  I should have taken before and after pictures but it totally slipped my mind.  I'll try to take a picture the next time I'm up there. 

We were only there for a couple of hours helping but both kids were worn out and so were the rest of us.  All that bending and digging, hauling stuff in the wheelbarrow took more of my energy that I could have imagined.  We didn't even get the entire thing weed free!  We did manage to get most of the surface weeds pulled out but it needs a good pitchfork to get the deep weeds out.  There was a couple of rows of carrots that we left in.  We took a big bag of carrots home too.

So now I'm sitting here wishing my bones didn't ache so badly from a couple of hours of work.  Sheesh!  I need to get some more exercise cause I feel older than my parents.  I forgot how painful gardening is if you are out of shape.  Our small gardens are nothing to take care of compared to that rather large veggie garden.  We also pulled some flowers out of the front garden, put away the solar lights and hauled the outside furniture off the deck to store it under the deck for the winter.

I think I need to take an Advil and go to bed now.