It is a funny thing if you think about it. Suppose you buy a house and everything in it is absolutely beautiful. You negotiated a great deal; it's in a prime location; it's in a good school district; it's nice and spacious. The only thing left is your new home's appearance. What kind of flowers do you want? What kind of bushes? The only thing you know for certain is that you are definitely going to need a garden of some sort, and you are going to plant it! There is NO WAY you want someone else to have such a beautiful and glamorous job such as planting flowers in the topsoil after all the troubles you had to go through to get such a beautiful home. You put in the work and now YOU will reap the reward!

Yeah right!

Hind sight is twenty-twenty, so now you know. What were you thinking?

Let us take a look at all the things you went through during this "beautiful and glamorous job" and all the things you subsequently learned.

Like most people, you probably had a picture in your mind of you being outside, soaking up the sun, your favorite straw hat shielding your eyes, cool lemonade close by, deciding which flowers to put where, and in general just enjoying yourself.

I repeat. Yeah right!

The first thing you learned is that the weather will not always comply with your plans. The day you were planning on buying (what you thought were) all the essentials for your beautiful home-made garden also just happened to be the day of what you are positive is the longest sun-shower in the history of your great state. Who wants to do anything related to anything beautiful, like a garden, on such a gloomy day? Instead you catch up on last week's Twenty-Four. The down-pour is not even the worst of it, since now you would've-been garden is more of a swamp than anything. Okay, you tell yourself. It's not the end of the world. Now that the sun is back out, you can just buy everything you need in preparation for when your swamp dries.

Now you are looking at all the different flowers for sale, and you are clearly overwhelmed. Dark colors, light colors, seasonal, bushes, seeds, flower pots, trees, topsoil, gloves, all kinds of gardening tools – you don't even know where to begin. After you finally pick the flowers that you want, you bring them home, but you obviously didn't need any of the extras, like topsoil, gloves, or any tools. You are not a glove-wearing wimp, and this other stuff is only on sale to turn a profit; nobody really NEEDS any of this stuff. You even feel proud that you are so far ahead of the game.

Again. Yeah right!

You get home and try planting the flowers by hand without any tools and without any topsoil. You quickly give up after learning about how hard and anti-flowers your yard can be. You ask a friend who you think knows this stuff only to find out that apparently everyone just hires people to get this sort of work done. You are suddenly hit with even more determination than before, telling yourself you will not hire someone to do this. This is YOUR fun job!

You finally decide to do a little research and just kind of go with what you learn; even though you KNOW you don't REALLY need any of the stuff you buy.

You're just going to let them win this once.

You load up on flowers, topsoil, gardening tools, topsoil, gloves, topsoil, and pretty much everything you're told you need, which seems to boil down to a whole lot of topsoil. You start to wonder what you need all this topsoil for, but you're beginning to subconsciously admit defeat, so you just take it in stride.

You get home and attack the garden again, but this time you are armed.

You're not ripping your hands up this time around, but you soon realize how tiring this beautiful job can be! It is barely a half hour before your arms are aching, your back hurts, you're beginning to burn to a crisp, your legs are sore, and you're rear-end is killing you!

One more thing you realized is just how dirty topsoil is. It is a little bit surprising that you didn't expect dirt to be dirty. But this dirty?!? You don't even know if you'll ever be completely clean again, but you are still determined to have this dream garden!

Now, two weeks later, you look out and admire your beautiful garden.

You think back about how silly and ignorant you were when you first tried to create this garden and smile to yourself when you see just how much you learned. But more importantly, now you know how to always be able to create a beautiful garden for yourself. It took some time and quite a bit of pain to learn, but now you have a fool-proof method figured out. You can just do what you ended up doing this past time.

You simply figure out exactly what you want your garden to look like, and then call 1-800-TOPSOIL and whola! A garden.