Garden
First Country Garden
However, living in suburbia cramped my style. The worms, for instance, insisted on crawling out of their burlap-covered boxes and drying up on the bedroom floor. (With no garage, I had to house them inside during winter.) The raised beds were a success, but I spent a fortune at the lumberyard since I had no access to scrap wood. My homegrown vegetables were so extraordinarily expensive that I may as well have shipped them into Missouri from the West Coast.
Having acquired a few acres in the country, I looked forward to expanding my operations. While planning the garden, my husband graciously offered to get it ready for me. I welcomed his chivalry. I’d always spaded the backyard plot and didn’t relish the blisters.
He wasn’t about to get blisters either, though. He got out the tractor and hooked up the plow. As I watched with growing concern, he plowed and plowed and plowed. Finally, I yelled, “What do you expect me to do, feed the whole county?”
“It’s only 200 feet by 50,” he yelled back.
Only 200 by 50? My largest garden, ever, had been 10 by 12. Overwhelmed, I mentally listed all the local hospitals and nursing homes that might be able to use the extra food we’d have. At summer’s end, with the freezer not yet full, I sheepishly told my husband that we needed to extend the boundaries for next year. Of courseI’ll have to order more seed, too. Sowing the seed has always been a joyous experience for me. I imagine myself a benevolent goddess creating a miracle. All I do is place this tiny kernel into the earth, keep it moist, let the sun shine on it, and poof! Before summers end, it gives back food to eat. I never cease to be amazed by this magic. So, it was with a spirit of light heartedness that I distributed the seeds in my first country garden.“I don’t have one,” I answered.
“How do you know the rows will be straight?” he asked, with such a serious demeanor, you’d have thought he was discussing our last will and testament.
“I just start a foot from the edge, walk alongside it until I come to the other end and then walk about a foot apart from the first row,” I said.
“Yeah, but the ends will get crookeder and crookeder,” he pointed out.
“So, who cares if they’re not perfectly straight,” I argued. “Besides, when everything grows up and gets leaves, they’ll be so close together that no one can tell if the rows are straight anyway.”
“Aren’t you leaving three feet between rows?” he asked.
“Three feet? And waste all that space? You don’t need three feet just to walk down a row.”
“Then how are you going to weed?” he persited.
“Like I’ve always done, over many weeks, with lots of muscle, and just pulling them out.”
“Nope,” he declared with a maddening air of masculine finality. “With a garden of this size, you have to use a tiller.”
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