by Duane Craig

Created on: September 04, 2007

During the summer of my life I decided to throw away the wisdom of the ages relating to the growing of a garden. I would banish straight, sterile rows of homogenous plantings in favor of a more casual, colorful and enlightened approach.

The garden of my childhood (designed to feed two adults, seven children and countless, unsuspecting relatives) was an expanse of green that stretched to the horizon as I made my way on hands and knees doing my share of the weeding. Because of the weed thing, I had avoided planting a garden throughout my adult life. Until one day I hit upon a simple truth. Since I was now an adult, nobody could make me pull weeds. Of course, there was my wife, but besides being a patient woman she will also listen to reason. So if I could come up with a logical enough explanation for what I was doing, she would buy it.

Using a lot of finesse (and a colorful flip chart) I presented a plan to her that extolled the virtues of letting things grow where they may. When her eyes began to glaze over and cross slightly I knew she was ready to surrender. I hit her with three minutes of labor saving cost analysis charts and she mumbled a faint approval.

The simplicity of my plan lay in the fact that I had no plan at all. That was the beauty of the whole thing. No plan meant nothing to go wrong, and best of all, no weeding.

Armed with seeds, soil, peat pots and plastic trays I started all the plants that the seed packets said should be started indoors. Eventually, every windowsill in the house sported its own collection. The germination rate was quite good. Actually, it was very high. The weeks sped past and I spent most of my free time during this period watering seedlings and moving them in a desperate attempt to keep them evenly distributed throughout the house.

The week of planting arrived. I scattered the tomato plants throughout the garden, interspersed with chili plants and borage. Then I stuck in a hill of zucchini, plunked some cucumbers here and there, sprinkled cosmos, nasturtium, strawflowers, tansy, pennyroyal, marjoram, celosia, pearl onions, peas, beans, and leeks between various other plants, and dropped some corn to the rear of everything. I finished off by spilling marigold seeds along the garden perimeter (to keep the cats out). About a week later I found an unopened package of spaghetti squash, so I dutifully went out, found what I thought was a potentially free space, and planted one seed there.

Then I sat back and waited for harvest time.

The

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