The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’m planting the third succession of beans and peas down in the garden today. This year I built a fence inside the outer fence, a double perimeter for the deer and rabbits that breached the outer barrier last year. I’m considering a moat, possibly a security system, and last resort, my granddad’s old 16 gauge shotgun. If I have to channel Elmer Fudd, so be it.

For those of you who don’t have vegetable gardens and even those who refuse to eat ‘rabbit food’, you can stop reading right now. I’m not going to pull a Come to Jesus and Jacama on you, but I will tell you a garden is one very easy connection to the earth. To the Land. To what was once, before the spinning jenny and the I-phone, as close to a cosmic umbilical as I can imagine. You know, not counting sex.

A garden is optimism shaded by luck. Bad weather, pests, varmints, blight — but you plant it and hope for the best. You learn to share with those pesky wabbits, with the crows and the deer, the slugs and the snails, hopefully with the neighbors too. You weed, you water, you pray to the gods of weather. And you curse, you howl, you plant a second time. Or a third. This is the world, the universe, the big roulette wheel, the game of chance and the luck of the draw. You succeed and you fail and mostly it’s out of your hands.

Yeah, you can buy potatoes at the Kroger, corn from the vegetable stands on the highway, frozen peas from Costco, fresh tomatoes … but don’t let me go postal on fresh tomatoes, a fruit the agri-assholes have completely ruined. Gardening is farming on the micro-scale. It’s maddening and it’s hard work. But … I wouldn’t stop for anything. Growing some of what we eat is a joy, pure and simple. Well, maybe not so simple.

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