The Top-Secret Garden

Actually, it's not so much of a secret, mostly due to the blood-curdling shrieks of pain.

Let me tell you about my day.

Plan A for this year, along with the Painting Party (more tomorrow) is to move my garden from its current chain-link enclosure (which I built, and built very stoutly indeed, during my marriage to create a dog-free zone for growing vegetables) across the yard to a space next to the grape trellis, and build a patio where the garden is. That in itself will be an interesting project - I sunk the fenceposts in to the ground in pads of cement to well below the frost line...well, that's a subject for another post.

So here's how things went.

• I walked to the hardware store - three long blocks away - to rent a tiller for the new garden space. I found a major drawback to globalization; tiller manufacturers assume that anyone with enough money to buy or rent a tiller will also be able to hire an immigrant laborer to run it. Since most immigrants are of fairly short stature, they make the handles on the tillers the perfect height - for someone who's 5'7. So I had to push the tiller - basically an engine driving couple of blades, perched way high above two tiny wheels, with a center of gravity to high the Beijing Acrobats would have to work hard to get anything done. I pushed this contraption the three long blocks to my house, bent over like an arthritic. By the time I got home, I was pretty well exhausted already.
• But not for long! Once engine began put-putting its mighty throaty chorus, the testosterone perked me back to life. I started breaking sod, just like my great grandparents. Until I ran over piece of chickenwire that had grown into the sod after my trellis project. The thin wire got hopelessly tangled in the churning blades.
• It took me a while to find my wire-cutter; little boys love playing with wire cutters, but not so much with remember where they put them last winter.
• I came out to cut the wires out of the blades. I leaned down to tip the tiller back, I inadvertently rested my forearm on the cylinder head.

  Insert sizzling sound.

  Discerning readers will note that this is where the "blood-curdling shrieks" in the intro come in. My fore-arm now sports one two-inch long blister that looks like an albino Sei whale broaching the surface, and two more that are six-sided bas-reliefs of the header bolts that put them there. I feel like I've been branded by the "Bar Hardware" ranch.

• However, I got things untangled, finished the new garden, tilled the old garden (the better to shovel out the dirt and replace it with sand, my pretty), and even went out front and plowed up a part of the boulevard to put in a decorative flower arrangement along my front walk.
• Walk the tiller back to the hardware store. It's no more fun going back.
• Naturally, since I impulsively plowed up my front walk, I needed to have some plants to put there - that, or have a community mud plot for the coming season. The local "Friends" Quaker school was finishing its annual plant sale today - a neighborhood institution, these days. Now, I have no problems with "Friends" and their beliefs, but the school itself is particularly aggressive about peddling their near-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil brand of pacifism around the neighborhood. And they - the school and the plant sale - draw a crowd that visibly thinks Dennis Kucinich is almost too far to the right (and the bumper stickers on the neighborhood streets bore this out). However, the last two hours of the sale everything is half off - which I think is a nice compromise between principle and value. Got salsa fixins (16 tomato plants, four kinds of peppers, onions) and perennials for the front (to mix with transplants of the hostas that overrun my yard), all for under $20.
• Back to the hardware store for Miracle-Gro.
• Home to see every robin in the neighborhood congregated on the plowed patches, guzzling the junebug larvae that I'd turned over while plowing. Good riddance, and thanks, feathered friends.
• Too tired to plant. Going out to cook hot dots and ponder the perfect hexagonal symmetry of blisters 2 and 3.

Updates as the situation warrants.

Posted by Mitch at May 9, 2004 04:20 PM