Miscellaneous Rambling: Garden
I'm back from my first summer vacation. It was short, just four days with the in-laws at Michigan's largest inland lake, Houghton Lake. It's not my favorite outing of the year, but I have a great set of in-laws who largely respect my, ahem, somewhat studious/reclusive mannerisms, so it's an enjoyable enough couple of days.
What the hell? Literally. What's with this hot weather? Old Farmer's Almanac was predicting a cool summer . . . not record heat. The weather as a whole has been terrible this year: late winter storm, followed by windy and hot weather that zapped moisture from the soil faster than anything my irrigation guy recalls ever seeing in the spring time, followed by bouts of relentless rain, shocking hot spells, and pounding rain. MAXimum Greens continues to march on (we harvested ten pounds of lettuce yesterday), but it's been a trial.
The weeds and bugs have been especially bad this year. Others at the Farmers Market told Max that they've been hit really hard by weeds this year, too. I don't know if the erratic weather makes the weeds worse? Right now, I'm throwing everything but the kitchen sink at them: tarps, flames, wheel hoeing, diamond and stirrup hoes, the Nejir Gama hoe, and (of course) pulling by hand.
The Nejiri Gama hoe is the best. At this point, I consider myself an expert on weeding. This thing is sharp and lightweight, with the head positioned perfectly to scrape weeds away. And it's cheap . . . really cheap. Its much more expensive cousin (the DeWit hand weeder: $31) isn't nearly as effective as the Nejiri.
I bought the DeWit hand weeder because its big brother, the 60" Diamond hoe, is the best weeding tool I have. It's expensive, but incredibly effective. I couldn't believe how ineffective DeWit's hand weeder is.
Random Blurb from the Notebooks: Let's face it: gardening is a thing for losers. By "losers," I mean those people who are content with their little homes and their little jobs and their little lives in their little towns. Thing is, I've concluded we're meant to be losers. Hollywood portrayals to the contrary notwithstanding, we're meant to be small: we are small, on a finite earth in an incredibly-finite slot of time. If we start aspiring to more than smallness, we are leaving our proper sphere. Discontent and dissatisfaction and unhappiness--and Prozac and psychological therapy and ennui--follow. Gardening might be the quintessential little pursuit, thereby making it a perfect (or nearly perfect) existential fit.
