Fall is…sort of here, although you wouldn’t know it based on the outside temperature, which is still in the triple digits. Earlier this year, I tested out my raised garden bed with a manageable crop of veggies I might actually eat. The white onions never saw the light of day. I had transplanted a tangle of crowded corn stalks and yellow squash – both of which failed to thrive. I added three baby cucumber seedlings once they outgrew their container and only one isn’t dead yet. The store-bought green onions – which get periodic haircuts – have proven to be quite the troopers, bedraggled as they are. The potatoes were looking good for a time, but then the sweet potatoes descended into anarchy. Four months of watering, two bags of foliage, a few uninvited mushrooms, countless overfed bugs, and a couple of worms amounts to a handful of skinny sweet potato roots and two puny sweet potato wannabees that might count as half a snack if I’m not too hungry…I may be doing something wrong.
A friend suggested I may need to add more nutrients to the soil, namely Lyme, which, she pointed out, “is also good for decomposing a body…so, you really can’t go wrong trying it out.” That right there is why we she is one of our dearest friends…come to think of it, I actually could fit a body in there…
Nevertheless, I decided it wasn’t the worst first harvest in the history of gardening. I brought my miniscule crops into the house and set them on my kitchen island to decide if they were worth curing or not (because, apparently, they aren’t ready to eat straight from the ground). However, it was an exercise in futility as, the following day when I returned home from an outing, I found the remains of my precious produce on the couch, half-mauled by – I can only assume – my male rottweiler, Remus, who has a history of stealing things off of the counters and shelves. To date, his cache includes a full loaf of bread, bird seed, kitchen towels, oven mitts, spatulas, countless DVDs, shoes, socks, and a bottle of superglue. He either has the intestines of a garbage disposal or, he is part cat and using up his nine lives at an alarming rate.
Original Post 09/2020
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