I wasn’t going to get my hands very dirty this year. I have oodles of very important things to do.
I love gardening, don’t you know? But my perennial flowers are lovely, and will thrive if I simply use the hose.
Yet, that little itch gets me.
Perhaps I could put just a few lettuce plants in the ground.
And what does it hurt to have two tomato plants? Nothing beats a sun-warmed tomato on an August afternoon. Right?
And then, I have all these seed packets … it can’t hurt to put them in the ground. Whoops, I stumbled across the bag of Jerusalem artichokes. A nice lady brought those to me as a gift.
Surely I should plant them.
Now that I’ve planted half of the raised bed, I might as well keep going. Watering one raised bed each week really won’t take that much time away from all the really, really important things I really must do. Right?
This week I found myself at a big-box store.
If you’re a gardener, sometimes you’ll have an hour to spare, get in the car with no particular destination in mind, and find yourself wheeling a shopping cart down a row of colorful potted plants.
It just happens that way.
Suddenly you’re touching things and smelling things, and next thing you know a rubber chicken is in your hand and you’re taking photographs.
There’s always something new, like bi-color petunias, that are mostly apricot with magenta stripes inside.
And purple flash ornamental peppers?
Who would buy purple ornamental “flash” peppers?
I think they market these plants for people like me.
And what’s that? The rubber chicken is in the middle of the row of hot golden cayenne pepper plants. I’ve never grown yellow hot peppers. Those are beautiful.
I am proud to say that I had a moment of clarity, grasping my travel-sized rubber chicken in my hand. My knuckles were white from holding on to the shopping cart, which had no business being in my hands.
My saving grace was that I played through the whole scenario. If I bought more plants, I would run out of room in my raised bed.
Then I would need to dig up a new planting area for the new plants. Then I might as well call my handyman Daniel and have him build a new raised bed.
All of this, and I have really, really important things to do this summer.
I’ll just need to learn to be content with lettuce plants, two tomatoes, Jerusalem artichokes, and whatever grows from the multiple packets of seeds I recently put in the ground.
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