Oh, so sorry. Did I get a song stuck in your head?
Join the club. grumble
So I think I’ve decided that I’m not gardening again next year. I tell myself that every year, but this year I think I mean it. I have many demands on my time, and my money, and the bugs around here (and my lack of making a time commitment to fight them, let’s be honest…) ahem. The bugs around here have NO lack in their time or commitment to go after my poor growing things.
Anyway. We’ve reached that time of the year, when I think that all I have to do is NOT go out and water them for two days, and then I won’t have to deal with those darn plants ever again.
I won’t do that, of course. I cannot give up on them while they yet live. I’ve tried! Who was it, still covering up her last abused tomato plant well into November? Yep, this girl.
Really, it would be cruel to murder them now. The poor things have tried. They have certainly done that. I’ve pulled THREE hornworms off my tomato plants in the past week, and those suckers are big and eat a lot– but my poor plants are still trying with less than half their leaves. I drowned the first one, and he almost learned to swim in time. So I dropped rocks on the second and third.
I chased some sort of moth that I’m sure is really bad for squash, off my zucchini plants this morning. But they, too, are still trying. Though both the squash that were actually growing appear now to be dying. Sad face.
Watering I’m good with. I can weed. That’s a thing I can do. But to go out there every morning (pre-glasses, because that’s the routine! I wash after I come in.) To go out there every morning and examine every plant for what bugs might be eating it and figure out, pre-coffee, how to deal with it before it eats most of my plant… that is beyond me, it seems.
I wasn’t supposed to be doing it alone this year. My son was going to work with me. We were actually going to plant a lot more than just the five zucchini (now down to two) and five tomatoes (three) and three peppers (one, and it’s looking bad.) But he never showed up for work, so I wisely did not plant more seedlings.
Every once in a while he looks at my poor struggling plants and offers a “helpful” suggestion with a smirk. I manage not to smack him upside the head with a watering can.
HE is home all day every day, y’all. HE could fight the battle of the bugs, if he chose. But he doesn’t, and he doesn’t help, but he’s all about making plans to put in a couple raised beds and maybe another greenhouse-thing and…
Now is the time to make this decision. I will help these plants struggle on. As long as they fight, I will. I cannot do otherwise; it just isn’t in me. I cannot betray their courage. But I won’t plant more. I’ll throw the seeds away. I’ll trash the (leaky) kiddie pool my grow bags are in, toss the grow bags which have about had it anyway, dump the dirt in the “orchard” (four struggling citrus trees still doing MUCH better than the “garden”) and I will give it up.
Maybe I’ll sell the wheelbarrow. It’s a nice one! Maybe I’ll donate it to my community farm. Maybe I’ll start wandering down to the community farm, when I get the urge to fight entropy with vegetables.
Maybe I freaking won’t. I just said I don’t have time for the battle of the bugs…
Yeah, that’s probably best. I’m just gonna go to the farmer’s market. An hour or so a week, and I’ll have plenty of fresh local veg, bought from people who actually (one hopes) enjoy the process of making food out of bug-fighting.
Squirmy little plant-eating bastards. Look at this jerk!
…okay, he’s gorgeous, in his own squirmy little plant-eating bastard way. He needs to be gorgeous NOT ON MY TOMATO PLANTS.
Jerk.