Rochester resident Matt Knutson is the communications and events director for United Way of Olmsted County.

“Those look like weeds,” I told my wife after examining our garden. It was less of a criticism and more of a fact. After planting our garden weeks ago, we’ve done little more than look out the window, acknowledge the rain is doing its job, and returned to our everyday business. The crops appear to be growing (at least the ones we can see), so I’m sure in a few weeks we’ll be enjoying a bountiful harvest.

I suppose bountiful might be a bit of a stretch. Only half of our small garden is planted, and its rows are filled with a variety of vegetables that we barely recall. You could say we didn’t think this through, and you would be correct. When we moved into our house last year, the garden was ignored because the previous owners, likely shortly before they left, filled the garden with tree branches. Planting season had certainly passed by the time I had the tree limbs removed, but I made a commitment to Sera that this year we would put it to good use.

Never one to break a commitment to my wife, a few weeks ago we wandered the aisles of a garden center and she gleefully picked one of everything for us to bring home. There might have been directions on which of these plants grew best in sunlight, shade, how deep they should be planted and how much space they needed, but we paid little attention to those instructions. Instead, on a busy evening several days after purchase, we planted them in the garden, sprayed them down with a hose, and looked forward to the fruits, or should I say vegetables, of our minimal labor.

We didn’t plant any weeds, so neither of us are quite sure what they think they are doing in our garden. Do they not know that they are unwelcome? I fought them tirelessly last year to keep them at bay in my yard, and now for some unknown reason they think they can take refuge in my garden. One day, hopefully in the near future, they will regret taking root in our fertile soil. Until then though, they’ll continue to compete against our precious crops for the nutrients of life.

Sure, it would be easy for one of us to weed the garden. We just aren’t the kind of people who want to weed the garden. I was hoping Sera would be into it, but she seems much more enthralled with the idea of a garden rather than doing the work to maintain it. Also, it would appear that neither of us has the patience to wait for the vegetables to actually be ripe, so this whole garden thing is seeming more like binge-watching a series on Netflix that isn’t very good, but you’ve already watched so many episodes that you feel like you have to finish it.

Perhaps my lackadaisical attitude toward our garden is coming from my wife’s shifting purpose for our crops. Originally we envisioned enjoying our produce with a meal on our deck as the sun sets on another day of marital bliss. Sera’s purpose for the garden has expanded beyond feeding ourselves; she plans to use our hard-earned vegetables in a food processor for our baby girl to sample. Can you believe that? I’m not waiting weeks, perhaps months, for something I’m not even that interested in, that now I might not even get to enjoy. Thus is the life of a father.

I will be honest — there is a very real possibility that none of these plants will yield crops. Our green thumbs faded to yellow long ago, and I wouldn’t be surprised that after the casualties we lose after weeding the garden, there won’t be much left to enjoy. Still, it is important that we continue onward. Last week I wrote about growth and how being intentional in how you grow is important. It is perhaps hypocritical to share that mindset and then write about the neglect in our garden, but there’s a caveat here that is completely valid in my point of view. Sera and I never wanted to be expert gardeners, so we’re not spending our time developing those skills. With a nearly five-month-old baby at home, we’d much rather devote our time to developing our baby girl and our parenting skills so we can reap the rewards of her talents in the form of early retirement. Perhaps in all of our daughter’s success, she’ll hire a gardener for us.