Raised Garden

August 24, 2022 — Pat Bertram

Lucky me! More stinkhorn mushrooms today. I tried to dig up the mushrooms and found a whole nest of stinkhorn eggs under the rocks. Now that was a treat! I hope you know I’m being ironic. Stinkhorn, as I mentioned yesterday, has a horrible smell. I’m not sure if the eggs have a smell because the stench of the mushroom is so strong, it overrides any other odor. And anyway, I dug up the eggs as quickly as I could, bagged them, and threw them in the dumpster.

The eggs, from what I can figure, are what the adult mushroom grows out of, but I don’t know how the eggs got in my rocks. Just grew there, I guess. If you, too, would like to participate in the stinkhorn experience, you can buy stinkhorn eggs (the price I saw was $15.00 per pound). People actually eat the eggs; apparently, the taste — and texture — is like a cross between a radish and a water chestnut, but frankly, there is no way I would ever put one of those things anywhere near my mouth, no matter how hungry I am or how delicious it might be. I couldn’t even get beyond the slime factor to simply touch them with bare hands. Besides, if I want something that tastes like a radish, I’ll eat a radish.

I was being ironic about the “lucky me” introduction, but this really was a lucky day for me, stinkhorns aside.

A couple of workers came to finish building my raised garden bed in preparation for the fill dirt this weekend. The bed looks a lot larger than when it was just a frame on the ground, and it seems to crowd the pathway. Of course, the plants bordering the path around the raised garden have grown and spread beyond what they were when the frame was set a couple of years ago, which makes the path seem narrower, but that’s not a problem. Come fall, I’ll trim back the plants so that I won’t feel claustrophobic.

I still don’t know what I will be planting in the raised garden. Most probably, next spring I will plant tomatoes and cucumbers and other simple vegetables, and not many at that. If the growth of the tomato and cucumber plants this year is anything to go by, a mere four to six plants will fill the entire garden. If it feels too much like a jungle when everything is grown, then I might switch to a different plant the following year — an evergreen groundcover, perhaps.

All I know for sure is that I will not purposely plant stinkhorn eggs!

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

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The Good Today

August 20, 2022 — Pat Bertram

I had a lovely surprise today. I heard a knock on the back door, which was unusual — visitors come straight to the front door rather than meander through my yard to the back. I opened the door, and one of the workers employed by my contractor was standing there with a shovel. “I’ve come to build your raised garden,” he said.

Although the garden has been on their do-to list for a year or two, it hasn’t been a priority. It was more important to me to have these people replace the roof of the house I am looking after for an absent friend. And then today, apparently, my raised garden did become a priority. It’s not really important in the grand scheme of things — the area could just as easily have been a ground-level garden like my other garden spots, but I wanted a different sort of accent in the yard. I have no idea what the finished “box” will look like — my only instructions were to build it 18” high with boards across the ends that I could use as a bench.

The worker was also one who laid my sod, so I cornered him to ask about my brown grass. It did surprise him, the contrast between the bright green healthy area and the dead-looking swath a mere three feet away. He does think, though, that since the sod is well seated and the grass doesn’t yield to being pulled on, the grass is still alive, just dormant. This pleases me in a “grass half full/half empty” sort of way. (Sorry, couldn’t resist the pun.) There is a chance the grass will green up, but meantime, it’s not very pretty.

What I do find pretty are some of the flowers that showed their faces today, especially this petunia. This is one that planted itself and is completely different from the original dark red flower that went to seed.

Speaking of pinks, this one is not only pink but is called a pink, which is another name for dianthus.

And another Heavenly Blue morning glory bloomed. I still don’t know where they came from, but they are welcome all the same.

What aren’t welcome are the mushrooms. We haven’t been getting any more rain, but the humidity is so unusually high that the dew on the ground in the morning is dense, and apparently, such wetness is the perfect environment for mushrooms and toadstools of all kinds. Most pull right up, but a couple were so entrenched I had to dig them out, and a couple even grew in the ornamental rocks around the foundation around the house.

And in the interest of truth — I did spray the herbicide to try to control the Bermuda grass, but nothing happened. Oh, well. As I said once before, it’s about accepting the bad with good, and today, so far, the good has been very good.

One last item: another worker also showed up, and when I opened the garage to show him some boards he could use, this second worker just stopped and stared. It took me a minute to realize he was staring at my car, thoroughly entranced. Gotta love car guys!

So yes, the good today was very good.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

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