Extreme Gardening #3 Extreme Gardening #3

(Photo: c. 2006 John Carlson)

Extreme Gardening
By Sean McEntee, your vegetal correspondent

Helpful Advice

You wonder how we managed to make it this far as a species without things like lawnmowers, flame weeders, and those little pigstickers that all the catalogs are flogging. 40,000 years is it, by some reckoning? That’s a lot of weeds and seed catalogs, it makes a stronger case for creationism, doesn’t it? I mean, 40,000 years of gardening, you think someone would have figured a few things out along the way.

Forget about convincing flounders to copulate with tomatoes just so you can have fish sticks with built in ketchup or tomatoes that stack neatly for shipping, that’s just crazy talk. What you really need is helpful advice.

My advice is: you need help. First, begin a regular regimen of grooming and establish personal hygiene habits. Next, convince a healthy young woman to marry you* and bear several or more children with you as soon as practical. Paper the nursery with seed catalog pages, and be sure all the children’s toys are working scale models of garden tools.

According to every pediatrician I’ve spoken to about this, as soon as the child is able to sit up they can be put to work in the garden.** BF Skinner’s work is a good reference for helping to teach the little ones what is a weed and what is a crop.

* If you are a woman gardener you obviously don’t want to be tied up in the baby making process, it is best to subcontract this part. Your better seed catalogs offer mail order brides.

**I’ve actually not spoken to any pediatricians about this.

Next: So many seeds, so little soil.