I’m trying to decide whether or not to plant a garden this year. Right now our backyard is a mess. We have a broken down, but still functional trampoline in the middle of the yard, a lot of shrubs and weeds in the corners, and various and sundry items around the perimeter that we wanted to get out of the house, but someone just coudn’t bear to get rid of completely. There’s very little grass because of the trampoline, and the picnic table I forgot to mention, and because of the building project that finally got finished last fall which made a shambles of what was left of our yard. The building project, a small house/room for my brother-in-law, was erected right on top of my old garden. (Don’t worry; it wasn’t much of a garden, really.) So, in order to have a garden this year, we’d need to start all over again.
First, we’d need to get rid of the weeds. I haven’t ever figured out an easy way to do this. Maybe the problem is that I’ve always been looking for “easy.” Pulling all the weeds out of the clay soil by hand just doesn’t sound like fun, and I’m not very good at it. However, those herbicides don’t really work very well, do they?
I live in Houston, and the soil’s clay, so the next part of gardening is preparing the soil. I have spent a lot of time in past years trying to break up the clay in my garden space and bringing in dirt to mix with it. (I can’t believe I’ve actually paid money to buy dirt, more than once.) I can grow tomatoes if I bring in soil, but if I’m not careful to pick them while they’re still green.the tomatoes literally burn up in the heat, cooked on the vine or they rot from an over-abundance of rain. I get beautiful squash plants–until the squash bugs get them. I have grown some small, but pretty bell peppers, not very sweet. Blackeyed peas will grow wild. As you can see, I’m a vegetable gardening girl. That’s mostly because I like to feel as if I’m doing something productive when I garden, and I can’t usually tell the flower plants from the weeds when they’re first growing. So I end up weeding out all the flowers. (Is there a parable in there somewhere?)
In Phase Two of my past gardens it gets too hot in Houston to garden or to weed the garden. Houston’s hot, by the way. (The city of Houston used that phrase, “Houston’s hot,” as an advertising slogan for a while, but I think they gave it up. It was much too obvious, and I doubt if anyone ever thought past the primary meaning of the word hot to consider having a “hot time in the old town tonight.” It just made me think about sweat.) I have good intentions about getting up early in the morning and weeding and harvesting, but my intentions usually pave the road to garden hell. The garden turns to chaos full of squash bugs, rotting tomatoes, strawberry plants that never produced, blackeyed pea plants running wild, and many, many weeds. Also in there somewhere are all the plants and seeds that the children begged to buy and plant that never grew or got weeded out with the weeds or buried by the weeds that didn’t get weeded out.
Maybe if my past gardening attempts sound pitiful enough to some of you, I’ll get some comments that tell me what I’m doing wrong. Why isn’t it easy? A curse on the ground, you say, what curse? And should I plant a garden or give it up?