I don't know about ya'll but I started my celebration early. I spent the weekend with earth in my hair and lodged under my finger nails and ground into my carpets . I was one earthy chick and not "earthy" in lets-break-into-groups-and-talk-about-our-periods-and- then-make-home-made-kotex-out-of-old-socks way that's so popular with the kids today . I was in the shower all damn weekend. Getting down with Mother Gaia is a dirty business.
I smelled good though. I was in the front yard after work on Monday and I could smell my new dirt. I hope the neighbors like the eu de par-fum of fresh soil. In my world it brings to mind honeysuckle and happy cows and baby goats and hope and bumble bees. In reality "fresh country air" smells like dung. My dirt smells like a scratch and sniff ad for California cows.
It's not a big garden. It's really an itty, bitty little thing. I'm sure it's over planted and I know there is some sort of established pattern or order that the experienced gardener instinctively plants his seedlings in as to guarantee a good harvest, but I just sort of tried to keep the varieties together until I began to run out of space and my shoulders started to hurt; And then I was just happy the stragglers got into place. And when I say "stragglers" I mean the eggplants. I don't even eat eggplants. Alphagal has been living eggplant free too, I found out, next year she gets her three year cup cake, in a few months I get my life time pass to the Golden Corral desert kiosk. So I don't know what's going to happen with the eggplants. Maybe I'll hold back the "organic" fungicide/insecticide at that end of the garden. With my luck I'll get a bumper crop of eggplants and all my green peppers will get eaten by moles or voles or whatever eats vegetables. Maybe deer. Tough, inner-city deer. It's not going to be bugs though damn it. I'm on the list for Bug bags at Home Depot and I all ready dosed my little friends with the "organic" insecticide.
It says it's "organic" but it could be malathion. Malathion is "organic" compared to some of the stuff I looked at. One suggested that prospective users of child bearing age wear appropriate protection while reading the directions and really, should just look elsewhere for pest control, and that fertile women of child bearing age should not even know the product is on the market and if users have children in the home, they should just give up hope for grandchildren and all users should be using a birth control method they had confidence in before exposing themselves to the spray. Another suggested that the end users no longer fertile or outside of their child bearing years not fraternize with fertile women and anyone of child bearing age for twenty-four to seventy-two hours post exposure.
And that was just the stuff they had a eye level. The really kinky stuff you had to ask for staff assistance to get at. The product I bought for my vegetables is more or less not all poisonous, although it does promises to be both an effective deterrent as well as being able to kill just about everything with an exoskeleton.
The shit I bought for my rose bush must actually work. I had to sign a HIPPA waiver and give my doctors name and number and I still can't pick it up for five days so I can have time cool off and really think about what my actions will mean to the aphid community and the ground water of the entire eastern seaboard. Did I mention that last year I got two blossoms? The eastern seaboard can just invest in bottled water.
True organic gardening is for folks whose heads are just not in the game or rich hippies with MBAs who are in the game who can afford to plant three acres of cabbage to net four heads per acre and the gall to charge $143.50 per surviving cabbage head to other rich hippies. I'm using an "organic" poison. I have eight feet of air-able land and I planted two tomato plants, this year I would like to net more than one tomato for my troubles.
I planted more than just the grape and Goliath tomatoes, I have slicing cucumbers, straight and crooked beck yellow squash, green sweet peppers, black beauty egg plants and collard greens.
So go forth today and sniff some dirt. The good stuff smells like happy cows.
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