Hand Me Downs

It’s dinner time, and as Kenny is out of town, I have to work especially hard to eat the occasional regular meal.  However, I just ate a half of an avocado with honey to see me through, because I wanted to show you something.

When you grow carrots (at least, when I grow carrots) you start with a blank slate.   You till and and add whatever you’re going to add to your soil to make it nourishing- compost, coffeegrounds, etc, and then, you have your blank slate.  Your black, crumbly, loamy blank slate.

Then, you sow carrot seeds.  Carrots are something you surface sow.  They’re tiny little seeds, and if you do anything more intense than pat the little buggers into the top of the soil, they’ll never have a chance at getting sunlight and germinating.

Thing is, they start out as tiny, tiny little bits of green.  Know what else starts out as tiny, tiny bits of green?  New grass seed and other undesirables in my carrot bed.  The first time this happened, all of the good and unwanted growing together, I remember thinking, “How in the world do I weed?”  You can’t just till it all under, you’ll lose your carrots.  You can’t tell who’s who yet, so it’s nigh on impossible to evict anyone.  So, like in the bible, which often makes good sense of many levels, you let your carrots and your other stuff grow up together until you can tell what’s what.  

We’ve had massive amounts of rain.  I cannot even begin to complain, as we’ve felt the drought so keenly the last couple of years.  I’ve seen it on the faces of the farmers from whom we buy our produce- it was hurting them.  Out at the park, it’s obvious the water table’s being restored- areas that I had no idea were wetlands apparently are.  The mallard ducks know it.

The rain has had the weeds and the carrots growing together like crazy, and I’ve been looking for a non-pouring time to go out and weed a bit, as I can now tell what is a carrot and what is not.  But my bed looked like this:

This is enough to make a Katy hyperventilate.  I don’t know if you can tell, but MOST of this looks like grass.  The little feathery things are the tender new baby carrots.  This looks like a massive and overwhelming task to me.  But I knelt down, and gave a go at one little spot.  I figured I’d shoot for three square inches.  

This, friends, is a primary reason I garden.  That three square inches took all of two minutes.  And Katy learned, again, that it’s best to pick one little spot, and start there.  Don’t write the whole album, play with a little melody.   Don’t write the whole book, find out what a character likes for breakfast.  Don’t weed the whole freaking garden, give six carrots some breathing room.  Gardening teaches me this stuff all the time.  And then I get some carrots.