Garden Toddling Right Along

This is it; I am not, not, absolutely not going to spend one more thin dime on the garden or the plants on the front porch this year. Well, except perhaps for some more wave petunias. One can always use more wave petunias, and when the pansies give out in the front container by the mailbox, something else, besides weeds, will have to go in there. Still, it's over. I've spent a fortune, again, after swearing I wouldn't do that this year. My mother was telling me about a book she just read called the $64 tomato and damn if that's not probably about right. I bet I could eat fresh organic produce for a year on what I spend on the garden every spring. And I'm not even charging for my labor. Except I wouldn't be able to buy flowers too, so it all evens out in the end.

Actually, the vegetable garden is being peculiar this year. Either nothing has sprouted in the top half of it or I forgot to plant that half. Both explanations are mystifying and I am puzzled. I could have sworn I put in half a row of zucchini, and you know that zucchini is not shy, or difficult to grow, but there's only one kind of sad looking sprout. So I stuck a few squash seedlings from Lowes in there tonight and half heartedly planted some beet seeds; now watch, the squash and cucumbers and melons and pumpkins will all cross pollinate and produce mutant inedible fruits, like that wild yellow orb last year. Squash is promiscuous and slutty at heart and thinks nothing of intra varietal romance. And the beets? The beets won't make it. Even though for years I've been tilling and digging and adding compost & peat moss & manure & ashes &, well, just about everything short of chemicals to that soil, it's still basically the same stuff you make terra cotta pots out of, and root vegetables don't have room to form. Yet again I'm in awe at the pioneers: how the ever living fuck did they manage to scrape out a living in these here hills? This soil really only wants to grow morning glories and honeysuckle, and nobody can live on that but fairies - not the big Elven faeries with swords, either, the twee Victorian flitty variety. Even the fairies get stunted in this red clay.