Friday, August 8, 2008

Gardens and Broken Dirt

"I understand your want to grow your own stuff and all, but do you really need 80 pounds of pea gravel and 2 more cubic feet of dirt?" Joe asked, as we stood next to the bags of garden soil at Home Depot. I was on a mission to finish planting in the planter boxes that Dad had helped me build for the patio, and this mission was being impeded.

I just looked at him.

"I don't know if the Cougar is going to be able to handle the weight. You could have mentioned something about this and I would have brought the truck."

He stopped suddenly, mid lift, and I immediately thought that perhaps he'd injured himself. After the great lawn mower lifting incident of 2007 that resulted in a pinched nerve or two in my back, I had reason to wonder.

"I broke the dirt," he said.

"You broke the dirt?"

"I broke the dirt."

"How do you break dirt?"

He pushed the flatbed cart back to expose a small pile of dirt on the ground, and a large hole in the seam in the bag.

"You broke the dirt."

"I did."

We burst into a fit of giggles. "Shhhh," he said, "They're going to see us and know I broke the dirt!" He hurriedly scooted the bag off the flatbed, selected a new one, and lifted it on there and started pushing the cart away, leaving the pile of dirt.

We got the dirt, unbroken this time, and the bags of pea gravel, and hauled them back to my house. Indeed, the Cougar was sitting a bit lower.

What resulted was this:


A new home for my two little tomato plants, 8 pepper plants, and 4 garlic plants. Yes, I realize that the cage for the one tomato plant is very large. It has big expectations. I have 3 very green, tiny, tomatoes hanging off that plant. I keep trying to coax them into turning red, but it's not working. I'm pretty sure my peppers are toast, and I really didn't realize that garlic was really that high maintenance of something to grow.

As you can also see, I'm having a small explosion of opal basil, Italian oregano, and chives in my herb garden. I also have parsley and thyme in there too.

That night, as we were unloading the rocks and the dirt from the Cougar to the patio, in very fast fading light, I asked Joe, "When you said earlier that you understand my need to grow my own stuff...do you really understand my need to grow my own stuff?"

He looked at me and said, "I haven't got a freakin' clue."

I smiled, "Yeah...that's what I thought."




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