It felt good to spend some serious time in the garden on Sunday, except when it didn't. After listening to an awesome lay sermon by a seminary student who is doing her internship as a chaplain at Grant Hospital, I was ready to weed and water. I'm glad there are qualified people to do that kind of work in those surroundings, and Chris is made of the right stuff. I prefer to dig weeds, thank you.
The choices I make when I play weekend farmer aren't as hard as Chris's are on a busy weekend, and my little corner of Methodistville is not a downtown trauma ward, although they are matters of life and death. Of plants, mostly wild, wanton, unruly ones. With growth exploding around me, I did some aggressive selecting to keep the population under control. It's a garden, not a wilderness. Starting with the perennial beds that are most visible, I attacked the dandelions first.
I have nothing against dandelions personally, but they are so prolific and invasive that I singled them out for elimination. I know it's not fair. Other wild ones will get the same treatment during different phases of the growing season, when wave upon wave of wild flora do their thing for the betterment of the species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, and kingdom. My work is just beginning. And yes, I do have control issues. The thistles will be next to feel my wrath.
There's another wild herbal thang growing like crazy in a raised bed right by the patio, threatening to crowd out some new groundcovers we just stuck in the ground late last summer. The neophytes are coming up nicely, but this opportunistic weed saw an opening and is about to take over, and I can't let it. The competition would make it difficult for the new guys to get established, so I will have to be vigilant in giving them some lebensraum.
Despite the necessary-evil side of weeding, I admit that it's satisfying work. You get to see the results immediately, and waking up the next morning to a neat landscape is easy on the eyes. It gets a little tiring in the lower back after a while, so I try to break up the day by doing something else. Psychically as well as orthopedically, planting provides just the right balance. So every hour or so I took breaks to spade and rake smooth a couple of beds for vegetables.
That flat of seedlings I bought last week probably thought I'd forgotten all about them. By the end of the day, in the triangular bed nearest the house there were 32 little plants (8 cabbage, 8 cauliflower, 8 spinach, 8 mesclun) watered-in and looking perky. In the trapezoidal bed next to them, there are 300 onion sets in three rows around the perimeter, leaving a triangle in the middle for something else, I'm not sure what yet. Maybe snow peas? Do we still have time to plant snow peas before it gets too warm?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment