Furrowed Brow Once More
Every year I say the same thing: next year I’ll downsize our garden, maybe grow one tomato plant and a row of peas, toss in a row of greens for salads and call it Good. And every year, as sure as the plums blossom and the nettles rise up from the dead, I haul out the old rototiller and start planting two months too early. The pea seeds are gonna rot and the lettuce won’t come up, but I’ll plant again in a couple of weeks, about when the cherries bloom. Same as last year, same as the year before, same as every year since I moved here 37 years ago.
Who’s kidding who? I can buy vegetables WAY cheaper than most of what I grow. They practically give you potatoes by the time I’m digging ours. They even taste better than my scabby ones. Corn? I did quit corn last year. But I’m thinking maybe one token row would be tasty come fall. I can grow mutant squashes here to Stanwoodopolis, but I’m not real big on squash although maybe I should reconsider seeing’s how easy they are, sort of a fruiting kudzu.
And of course it’s a battle with slugs and snails, cabbage moths and cutworms, scabs and aphids, deer and rabbits, weeds and crows. We all want to eat, I guess. When they vote me in as God, I’ll do it different. Maybe just do it like the plants, grow on sun and air and water and dirt. Us animals turned Paradise into a Jungle. Tastes good, but kind of brutal at times.
It’s a lot of work, this gardening. But then, so is shopping. Bump cars with folks in a hurry, the parking lot mayhem, self serve registers trying to find the bin number for organic cauliflower not the Monsanto cauliflower, the bag choices, the plastic store card they swipe to track your buying habits, coupons and sales gimmicks. It’s a jungle in Safeway too.
And anyway, I didn’t move to the country to watch bad TV, I hope. I don’t kid myself — I’m not growing food here so much as I’m trying to get back to some Roots. I’ll have to share it with the vermin and the predators, the pests and the worms. Like always, I’ll have to learn to live with the neighbors, two legged, four legged, no legged or practically invisible. After all, we’re all in this thing together.
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