Organic Gardening August 5, 2008

I just spent the better part of the day tending to my, um, yard. I can’t bring myself to call it a garden quite yet because I feel I’ve done it a disservice. It’s been so darned hot, muggy and rainy, I really haven’t kept up. So it’s a jungle now.

A new neighbor offered to loan me his power mower and terrifying loud weed killer on steroids tool but I declined. Not only do I not want to use gasoline and create noise polution, I would not enjoy the process one bit.

Pulling out weeds and vines by hands is hard work, but it’s honest work.

While I was sweating my guts out, I looked up a few times to see my neighbor, pouring some kind of poison in to small areas of his lawn. His lawn is actually grass, while mine is anything but. What would be so difficult about bending down to pull up a tiny weed? By design; I’ll be happy when all the grass is gone once and for all. My front is total shade and has plenty of beautiful plants that the former owner, obviously a more experienced gardener and landscaper than I, left behind. I wish she hadn’t died or maybe I could track her down and ask her what some of the plants are and find which are weeds and are safe to pull. I am learning, slowly. It takes a full year to be sure. I shudder to think that some of the bushes I tired of could be rare and beautiful flowering ornamentals, storing up for a profuse spring bloom that I’ll miss.

I also hate that I squashed some scary locusts. I had a friend visit a month ago, a self-professed “nature boy”. He eats only raw vegan food and does not even kill mosquitos. I wonder, if he had his own garden and was growing all his own vegetables, would he rethink that? Those darned locusts cleared out a huge section of our front, um, garden, this spring. They are so huge and ugly now. We saw two mating on our screen a few days ago. They stayed like that for hours. At 3am, I knocked them off the screen – hard to do as they just shifted around a bit and held on harder as I banged at them with a long pole. I was still thinking of my friend and wasn’t ready to kill them. The two I got today I think were pregnant. It felt truly awful to squash them but I do want to have an end to them already and think forward to my own organic garden.

I will start my garden in the fall. It will be in the back, where the sun is better and the neighbors and their poison farther away.