Gardens are Damn Strange Things

Every year we plant a large 2000 square ft garden, both for entertainment and for the great food we get from it. Yes, it is also exercise and a hobby, and I could throw in education. This year we have had all the above attributes but the last one is most noticeable.

In this world or Perma-culture agriculture and of great pontificators about the need to grow ones own food, there are always some things that seem to get left out. I don't know how many times I have seen presentations, or read articles where some affectionato of gardening goes to great lather about how one just chucks some seeds in the ground and out come all these great veggies---I hate the word veggies. Too yuppieish and herbal-kerbal cute.

It always seems so easy with the tidy raised beds and magical watering systems, and lovely people tripping ever-so quaintly through their agro-land. They even have these gardens in cities where they claim they can feed every last starving soul in Detroit by just digging up the old fallen slums. Makes me sick. (Did you know the the people of China now tell their children to finish their food because of all the starving people  in Detroit? )

It is just so cute with some trendy, gentrified , upper-middle class yahoo cleanly picking a nice cluster of bug free kale. I will admit, and the photo above will confirm, I too am attractive, content and very full of myself over this one lousy tomato that at first viewing might feed half of Chicago. There is more to the story, and this is the important stuff.

Gardens don't just turn out perfectly, you know, with every thing planted being robust, bug free, fat and sassy, and packed with dripping nutrition. One can bust an ass only to find out that while the carrots looked down-right powerful, as they did this year, once pulled the little sons-a-bitches are about an inch long, pudgy, rather worm eaten and in some cases rotting. Oh, real nice stems and leaves but not jack for carrots. Not so hot if carrots were to be a feature.

The red potatoes planted in March are kick-ass, big and solid and, I must say, tasty, if not nutty in tone, not pretentious but muscular. However, the Russets planted a month later had a period of three weeks were the rain did not fall, so these suckers are all small, puny and if we depended on them to get through the winter we would be cold dead by February---just like the Irish in 1829.

The fricking broccoli did this thing where the plants get massive, but have they put out a single flower head, that would be the part we eat, no! It is like global warming has shut them down. Never saw it before and it sucks. George H. Bush loved broccoli. He would have been depressed to the point of quitting---oh shit a missed opportunity.

The point is one can think gardening is easy and fun and you can get all the food you want right in your lovely mid-western backyard. That is bull shit---actually I could use some for the garden. Only when folks have to raise their own food will they find out how difficult it is  and how Mother Nature is really a bitch at times. We do have some good things like that tomato---and others.