I want to dress for yardwork as if I didn't have to DO yardwork.
Joe's old shirts are wearing out. They're faded and fraying and the buttons keep falling off. They have been the mainstay of my yardwork wardrobe and now I have to look around for something else. Microsoft caught me
doing the yard one day (photo from bing, left, or maybe it's Google Earth). See the straw hat, the chambray shirt, and the sweat pants. Yes, that little blob. That's a straw hat, chambray shirt, and -- oh, just trust me on this.
We had a gardener for awhile but he and his crew got very sloppy, mowing off sprinkler heads and then offering to fix them for an additional charge. They always wore white dress shirts and Dickies work pants. For a while I asked him to just take care of the front lawn, but as time went on I decided I could use the exercise, share the activity with my boy, and [the primary reason] put the money towards ever-increasing health insurance premiums. So I "downsized" him.
With characteristic ignorance, I figured I could take care of the front as well as the back yard. Why not? He only took about 30 minutes once a week, less in winter, not at all if his scheduled work day fell on a holiday. Me, the one who doesn't even like houseplants. I'm allergic to silk flowers and plastic ficus trees. My idea of great lawns are those made entirely of apple-green crushed rock that you see in senior communities, punctuated by a yucca and a boulder. Plus maybe a big tyrannosaur welded of old tractor seats and scrap iron, a couple of colorful pinwheels turning cheerfully in the afternoon breeze, and seven ceramic gnomes in charming Eastern European farm garb-- but nothing requiring clipping, mowing, fertilizing, mulching or water.
So with nary a thought for equipment, chemicals, seed or the toads hibernating under the shrubs, my first concern was, "What am I going to wear?" This was not merely a bit of feminine frivolity. More than once my DN (dear neighbor) popped his head over the back yard fence to check on things when I was out there in my nightgown. When one is out in the front yard, sweating like a sow in a sauna, taking all morning to accomplish what the gardener used to do in half an hour, one hopes the neighbors will not call the sheriff to report a suspicious-looking bag-lady digging around the community. But I knew I'd never look like Martha Stewart culling carrots on cable tv.
I still have some of my husband's Hazmat B suits. They are made of Tyvek, that white plastic that they make indestructible envelopes from. I considered suiting up like Squishy the Marshmallow Girl but decided I'd rather not.
Garden shirts were an easy choice. Joe's solid color shirts fit me like smocks. (I made his plaid flannel shirts and old jeans into a quilt.
I just love it. No Goodwill would have wanted his old oil-soaked work jeans, so they form a sturdy backing and make the "rag" edging you see here. When I toss this quilt over my son, I tell him it's a hug from his daddy. Thanks for letting me mention it.)
I'd love to be able to dress like the menopausal matron in the Jack In The Box commercial. A casual but chic floral dress and professional hair. Check out her pink high heeled pumps: you could aerate the lawn with a couple of paces, then relax on a lounge with a smoothie. My cousin Donna learned not to wear flipflops on the farm when a cow stepped on her foot, but I find flipflops very useful in the backyard for collecting goathead tacks in the soft foam (and then sitting there extracting them so they don't get distributed all over the yard). I have to be covered up because I get blotchy and itchy in the sun, and the clothes have to bear up against rose thorns, cattails and evergreen spikes, mud, knees on concrete and the occasional abrasion when I fall off the ladder. I try to be cute with my breast-cancer-pink gloves, but I'd never wear one of my outfits to, say, a teacher appointment or the grocery store. Maybe to a dogfight. Did I mention they can't cost anything?
Some days it takes a lot of mental resolve and promises of Dr. Pepper to get me out the door, especially when it's 102*F. Do you think I would like gardening more if I didn't look like a refugee? Would I dread it less if I didn't give a rip what the neighbors thought? How do YOU handle this?
I was complaining about the cats messing around in my garden and compost pile, and my DSIL (dear sister-in-law) told me to go to Starbucks and ask for their grounds to put on the garden. 
