Got my garden in today. Realistically, this means that it’s going to be a rough year for everything except the radishes. According to conventional wisdom, it’s *way* too early to be putting in lettuce in Minnesota, and only a little too early for the rest of it. Radishes are tough, love frosts, and will happily grow anyplace sunny with good drainage that’s less sandy than an outright beach. The brutal calculus of the impending move to Rhode Island forces my hand. If I want any sort of a crop out of plants that require 60 days before harvest, I have to start now.
Also a bunch of yard work in support of the first impression of potential buyers of the house. It’s remarkable how much of an improvement we can make just by raking and dumping a truckload of cedar mulch on the beds. We went from being a little behind the curve to looking well manicured and ready to rock with a half day of fun in the sun and a little sweat over the edging tool. For price performance on yard tune-ups, you really can’t beat edging. Even a totally overgrown and patchy lawn with really razor crisp edges looks well cared for and downright british.
Yard work and gardening brings back some of my very earliest memories. I remember planting onions in parallel rows with my mother, her showing my the proper spacing by measuring if out with my small hand-widths. Some of these memories are in the third person, clearly built after the fact from pictures and stories I’ve been told…but some of them I believe to be actual recollections.
Of course, now it’s my little garden, my very own yard. My parents are angling toward retirement, and I’m the one wondering how it is that I’ve gotten so busy with a career that I have to not grow tomatoes this year. I would just abandon them to some new owner of this soil who probably won’t care. If I’m lucky, prospective buyers won’t regard the garden as an unsightly bare patch, devoid of grass. At best, it’ll be a selling point that there is lots of space to park cars during the state fair.
I feel a good rant about the fundamental transience of all human activity coming on, so I should probably go. Besides, It’s time to pack more of my life into boxes.
Still need a job. 🙂
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