Now is the time of year when serious gardeners put aside the colourful catalogues they’ve been reading all winter and step outside to dig serious money into the ground.

For gardening is no longer small business. Gone are the days when all you needed was a pitchfork and a spade. Now, you need a fat wallet filled with a deck of credit cards.

Let’s say you are looking for a harvest of tomatoes and beans and peas and perhaps a few potatoes and a squash or two. Not to mention a sea of colourful flowers. Yes, if you are young, strong and have the time, you might get by with a week or two of serious soil-turning. But, in theory, it is far easier to plunk down $1,000 or so and get yourself a gas tiller — a machine that will do the job in a few hours. Except…

Except out where I live. There was a humble patch for vegetables when we bought this house; its centrepiece was a gas tiller wrecked upon the rocks. For we have more rocks than soil, and this is death to mechanical devices. That’s why you will probably find me creeping through the weeds on my knees, wielding a tool called a ho mi. That’s a sharp-bladed, short-handled digger that was popular in Korea in the Bronze Age. And it is almost as modern as I get. It’s also relatively cheap.

Of course, I have a supply of bent-tined forks and dinged-up spades — an inventory worth about $1,000. They will be handy if I ever get the rocks under control and out of the ground. Maybe in a few more years.

If you are a gardener, you will know it is easy to run up a large bill because you want a turning fork and an edger and a rock rake and a rabbiting spade and a sod lifter and a transplant spade and loppers and pruners and saws, plus a special fork to turn your compost, as well as a special composter. And you can spend $400 or so on a wagon or a cart, and mayhap $40 on a long-handled dandelion digger.

And those are just some of the tools.

You also need hoses and sprinklers and, if you are truly discriminating and want the neighbours to envy you, you may spend $100 or so on an elegant watering can. Me, I have no neighbours and I get by with an old lard pail that cost me $2 at the bakery — empty of lard, I should add.

If your tastes run to decoration as well as cultivation, you can pick yourself up a solar-powered bird bath fountain for about $200. Or perhaps you would like a statue of St. Francis feeding the birds or a couple of lions (lion statues, that is).

And what is a gnarden (sic) without a gnarden gnome? It’s only $20 for your basic gnome sleeping under a gnmushroom.

Then, to get everything growing, you’ll need fertilizers. It used to be you fed your garden manure and hoped the wind would blow away from the house for a day or two. But now plants have become finicky. Tomatoes want tomato food and potatoes want potato food. Trees and grass have their own special fertilizers, and roses want rose food or they will sulk all summer.

Once everything is growing (in

theory), you can then spend a bundle on the instruments of death. For a garden is a battleground, and you will want herbicide to keep the weeds in line, plus various dusts for flying insects and aphids and the like, as well as poison for slugs and snails and a beetle trap or two. If you are deep in the country, you might even want deer repellent (which also works on elk and moose).

There is another possible problem that faces your garden, lush with flowers and bountiful with vegetables. By the time you have spent your money on diggers, cutters, pruners, rakes and stakes, plant food and poison, it is possible you won’t have enough money left for a bed of Blue Muffin viburnum or burpless cucumbers. But, at least, you’ll have had a lot of exercise. IE