SEED STARTING MADE QUEASY
Seeds are miraculous and all that, but I’m an instant gratification gardener. When Lowe’s sends me a 10% coupon, I heed its embedded, subliminal instructions: save money by buying enough plants to fill the cargo area of a mid-size American car. Dig holes all over property and go nuts. Three years later, wonder why three shaggy rosemary bushes were really better than one, or even none. Fantasize about a spare, serene landscape in which tall grasses wave behind short Martha Gonzales roses, not the other way round.
The most recent coupon is staring at me. I’ve vowed not to use it unless a crucial piece of equipment breaks. (This doesn’t mean if I don’t get a chipper-shredder, I will die of boredom.)
I must resist. This year, reasons not to wave my credit card around are as abundant as stink bugs on an heirloom tomato. I’ve become a fiction writer, as opposed to a non-, and this isn’t a job so much as a full-time cash-sucking hobby I can now add to gardening, quilting, thrifting, dining out and bicycling. This year, I will scrimp.
Okay, but where are the kicks in just tending a garden? How can I live without infusions of the new, thrilling, and fraught with potential failure? Maybe another stab at giant, tasteless watermelon! Absolutely another home-made irrigation system that either refuses to drip or drains the local aquifer! But no, no, no!
So I’ve been forced to turn to seeds-as-future-landscape-plants. I had a lot of seeds lying around. I threw them everywhere. I covered them with a layer of fine soil and firmed it down, sort of. Watered in with a gentle mist, somewhat. And even wrote the names of the seeds on plastic knives and marked the spots where the seeds were to emerge. Unless I didn’t.
Sitting in the palm of my hand, the seeds betrayed no personality at all. They went to work in the earth about a week ago. So far nothing has happened.
I have a terrible feeling this is all going to take discipline.