One of the appeals of vegetable gardens is a sense of self-sufficiency. If I had to live on what comes out of my garden, I’d last about a week, but I still enjoy the illusion. I put eating from my garden in the same category as imagining that I am an explorer when I go backpacking. I always drive to a restaurant as soon as I come out of the backcountry, but I’m Kit Carson right up to the moment I sit down to a burger and fries.

A second attractive feature of vegetable gardens is that gardening is a DIY project where mistakes don’t matter. If I get impatient in the spring and plant before last frost, I am out a couple packages of seed. If rabbits get through the fence and eat my salad greens, I tell myself that I prefer store-bought iceberg anyway. If my cucumbers flower, but produce no fruit, vendors at the farmers’ market sell cucumbers by the basketful. Unlike plumbing or other home repairs, I’ve never hired a professional to fix any of my gardening errors.

Yesterday I took on two home projects. One was to replace the parts inside a toilet tank. The other was to prepare the raised beds of my garden.

I thought that I’d replaced all of the parts in a toilet before, but apparently I hadn’t. Putting in a new flapper requires lifting the tank off the bowl, and I don’t remember ever doing that before. That one step almost stopped me before I got started, because the bolts connecting tank to bowl were so corroded that I had a hard time getting them off. Once I got past that problem, the actual replacement of parts was fairly straightforward. My only concern was that the project included four different threaded connections. This means that there are four places where my efforts could cause a leak. I finished the project and saw no water dripping, but I still put down hand towels all around the water closet. This morning I will check to see if any of the towels are wet. I should have checked as soon as I got out of bed, but toilet repairs kept me from my writing yesterday. I’m not going to let that happen today.

After the bathroom I moved to the garden. There I noticed that some of the 2” x 6” boards surrounding my raised beds are spongy and need to be replaced. My first inclination was to immediately drive to the lumberyard for new boards. My second was to wait until fall, and my third was wait until next spring. I decided that nothing significant could go wrong if I waited, and it would be foolish to unnecessarily expose new boards to the harsh weather of next year’s winter. Unlike a constantly running toilet, everything in a garden can wait.

Some of my first generation Asian American friends are surprised when they discover that I do many of my own home repairs. In Asia, university professors hire out. I’ve never asked my friends whether they think that professors are too important to be wasting their time on simple maintenance projects or too much in their heads to comprehend the proper use of common hand tools.

Each spring I am full of hope in terms of my yard. The grass is green, and the weeds, but for dandelions, have yet to fully emerge. I dive into yard work and optimistically think that this might be the year when a little effort in April and May will pay off come July and August.

This year, however, I had a small outdoor project to complete before I could work on the lawn, the vegetable garden, and the flower beds. I had to repair a fence that was leaning into my neighbor’s yard. My property is on a slight hill, and I assumed that gravity was pushing soil downhill and gradually tipping the fence over. My plan was to jerry-rig a pulley system between the fence and a tree in my backyard, ratchet the fence back to vertical, and then hammer in wedges behind the fence posts to force them to stand up straight. The project should have taken thirty minutes, but I conservatively planned on a full hour. I was off by four days.

The first thing that I discovered is that hammering wedges is not as easy as I thought it would be. A regular hammer didn’t do the job, so I needed to use a sledge. I don’t own a sledge hammer. I don’t remember ever needing a sledge hammer, so I reserved one from the tool collection at our public library. I have mixed feelings about the existence of a tool collection at the library, as I think that it is one more example of libraries watering down their focus on books, but this sentiment does not prevent me from checking out a tool once or twice a year.

After waiting three days for the library to email me a notice saying that the hammer was ready for me to pick up, I went there to see about the delay. The staff member at the front desk was as confused as I was, since their records listed the sledge as being available. The librarian in charge of the tools admitted that he had looked, but couldn’t find it. He brought me back to the storage room to look for myself, and I found it tucked behind a machine for thatching lawns.

I went home with the big hammer and pounded in the wedges. After finishing the task, I released the tension on the pulley system and watched the fence flop right back to its original crooked position. This made no logical sense. I started digging around the posts with a small hand spade and discovered that the problem was not soil creep against the posts, but post rot below ground level. The posts were no longer holding up the fence. If anything, the fence was holding up the posts.

I now had two choices. I could either pull out the rotted posts and replace them with new posts or I could leave the old posts in place and put in new posts alongside the old ones. I went with the second option. The soil in my yard is mostly sand, so digging post holes is usually easy. This time it was not. Tree roots and small junks of concrete that had no reason for being there made digging holes nearly impossible. My plan had been to put in three new posts, but after an hour of intense labor, I gave up after one.

Still one new sturdy post is better than none. My fence now leans less than it did, and I am confident that the whole thing won’t fall over. I already explained the situation to my neighbor. I told him that I will put in another post or two once I finish my other springtime chores, and if that doesn’t work, I’m taking the fence down.