Green Thumbs Up
So you want to plant a little garden in the corner of your yard. You want fresh tomatoes, zucchini, squash, maybe a few cukes. (you’re not sure what cukes are but want them anyway.) You think that you might make some homemade pickles or relish, everyone loves homemade pickles and relish. You can imagine the bounty that will cover your dinner table and the compliments that you are certain to receive from guests satiated by the efforts of your labor and toiling. You have high hopes.
Unfortunately you run face first into one tiny problem: you don’t have a green thumb. In fact, it’s not just that you don’t have a green thumb, it’s more that you have a pitch black festering thumb that destroys life.
You’ve purchased all of the books:
- The Beginner’s Guide To Growing A Garden.
- The Idiots Guide To Growing A Garden
- The Idiot-Beginner’s Guide To Growing a Garden.
- With This Book, Even A Chimp Could Grow A Garden.
- The Idiot-Beginner-Chimps Guide To Growing A Garden.
- If You have A Pitch Black Festering Thumb That Destroys Life, This Book Is Your Last Hope.
- The Giant Catalog Of Plastic Plants.
Those books are now deposited in a bin labeled: things to be shred, burned and buried in a deep hole.
Note: you purchased a few plastic plants that inexplicably turned brown and fell apart. You choose to ignore the metaphysical ramifications that you were able to kill plastic.
You are now known as the “Grim Reaper” at every nursery and ag center in the area.
Undaunted, you press forward.
You read that Native Americans placed a dead fish with the kernel when they planted corn. You put a fish stick in the ground with every seed you plant. It doesn’t seem to help. You decide that you need a whole fish, so you raid the family fish tank. All that results in is a ticked off family.
You do discover that you can successfully grow something: weeds and a lot of them. You can grow weeds like they’re on freakin’ steroids.
You also discover that fresh vegetables are enjoyed by a lot of nature’s creatures: bugs, worms, rabbits, gophers, and the neighbor kid Gerald.
Finally, you discover the answer to all your problems; it’s called the farmers market.
At last, your dinner table abounds with bounty, the fruits of hard labor and toiling, just not yours.
Vile enemy, the prickly weed.
I came to terms with my killing thumb years ago. There is not a single live plant in my home–plastic abounds–nor a vegetable in my yard, save what toppled out of my grocery bag. And I’m fine with that.
At least you haven’t killed your plastic plants yet.
True. But I haven’t dusted them either, so they leave a nice film on the clothes if rubbed up against.
The only success we’ve had in our garden, and it was half assed, was potatoes. We tried tomatoes and got a few out of the deal but then bugs, birds and drought with water restrictions set in! As you say, Farmer’s Markets for the win!
The last time a had a garden everything grew out wonderfully; all the local wildlife enjoyed it immensely.
Nothing like a wonderful specimen of a tomato with a huge gaping hole in it before you can pick it!
You’re really ragging on weeds here, dude. I’ve come to like the unassuming weed. Did you know that, if left alone long enough, many weeds will sprout flowers that can bring you real delight?
Ok, so you only wrote one sentence about weeds in this whole post and you really didn’t even say anything bad about them, but there were negative implications and I’m just not into that.
At least I can grow something. This article is making me feel bad, dude.
Apart from dandelion wine, flowers don’t bring me delight.
Reblogged this on The Amateur Astrophysicist and commented:
I wanted to take this – a second – opportunity to introduce you all to my personal favorite blogger “idiot-prufs.” Check out his stuff, it’s hysterical.