Now that the weather has finally become co-operative, I find myself walking almost everywhere, frequently with a kid or two. Usually, those children are mine.

All of this foot-pounding dovetails nicely with one of my other favorite summer pastimes. No, not baseball, which is in my considered opinion, one of the greatest sleep-aids yet invented. I can hear Daily Star Editor Sam Pollak clutch his chest even as I type this.

Apart from giving Mr. P palpitations, one of my most beloved hot weather pastimes is gawking at other people’s gardens. Once I thought this was because I wanted to be a gardener myself.

With age comes greater wisdom, which makes up for all of the gray hair and saggy skin. What I have finally learned is that I am a great appreciator of gardens but shouldn’t be responsible for actual patches of dirt.

I should have known that I wasn’t cut out for the dirt-under-my-nails life when I was double-digging a planting bed a decade ago.

Double-digging, for those who’ve never done such a thing, involves digging a trench, then digging another trench right beside it. The soil from the second trench gets tossed in the first. The soil from the third trench gets tossed in the second, etc.

Allegedly, this creates a well-tilled bed that any plant would dearly love.

In my experience, all this created was a back-breaking realization that life is futile and gardening doubly so. All that month, I kept having visions of Sisyphus and his rock, which might have cleared up if I’d had the good sense to put on a hat.

Still, I persevered. The finished bed was, in fact, stunning. Lush and healthy plants thrived, mostly.

About six weeks in, however, I noticed something.

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Not only did my chosen flora love this soil, every weed in a four-county radius did, too. I would spend hours on my knees pulling that noxious greenery out _ only to have to do it again days later.

About the time I started to resent nature’s bounty in general, winter came. Slowly, I spent that entire season forgetting how little joy I got from the garden.

By springtime, with its exuberant flowers, I was ready to go once more into the breach and had convinced myself that this year would be different.

It wasn’t.

That has been the cycle of my gardening life: hope, followed by futility, followed by resentment, followed by forgetting. They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results. This is the summer that I have decided to stop the insanity. My garden, such as it is, will not win any awards this year. The weeds will be plucked only if they ruin my view of my favorite few plants. The rest of the yard will be a great experiment in Darwinism. I am completely OK with this.

Instead of caring about my own garden, I stroll around and sigh over other folks’ yards. (Confidential to the gardeners at the corner of Irving Place and East Street: You are doing an awesome job and I covet your perennials.) During one of these walks it dawned on me how much gardening and parenting are similar.

So much of what any parent does is the equivalent of moving dirt mere inches from where it started. Which is about like what it’s like to live with an infant, when all of your hard labor won’t even begin to show fruits for months.

But _ thank whatever God you choose to thank _ we are past that particular bit of double-digging. Both of our flowers are to the point where, if not in full bloom, are at least leafing out. You can start to see the outlines of what sort of plant they might be.

What’s nearly constant now is the weeding. It can wear you down. Each time I ask the girl to pick up her dirty socks, which could overrun the house if left unchecked, or hang up her jacket, I’m pulling up yet another dandelion.

The problem is that there are just so many dandelions to choose from. It’s hard to know which particular weeds are apt to spread if left unchecked and which are almost attractive once you view them in a more flattering light. Which weeds do you need to pluck in order to enjoy the plant they are obscuring?

The Boy, for reasons unknown to us, will eat almost anything vaguely food-like that gets dropped on the floor, including cat kibble and pea-sized bits of clay. Yes, we do try to stop him. He’s faster than you think.

In addition, he has also taken to not eating three-quarters of the food we serve for dinner. There are moments when I am half-tempted to serve his meal on the floor just to cut out the middleman. Should I just wait until an inevitable change of season kills this weed? Or should I root it out now?

The same can be asked of the Diva’s new insistence on referring to her bottom as her "booty." I cringe every time I hear her say it. I do the same with her other new verbal tick, which is to put the phrase "goo-goo" before words. Like, in the mornings, she’ll say, "Where are my goo-goo socks?" or "What happened to my goo-goo jacket?" It sounds minor but, trust me, can drive you around the bend after a few minutes.

She knows this, of course. The roots of this weed are deeply sunk in each child’s core. This desire to irritate the stuffing out of your parents is the sort of horticultural blight that you can never really destroy without industrial-strength herbicide that kills all of the other greenery around it. But do you snap the flower off of this particular plant and wait for an all-new bud to form elsewhere? Or is discretion the better part of gardening? Is it better to embrace the weed you know?

Adrienne Martini, author of "Hillbilly Gothic," is freelance writer, instructor at the State University College at Oneonta and Hartwick College, mom to Maddy and Cory and wife to Scott.