April 02, 2006

damn! That's like work!

I felt pretty good yesterday morning, so I went back to work on my garden early, before the sun got too hot. I was having a nice time until I managed to stir up a bunch of insurgent fire ants, who ambushed me mercilessly and bit the living shit out of me. Damn! Those are some mean little bastards!

I had to postpone gardening for a while and root around in my garage for the 100# of Diazanon I bought after the EPA announced that the perfectly safe and effective pesticide was being banned for no good reason other than some environmentalist's whiney whim a couple of years ago. I purchased two 50# bags and stored it for future usage before the stuff vanished from store shelves. Fuck the EPA. I hope fire ants bite the shit out of them, too, the buncha Chicken Littles.

I found my stash and launched a chemical attack against the implacable, six-legged terrorists infesting my yard. My preemptive strike must have been effective, because I didn't see ANY ants in my garden today. All the mounds appear to be abandoned. But past experience has shown me that I didn't kill the bastards. I probably just ran them off into my neighbor's yard for a while. Like the Terminator, they'll be back.

But I was able to finish my planting today, unbitten and unbothered, so I am happy. Sore and tired, but happy. I set up my big Rainbird sprinkler and created my own rainstorm to wet everything in good. The damn plot of ground already looks like a garden, except for one small detail: I still have room for more stuff out there.

What the hell. I already have tomatoes, corn, potatoes, green beans, okra, squash (crookneck AND zuccinni), bell peppers, banana peppers, cucumbers and sugar snap peas planted. If I'm able to get out of bed tomorrow, I'm gonna go buy some more squash, okra and cucumbers, plus some watermelon and cantelope. No sense in letting any tilled ground go to waste.

After that comes the fun part--- trying to keep the tree-rats, the potato bugs, the cutworms, the corn grubs and other nasty predators from eating me out of business. "Delicate" environment, my Cracker ass. It's a got-dam hostile world out there. It's already put a whipping on me, and I just got started.

Gardening---call it a hobby if you want, but it sure seems a lot like work when you actually DO IT.