Hope Springs Eternal

Hope Springs Eternal

Greetings gentle readers.  As I write this I am sitting in the Houston International Airport, about to depart to Mumbai, India.  What fun.  I had a choice between taking this trip or having a colonoscopy.  With the new Obama Care rules, the examination was going to be given by a boy scout, to earn a merit badge, using a garden hose and a flashlight.  I signed up for it anyway, but there was a slight snafu with the Healthcare website and I apparently enrolled to be trained as a bomb sniffing dog for Afghanistan.  That job still sounded better than making this trip to India, but since I am not limber enough to scratch behind my ears with my foot, I couldn’t pass the physical.

So, here I am at the airport.

It will take about 23 hours of flying and wait time between flights to get from Houston to Mumbai.  These long trips give me time to stop and reflect about my world.  To ponder the meaning of life.  Time to consider what is really important; what my goals and dreams are.  I could do that, but that would be perilously close to actually thinking.  So I write this crap.  I always have a thousand important things I want to accomplish that these overseas trips keep me from doing.  Like trimming my nose hair. Personal hygiene is important.  And if you have seen my nose you will appreciate that this is not an insignificant task.  But actually, I do have one serious goal that I am reminded of when watching TV.  I refer to the commercial featuring “Doug” who has fibromyalgia.  I want to slap him and get him to stop doing those commercials.  Dougie Boy,  If fibromyalgia is such a bad condition (and I am not doubting that) shouldn’t you be spending your final days with family and not shilling for a law firm so they can sue every company on the planet that has ever created dust?

But I digress.  I did manage to get one project almost completed before I left.  My wife, the fetching Mrs. Intrepid Traveler, has been trying to coax vegetables to grow in the poor soil of our garden ever since we moved to the country.  This is sandy soil and it does not exactly produce the most robust plant life, unless you count weeds.  So I, the caring, dutiful husband that I am often confused with, decided to build a raised bed garden for her. I was planning to fabricate a series of 4ft by 12ft. boxes, about a foot tall.  I would fill them with fertile garden soil that the dirt yard sells.  That was before I actually calculated how much dirt it takes to fill several 4ft by 12ft boxes.  Forget it.   It was going to cost hundreds of dollars just for dirt, and I woulda had to wheel barrow it in to fill those boxes up.

I had already built two of the raised bed frames before it occurred to me how expensive this plan was going to be. We could have fresh vegetables delivered daily by a chauffeured limousine cheaper than it was going to cost us to raise our own.  So I compromised.  I used the tractor to scoop up decent looking top soil and dumped several loads in to the raised beds.   Then I added a dozen bags of compost and peat moss to amend the soil. I tilled it in.  It looked marvelous.  I imagined juicy red tomatoes, bursting with flavor growing in tight clusters.  I envisioned onions, carrots, and potatoes virtually leaping out of the soil, just begging to picked.

Since it gets hot in our part of the country early in the year, we have to plant as soon as possible after the danger of freezes are over.  So went to the Home Improvement store (was there ever a more hopeful category of retail store?) to buy plants.  My wife had saved a gardening article giving guidance on what the best varieties of plants to buy for our area.  As usual, I forgot to bring it with me to the store.  I opted instead to buy the ones the garden center had on display.  I should have been suspicious when reading the names of some varieties.  For example:  Their Broccoli variety was named “Fat Chance”, the Cauliflower variety was  “Fugetaboutit”, and the tomato variety was “You can’t be serious”, (seemed a bit wordy to me) and the peppers offered were “You wish”.  I guess it should have been a red flag for me when reading the package’s planting label that said:  “compost pile ready”.  Some had instructions which suggested speeding up the process by just throwing the plants away immediately.  Apparently truth in labeling has come to the garden center.  However, I was undeterred.  I bought a dozen spinach plants, the variety endorsed by Popeye, collards, and several tomato plants. 

The tomatoes were guaranteed not to die within the first 48 hours, if you did not stick them in the ground.  If you really plant them, all bets are off.  I had a secondary motivation:  tomatoes are poisonous to sheep and goats, and their pen is just outside the garden.  Hmmmm…Wouldn’t it be a shame if those sheep somehow got loose in the garden and followed a trail of their feed which led to those tempting tomato plants?

I am certain every gardener feels the same optimism when doing the first planting of the year.  It is never better to be a gardener than the moment your hands scoop out the cool soil, creating a divot for the new plant to rest in.  Ah spring.  I love the smell of tilled soil in the morning.  I could almost hear a pipe and drum corps playing in the background as Mr. Douglas of Green Acres quipped about the nobleness of farming. 

Sadly, I already know the outcome.  The varmints will eat the new plants, or the dogs will decide it is the perfect spot to dig, or we will go out of town, they won’t get watered and …you know the rest.  In the end, the weeds will win.  We still want to eat healthy, but we spent all our money on the garden.  So I will be ordering our fresh veggies, to be delivered by limo.   That is actually a new business venture I plan to launch on the TV show, “Shark Tank.”  “Garden plants, you are dead to me!”