If you're not a gardener, or if you're rich, you may think gardening is all about crouching on your knees and leaning over into a green maze, plucking a weed; selecting a handful of leafy lettuce; tugging a carrot up by its top. Would you recognize what I did yesterday as gardening?
It started with old fence wire, pliers, and wire cutters. I have some used rolls of fence wire left over from when we took down a fence, and I use it to fashion trellises. Yesterday I made a round and an oblong one that will support two plantings of cucumbers, then I made an open-ended oval to support lima beans. To anchor them I scavenged four of the 6-foot metal stakes they use for barbed wire fences, and I hammered these into the ground with this big--and extremely heavy--stake pounder device. Then I cut little pieces of wire and firmly joined the fence wire to the stakes.
Before 'planting' these devices, I dug up weeds and smoothed the soil in the beds. So that's the shape of my garden right now--metal, and dirt.
Under the first two I planted cucumber seeds--flat, pointed slivers about a half-inch long. (I would have planted lima beans too, but I forgot to order them. Coming soon.) So what's the purpose of all this complex apparatus?
Ah, but that's what makes me human. I can look out and see only disturbed dirt, but I can look back and remember the sheer bulk of plant matter these tiny seeds might produce. Lima beans have huge leaves and the vines get big really fast; when weighted down with water, they can topple a puny trellis in the slightest of winds. And we don't get slight winds here, not very often--we get gale-force winds. In fact, as the vines grow, I may consider adding another couple of supports.
So that's gardening--a lot of labor up front, and then if you're lucky, you spend time on your knees leaning over into a green maze, selecting a handful of leafy lettuce.
No comments:
Post a Comment