Garden envy

(Yes, this is a family life update. So sue me.)

I am now officially a gardener. I am a gardener for two reasons. First, I love tomatoes, and by love I mean I deeply, seriously, from the bottom of my heart or perhaps stomach, love tomatoes, especially the big, drippy, juicy kind you can put on sourdough bread with lemon juice and mayonnaise and sea salt and slurp up, one after the other, until you are groaning on the floor from having eaten too many. They are nearly impossible to get here in SoCal, especially now. Second, as you may know, the end of the world is coming and it is anticipated by our renowned experts that in the prolegommenon to this final conflagration, tomatoes will be hard to come by. Hence, I’ve decided to grow them.

I started out by building four 6X4 raised beds and one enormous 8X4X4 Huglekultur bed, which is a sort of German run-around-naked-in-the-forest, natural tree-huggy permaculture set up that as far as I can see probably won’t work but was built anyway in a moment of enthusiasm. I shelled out in excess of 500 USD to get a big dump truck to deliver to me highly ranked on Yelp raised bed soil. There was also the lumber and the time. I moved said soil from its temporary mountain, ten cubic yards of it, which seemed like a lot, into the raised beds I had built. I was very proud of myself. LWF took many pictures of her grinning, sunburnt spouse. I was a man of the soil. I drank cold beer and deserved it.

Then there was getting the plant babies. This proved to be something of a challenge as well. Under our lock down procedures, each plant had to be individually interviewed to determine whether it had been anywhere in its past where it might have picked up the corona you know what. But as plants are sedentary creatures, most of them hadn’t. I finally found the various plants, mostly tomato plants, in various directions, all about a 30-45 minute drive away. I bought them at some expense, took them back to the ol’ home place, slapped them into the ground and let the sun shine down upon them. For a couple of days, they looked fine.

Oh, yes, I constructed a rabbit fence around the garden, which turned out to be a fair amount of work, at least by my standards.

So now I have four raised beds of slowly wilting, which is to say dying plants, staring reproachfully at me from their soily holes. Why won’t they grow? I might have overwatered them.  They might have a disease. They are very small. Go on youtube and you can see all these people with their magnificent gardens. Acres of beans, lettuce, persimmon trees and, most of all, tomatoes. I never gave the slightest sh*t about them before but now I grind my teeth in envy looking longingly at their blossoming accomplishments. What makes them so special? That guy barely has teeth. That woman may have great vegetables but she’s fat and getting fatter. That guy’s garden looks like hell except for all his glorious vegetables. What am I, chopped cilantro?

Maybe I’ll get some Miracle Gro, that utterly non-organic chemical, a toxic byproduct of nuclear fission, and that will goose my tomatoes into production. Maybe I’ll just despair. Nature is after all, evil in the end. She hates us. She hates tomato sandwiches, which tells you something about her. I’m sure the Roman Catholic church must have prayers for good harvests and the like, I mean, obviously. I think I’ll try that next.