PhilosYphia

It has always seemed that gardeners around me had a timing for getting going in the spring that rivaled even the reliability of the flittering redbreast himself, timing their plantings and tillings to acutely match the torrid thrashings of the new warmth and dashing rains. I always marveled how they could slip things in between drenchings with apparent ease and therefore would have crops weeks ahead of mine, simply because by the time I got my garden planted, it was the end of May and summer was in full swing.

Until now, that is. Maybe the perils of age come with a few pearls of glory.

My father came over with his overpowered tiller on Sunday afternoon and proceeded to beat the tar out of the soil that had lain dormant over the long winter, cussing slightly because I had thought it best to drown it in a few inches of compost, leaves, and grass clippings for good measure. But the old bear of a tiller was the victor in the long run, slapping it into submission, and by evening I had a good plot going.

Normally I would let it sit there for a few days, but I thought I should get a jump on it and tossed handfuls of seeds into hoed trenches, all the while attempting to space them correctly but not so accurately that I would be chagrined for being a pompous anal git.

In this pursuit I discovered a wonderful invention — seed tape. For the uninitiated (as I was, prior to this season), seed tape is where they take something very similar to toilet paper and lay the small seeds of some unfortunate plant (a lettuce mix in this case) between the layers, pre-spaced and pre-mixed for your pleasure. And pleasure I did as it took a ton of frustration out of the process and instead replaced it with maniacal glee at the prospect of planting an entire row of lettuce in 30 seconds or less.

In total, I laid down 4 rows of peas, 3 of yellow onions, 2 of lettuce salad mix, 2 of parsnip, 1 of peanuts, and 3 of green beans. For markers I tried something new, hacking foot-and-a-half lengths of 1/2″ PVC pipe with a saw and hammering them into the ground at the head of each row. That took up about half of the length of the garden.

For the rest, I was planning on planting our usual OMG array of tomato plants. We found out the first year that the red fruit grows extremely well in our soil and, since we love doing things with them, they are our typical “bumper crop” item. However, we buy plants, not seeds, and I had yet to obtain them.

Tuesday evening after work, I decided to find a greenhouse I had seen advertised in Charles City where I work. Since the alternative was either Wal*Mart or a local greenhouse about 15 minutes from home, I thought it couldn’t hurt to check it out.

I tell ya, I’ve found my new favorite greenhouse.

The place is immaculate with this huge array of absolutely gorgeous flowers that makes me want to terraform my entire backyard and house into perpetual flowerbeds. I wandered up and down the aisle just taking in the flood of colors and scents, pure candy to the eyes.

The vegetable section was small, but the quality was not diminished and I was able to pick up 32 tomato plants of 3 different varieties, pay my $17.50 for them, and head on home. Upon arriving home, I checked the darkening sky and radar and decided that I could make a run for it. Over the next half hour I ran, sweated, dug, shoved, planted, and covered all of the plants and still had 5 minutes to stand and watch the sky before the floodgates opened and dumped one of the most gorgeous rains ontop of us.

I love rains like those…start in the evening, done by morning, and a steady yet full downpour that really soaks and settles the ground, cleans the air, and generally makes everything go from simply greenish to GREEN.

And, for the first time, my garden was completely in the ground, leaves and dreams turned towards the skies, taking in that first deep soaking. I smiled to myself as I exited the house this morning, glancing towards my well-saturated garden, and internally patted myself on the back for figuring out the game like the gardeners that I admired. I might not have it all figured out, and the weeds are just as likely to grow this year as any, but I’ve won the first round. Bring on the summer!

For many, a daily Oprah episode signals the beginning of a session of pleasure, a desperate excitement that lasts for an hour and then melts into a lathered puddle of women lazily lounging around on the steps outside of her studio, grabbing cigarettes and moaning about how the sparks flew and lit up their eyes for the better part of an afternoon. To some it’s a satisfying event; for others, she leaves us ridden hard and hung up without a vigorous towelling-off. Not even the “O” word in magazine format can possibly wrench us from the idea that whatever just happened on that TV probably cost us a few tenths of our soul.

A couple of days ago, I managed to gather that Jessica Seinfeld, wife of famed and funny Jerry, was on Her Majesty’s program to promote her new cookbook about how to hide vegetables within foods that children have naturally found easy to stuff down their maws in large quantities, thus avoiding a task that most parents have found to be unpleasant at best. As many have found, broccoli would go down a lot easier in the younger generation if it was coated with frosting, carbonated, and deep fried in a rich, caramel sauce.

So, Jessica’s method of circumnavigating this parental mountain is to simply whip all manner of plant material into the consistency of Slim-Fast and incorporate it in the mix for any number of foods that are more acceptable to the refined and delicate palates of children. Ha-HA! Take that, ye denizens of culinary hell, we have you pegged now! Enjoy those chicken nuggets, but beware — they’re chock-full of nutrition! Naturally, Oprah loves this shit and presented it as God’s own nectar and the saviour of cooking-frustrated parents everywhere. The rash of people showing up at Wal*mart that afternoon to purchase a Cuisinart must have been impressive.

Does anyone else besides me see a problem with this entire idea? The consuming of various vegetables may not be the most memorable experience for a child, but it certainly isn’t an event that should be traumatic or detrimental to their development as a human being. The show had some parents and children on there that threw huge tantrums about eating veggies and the exasperated parental units lamented that their days were filled with the screams of their tortured offspring who were being crippled by the carrots, bled dry by the beets, and ostracized by
the onions!ostracized by the onions!

Give me a break.

All this points to is a lack of boot-in-ass-itis, and the children are both infected and carriers of the disease. Eating vegetables, as well as other foods of varying types, is part of learning to be a discerning human being who has the ability to try and experiment with any number of culinary creations and to not be rude about ones that don’t appeal to them. Saying, “I don’t prefer these” is a skill to be developed, not avoided. Giving in to immature refusals and resorting to trickery seems to me to be a bad parenting technique. What are you going to do when they don’t want to do chores, take laundry to the pool, toss it into the water, and encourage kiddo to play “sink-the-bra”?

Mrs. Seinfeld’s ideas aren’t completely out of whack, of course. The idea of incorporating more healthy ingredients into any recipe is encouraged and smart. However, there are limits to how far you should go to combat what is, in most cases, a lack of parental effort in discipline and instruction, not a crisis of creativity. Of course, this goes for a lot of things, not just food creations.

I do, however, have to wonder about Jessica herself, because she seems a bit too involved in this entire, “puréeing”, thing. A quote for you, to demonstrate: “This is a secret that most people don’t know about me…I love puréeing and packaging,” she says. “I used to just have like one or two purées, but this has changed my purée paradigm.”

Purée paradigm?

Oh, sweetie, you have serious problems, and I’m not talking about mathematics.