Farmers all over this county are grabbing their tools and heading out to the south 40 to plow, and row the soil before planting the coming year’s crops.
Unlike my dad, I’m not a farmer. I don’t own a horse or plow, and our house sits in a subdivision, not on 40 but on slightly less than one acre. It’s not to say I don’t like vegetables, I do. There’re just a couple of things about growing them that bugs me – all the work and all the bugs.
There’s nothing better than corn cooked on the grill, cherry tomatoes eaten (or thrown at your unsuspecting brothers) by the handfuls, baby carrots, and fried green tomatoes. These are just a few of the vegetables Dad grew in his garden.
We spent seven magical years growing up on Flamingo, but there were some times that weren’t so magical – the time we spent working in Dad’s garden. How he could call it “his” garden none of us understood.
My three brothers and I used the big red tiller to plow and, afterwards, spread fertilizer and lime. It was us that dug rows, planted all the seeds, pulled all the weeds, picked everything and struggled to carry the full baskets to the house. This continued for nine months each of those seven years we lived on Flamingo. I swore I’d never set foot in a garden again.
Now that I’m a grandparent, I find a lot of things have changed. This is the first year we have a garden in the backyard, but true to my promise so many years ago, my feet aren’t the ones in it. I can truthfully say I haven’t set a foot in the garden. The feet are a good deal smaller and connected to our two granddaughters, Little One and Sweet Caroline.
The Wife and I thought it would be good to teach them how to grow vegetables. I just had to get rid of all the work associated with plowing up and planting a garden, maintaining and picking it, and all those pesky bugs. Can’t have our little darlings bitten by anything other than kiss bugs, now can we?
My solution to avoid the garden woes of my youth was rather simple. Simply write a check — or checks. Seems the older I get that has been the solution to a lot of my problems. Want the grass and bushes cut, but don’t want to do them? Write a check.
Since retiring from the fire department, The Wife doesn’t want me to climb ladders anymore, not even to clean out the gutters. So what do I do? Write a check.
House needs painting, trees need to be cut down, or super-duper best sandbox in the world needs to be built – all are completed effortlessly by Yours Truly and his handy dandy checkbook. So when asked if we were going to have a garden this year, I did a quick check to see if I had any checks left and then said yes.
Best Friend Mitch came over and built frames for two raised beds for our garden. Each was about two feet tall, four feet across, and eight feet long. When finished, I wrote him a check that he promptly gave back saying, “Your friendship is payment enough.” Then I ordered a special soil mixture from our local nursery.
Soon three huge bags of the soil were delivered by forklift to our backyard and dumped into the frames. I was handed a bill so I hugged the man, said he was now my friend, added that should be payment enough, and handed the bill back. He was not amused. I had to write him a check.
Next, I wrote a check for the best weed prevention fabric known to man. A lot of the work us kids did in my dad’s garden was weed eradication, and the use of the fabric guaranteed there would be none in ours. After a quick walkthrough of the garden center of the giant hardware store with the orange roof, I came away with one less check in my checkbook and all the plants needed for our garden.
Now the only thing left to do was to pack down the soil in the raised beds then plant and water everything. Enter our two little granddaughters, or I should say, their four little feet.
After stomping their way silly, the girls planted the entire garden in one of the raised beds and I wrote one final check. I decided it was time to start putting money away for them in an account. Perhaps, one day, there will be enough for them to buy a house that already has a garden in the backyard.
In the second raised bed we planted flowers. Flowers make The Wife happy and her happiness is something a check can’t buy. But flowers planted by two of the best little gardeners surely can.
So what of all those pesky flying and bugs from my youth? How did we get our raised bed garden to be a bug free zone? Well, Dear Reader, that’s a stinging story for next week.
[Rick Ryckeley has been writing stories since 2001. To read more of Rick’s stories, visit his blog: storiesbyrick.wordpress.com.]
