Before you read any further thinking this will be highly inappropriate, I just wanted to let you know that there won’t be anything obscene. Sorry folks, it’s about exactly what it says—garden hoes and stereos.

Summer is the perfect time to embark on new projects and listen to a ridiculous amount of radio music until your ears hurt. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), I was able to do both tasks.

Let’s talk about the hoes first, or a.k.a. The Amazing Garden Project of Summer 2009. My brother decided to move back home temporarily over the summer while my mom was away for about a month. Just for some background information, my mother possibly has the blackest thumb, ever.

Over the years, our yard has turned into a “zen garden.” Sure, it might sound cool, but when you only have pebbles or rocks aligning the paths and those ultra-sturdy bushes and trees that are all the same green color, it can get kind of boring.

Furthermore, there are these three semi-circle slots in my backyard that have become known as the “circles of death.” No matter what we tried to plant in those areas, all the vegetation eventually withered away.

So, my brother and I decided to splash some color into the dull gray-green mix and plant some new flowers, bushes and trees in all your favorite colors of the rainbow. We went with some Bada Bing (that is its real name) and geraniums in the front yard, some Blue Victoria and Cosmos on the side, both of which I highly recommend, and we replaced some of the rock areas with Red Tip Photinias and hibiscus bushes.

This summer, everything was going to change. My brother and I fixed up the irrigation system by digging this almost one-yard tunnel underground using hoes and other various gardening tools. We connected pipes from our sprinklers to the circles of death via the tunnel. That was probably our most difficult endeavor, but hey, at least our skin was covered with a nice mud treatment.

So what do the garden hoes have to do with stereos? Well, we hooked up our boom box so that we could listen to the radio while we were working. What I find to be so true is that music really does bring back memories. This summer’s songs were 3OH!3’s “Don’t Trust Me” (which I find slightly offensive with its Helen Keller reference, or am I just getting too old?), “Love Game” by Lady Gaga and “I Gotta Feeling” by The Black Eyed Peas. In fact, these songs are all overplayed. Even on my road trip, the Canadian radio was filled with “Helen Kellers” and “tonight’s gonna be a good nights.”

But isn’t that what defines a summer song? Overplayed, addictively catchy and way too mainstream. By next spring, all of these songs will seem old, but when I hear them on the radio again, my mind will blossom with geraniums, Cosmos and those oh-so-cool-sounding Bada Bings.