Gardening and Other Crap

I finished reading William Alexander's The $64 Tomato yesterday. It's about this yuppie gardener from New York's Hudson Valley, his yuppie house, his yuppie garden, and his yuppie ways. He says yuppie things like "Our rental cottage was perched on a seaside bluff next to a lighthouse in the most marvelous meadow I have ever seen," that make me gag. Now, I realize I'm a total hypocrite because there are some very Stuff White People Like-esque qualities about me, but reading about this guy annoyed me like reading about 1800's British landed aristocracy that sit around drinking tea and playing cards all day and looking down their nose at people that have to work for a living does. Anyway, besides that annoying quality, the book itself was actually pretty well written and entertaining.

To complete the full circle of hypocrisy (or self-loathing, take your pick), I planted my own garden this weekend.

These are actually the hedge in front of my house.

Here's the garden in general. There's lots of community stuff like raspberries and fruit trees.

This is my plot, with some flower and a gigantic rosemary bush I took out.

The flower I got rid of.

My plot after planting. Lettuce, cucumbers, strawberries (too late for this year? Oh well), peas, sunflower, broccoli, beans, carrots, potatoes, and sweet 100 tomatoes. I'm guessing that's too much for this tiny plot, but there's not a lot of each of those things. It seemed kinda lame to buy starters from the store, but I caved when I saw strawberries and sweet 100's. All the seeds, water, tools and everything are supposed to be provided by the city, but some jerk broke the lock and stole three linear feet of seed packets the day before I got started, so I had to go to OSH and buy my own. No biggy, the Saturday paper had a coupon.

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