TELL THE GARDEN FAIRY YOU WANT TOMATOES
Everything I know about plants and gardening would fit into a sentence as long as this one, which is 21 words. Maybe I should add “use some fertilizer” which would make it 24.
So I don’t know much. I know how to plant bulbs but the gophers eat them all anyway, unless they’re moles. I can plant corn but it comes out the same if I don’t plant corn.
Last summer I planted tomatoes in two big clay pots and after five months didn’t have six ounces of tomatoes all put together. Summer in Ukiah, mind you. Someone later told me I should have put in some fertilizer.
Wife and I have planted alyssum, a modest, flowery ground cover, at least five times over the past 10 or 12 years, bringing in flat after flat of it, planting it in rich store-bought bags of soil and watering it all carefully. In the end we get a few nubs of tired, brownish blooms straggling along the ground between rocks.
This wouldn’t bother me so much if Ken, the guy around the corner over on Standley Street, didn’t bother to plant alyssum at all, but still has huge basketball-size clouds of the stuff erupting from out between the cracks in his sidewalk! I couldn’t grow dandelions in a greenhouse but Ken’s got flowers elbowing their way out of his pavement.
Lesson to me? Don’t plant it, don’t water it. Just leave it up to the garden fairy and all will be well. As if that’s not enough, Ken’s front lawn looks like expensive green carpet; my front yard looks like Ukiah High’s football team scrimmages on it.
Then I roam around the neighborhood and see plants that look like they belong in some other neighborhood, or planet.
Over on Willow Avenue off North Dora there’s a yard that never stops coming up with exotic displays of things I assume are plants, but I could be wrong given how much I know about plants and gardening. Sometimes I reach out and touch the branches or leaves in the Willow Ave yard to see if they’re plastic. Right now, or at least the day I write this, there’s what appears to be an exhausted artichoke bush on the west side of the yard, except the branches have all broken out in black lesions. Or is it spray paint? It’s like it the bush camouflaged itself but forgot it doesn’t live around leopards anymore.
On the other side is the strangest thing coming out of the ground I’ve ever seen except in horror movies. It’s a low-lying lavender thingamabob with a weird beneath-the-sea look to it, including tentacles (not sharp; I felt them). Plus it’s translucent so it has a creepy, liquidy life force to it.
It wouldn’t be complete for
a story on Ukiah gardens to leave out the sunflowers way up on West Standley Street, beyond Giorno Drive. There they stand in a wooden planter box, heavy heads bowed, and peering down upon us from maybe 18 feet in the air.
Eighteen foot tall sunflowers!?! Go look. Maybe they’re only 17 feet. Sue me. What do they fertilize them with, dead horses? Nuclear waste? Granola bars?
Walk around you own neighborhood and you’ll probably see similar or even more bizarre plant growth. I actually don’t pay much attention to yards and gardens and I still spotted these monsters.
No telling what you might see if you keep your eyes open and stay alert. Might even be able to grow some in your own yard. Usefertilizer.