A Growing Hobby

I spent a pretty good amount of time pruning, trimming, sweeping and transplanting today.  Several hours as a matter of fact.  The yard had begun to look like it was getting ready to take over the whole town.  It was a growing insurrection.  

Gardening is like most hobbies.  You are so innocent at the outset. You start out with a plant, a pot and some dirt.  You have a little bit of success, the plant lives for a while and, if it's edible - an herb, say - you get the idea you can grow something else that's useful. Before too long, you have several plants and a few odds and ends, pots, saucers, a trowel.  It's pretty fun!  Then, you get some gloves, then better gloves, and then a few snippers and some fertilizer.  One thing leads to another.  Seed catalogs, gardening books, hoses and watering cans gradually appear.  It's looking like you're ready to feed the whole family, and the bounty of the garden is becoming life-changing, inspirational.  

Then you meet your nemeses.

Bugs arrive in everyone's garden sooner or later.  Death on six (or more) legs.  One day you have beautiful flowers that bob happily in the spring breeze.  The next, you have a sickly yellowed mess.  En masse, bugs descend on your little beauties like Hells Angels arriving at a violin recital.  And there you are trying to fend them off with nontoxic (wimpy) products that you hope desperately will work.  You don't really want to poison anything, especially the earth you've become so proud of.  Earwigs, snails, slugs, aphids, spittlebugs.  Just their names give you the creeps.

Your gardening book says, "Give your plants a blast with the hose to remove aphids and other clinging pests."  Simple enough.  You blast away and really kind of enjoy it, a Valkyrie dispatching the enemy like the unworthy and sullen beings that they are.  Trouble is, the blasts of water also serve to disperse the bugs to other plants where they cling and thumb their noses at you, blow raspberries and plot certain revenge.

You keep trying, remembering the wonderful array of flowers and herbs you'd managed to grow before the Huns arrived in all their hordes, and you have a little luck.  You learn that beer set out in shallow dishes attracts snails and slugs.  You cheer for ladybugs who are said to eat aphids like candy.

You also learn to get out early in the day to check your plants before the little dears have been beaten down by the heat of the midday sun (well, okay, that doesn't often happen here in the Groove, but it's still wise to get out early even in the fog), check for damage overnight, admire the morning blooms of the day lilies and see the dew on the roses as they open.

The big payoff is always what you reap after the battles have been waged and your patience has been strained to the breaking point.  That is, you have an armful of flowers to set in a vase or you have a handful of food to add to the table for the next meal.  Bringing in a harvest, no matter how small, has few equals.  It's well worth the work, by any measure.

I brought in lemons and roses today.  I am thrilled to say I can pick mint, oregano, thyme, rosemary and lavendar when I need them.  Quite a few plants are budding or blooming.  Life is good and actually pretty simple; you really realize it out in a garden.  Just watch out for bugs on Harleys.