Now, if you could raise hot dogs outside your window, you'd really have something you could justify without a second's hesitation. as it is, though, i cannot deny that when april comes i find myself going out to lean on the fence and look at that miserable plot of land, resolving with all my rational powers not to plant it again. but inevitably a morning arrives when, just as i am awakening, a scent wafts through the window, something like earth-as-air, a scent that seems to come up from the very center of this planet. and the sun means business, suddenly, and has a different, deeper yellow in its beams on the carpet. the birds begin screaming hysterically, thinking what i am thinking—the worms are deliciously worming their way through the melting soil.
It is not only pleasure sending me back to stare at that plot of soil, it is really conflict. the question is the same each year—what method should we use? the last few years we put 36-inch-wide black plastic between the rows, and it worked perfectly, keeping the soil moist in dry times and weed-free.
But black plastic looks so industrial, so unromantic, that i have gradually moved over to hay mulch. we cut a lot of hay and, as it rots, it does improve the soil's composition. besides, it looks lovely, and comes to us free.
Keeping a garden makes you aware of how delicate, bountiful, and easily ruined the surface of this little
planet is. in that 50-by-70-foot patch there must be a dozen different types of soil. tomato won't grow in one part but loves another, and the same goes for the other crops. i suppose if you loaded the soil with chemical fertilizer these differences would be less noticeable, but i use it sparingly and only in rows right where seeds are planted rather than broadcast over the whole area. i'm not sure why i do this beyond the saving in fertilizer and my unwillingness to aid the weeds.
The attractions of gardening, i think, at least for a certain number of gardeners, are neurotic and moral. whenever life seems pointless and difficult to grasp, you can always get out in the garden and get something done. also, your paternal or maternal instincts come into play because helpless living things are depending on you, require training and encouragement and protection from enemies. in some cases, as with beans and cucumbers, your children—as it were—begin to turn upon you in massive numbers, growing more and more each morning and threatening to follow you into the house to strangle you in their vines.
Gardening is a moral occupation, as well, because you always start in spring resolved to keep it looking neat this year, just like the pictures in the catalogues. but by july, you once again face the chaos of unthinned carrots, lettuce and beets. this is when my wife becomes—openly now—mistress of the garden. a consumer of vast quantities of vegetables, she does the thinning and hand-cultivating
of the tiny plants. squatting, she patiently moves down
it is spring怎么读each row selecting which plants shall live and which she will cast aside.

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