Planting my own garden this year is my way of staking my own claim, marking out a somewhat reluctant commitment to this complicated physical and emotional space. I’m anticipating the all-too-familiar anxiety of the prolonged job hunt, compounded by the presence of a pressing timeline of bills. So my garden is a way of grounding me...and it is very satisfying work, which is funny because as a teenager I found it tedious and uninteresting. It’s a fairly uncomplicated task, which is a relief in many ways:
You dig and you sweat and you are sore for a few days, turning red clay the consistency of dried mortar to the consistency of week old grits ( a vast improvement) . And you draw out some plans and make a few decisions about what you can plant with the space that you have available. Then you take yourself down to the Pickens Feed and Seed, buy 800 pounds of cow shit, limestone, bone and blood meal (which you carefully avoid reading the label of), and all your seeds. You have trouble choosing seeds when there are fifty different varieties of EVERYTHING to choose from, all sitting up on the shelf behind the counter in big coffee tins saying “Pick Me!” You humor the old man who is humoring you as you ask silly questions about how tall your trellises need to be for Mountain Lake Poles in comparison with your traditional runners. Then you spend a day mixing in the manure and other lovelies and are sore as hell again (but not as sore). And you spend another day in a perpetual squat, mashing the seeds into your mounds one by one. You build your trellises if you need them and then you wait until the bugs start nibbling on your plants at which point you concoct some organic (and therefore pretty much ineffective) spray and face the fact that you can eat the bugs’ leftovers. And low and behold come late June, you’ve got more vegetables than you can give away. Voila!
Well, it’s not all waiting, per se. I weeded today, though I wasn’t wearing my contacts at the time and I think I accidentally plucked a few zucchini sprouts. I further wasted time by squishing a few roly-poly bugs...now that is additive-free farming right there. And I haven’t built my trellises yet, but I drew up the design and just have to go to the lumber yard and pick up some seven-foot poles.
Anyway, I feel good about the whole thing, my little fuck you to Monsanto. I’m reading The Essential Agrarian Reader, which talks about corporate farming both at home and abroad as the most successful (and therefore destructive) colonial endeavor of the 20th century. And the only lofty ideal of this Empire is money. I guess you could argue that money is the heart and soul of all colonial endeavors, but at least in the past it has been poorly disguised with aims of socio-cultural influence or (in our current quagmire) democracy. I’ve decided I could become a Wendell Berry fan. I’ve never been able to get through his fiction, but I did enjoy The Country of Marriage and I really like his essays. Meanwhile, Barbara Kingsolver has a new book out, but I’m not sure I want to read it. She’s so damn self-righteous these days. Reading her essays on sustainability in the face of microbe extinction is one thing, but reading what appears to be a Kingsolver version of Little House on the Prairie... I mean, why does she have to be so admirable, making the rest of us feel like shit. I never thought I’d have anything bad to say about Babs, but it gets on my nerves.
Anyway....
This is the garden from afar.
a little closer....
and there we have it, professionally labeled.
I find that old beer bottles make good markers.
These are the accidental squash. What I think happened is that a dried out squash gourd from last summer somehow got buried during the plowing process. They are kind of in the way of my nice neat rows, but I think I am going to leave them. If they are from last year, there is a good chance that they might be a funky hybrid this year. For example, if you have Zucchini, butternut squash, pumpkins, and summer squash in close proximity, they'll most likely cross-pollinate. It's fine for that year's yield, but if you save seeds for the next year, you'll get all sorts of funky-looking squashes. Kinda like a mystery-flavored Dum-Dum.
This is a zucchini bud up close, nice and fuzzy.
I thought this was pretty...a blurry pea-sprout.
A lone bean sprout. I actually tried to eat one of these, thinking it would taste like bean sprouts, and it just tasted like grass. I just love beans. It's like the bean pokes his little head out into the air and then pukes itself into existence. I love it!
Here's Daddy on his new tractor. The old one died a while back, but our next door neighbor (or one of the various people who live in his house) knows how to fix lawn mowers and so we gave it to him and low and behold, he was outside riding it yesterday. Riding it hard, too. It kept backfiring and the dogs got really nervous. We have the weirdest neighbors ever. There's Tony, who has started painting porcelain baby dolls and selling them on Ebay. And then there's the sex offender who was charged in 1987 for "lewd acts upon a minor," whatever that means. He does sheet rock for a living and my lovely father is going to hire him to do the sheet rock upstairs. Sheesh!
Here are our peppers and chilies which won't fit anywhere else.
The house from the back. I'm upset that the wisteria on the kennel doesn't bloom anymore. I always thought they were magical.
Here are the fruit trees and berry bushes. The blueberries are always fine, but the plum and apple trees mostly produce fruit-shaped clumps of Japanese beetles. It's a shame really. I love plums.
My Crocs getting a good wash down after a hard day's work.
