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Norman needs to come and pull the damn dandelions. They're everywhere and they are starting to flower. If he waits too long, they'll go to seed and it will be his damn fault when my lettuces are choked in dandelions. I'm sure that Norman is a perfectly nice guy and all, but I'm going to have it in for him if his dandelions, which are starting to grow as though they were a fertilized crop, move across the path and start staking out a front line in my 100 square feet of garden patch.
There's been a lot of bitchiness around the garden lately. It started with the weeding, We got a mail a few weeks back suggesting that weeding needed to happen when it was inconvenient for the weeds, not convenient for us. Oh, I read between the lines of that. It was clear that someone was not doing his or her fair share of the weeding. And no doubt the poison pen was also concerned about the burgeoning dandelion crop. Perhaps they saw my fragile lettuce seedlings and became incensed on their behalf.
Then there was the business with the compost. There are a lot of new folks in the garden and they don't know the rules about composting. I'm not surprised, seeing as you have to have a fucking syllabus just to figure out what to read about composting the correct way for this garden. The first complaints were about too much dirt in the compost. Things don't decompose as well when there's lots of dirt in there, plus, it's a trial to pick up the bin and turn it over, it's just too damn heavy. The garden is populated primarily by modest sized women, and we don't have the strength to be hurling bins full of wet dirt around.
The second frenzy of email was about weeds. Someone had been blissfully unaware that weeds were not to be composted. Perhaps they'd been composting dandelions, which, as everyone knows, need to be bagged up as yard waste and taken to an underground bunker in Utah. At any rate, there was much heated discussion about what, if anything, could be composted. No kitchen waste, it attracts rats. No noxious weeds. I'm not sure what's left to compost seeing as how we're going to eat everything else. It's a miracle that we have any compost at all; it must be made from air and leaves that blow in to the bin from the surrounding trees. Perhaps it's made from the spindly vines from last year's tomato plants. Perhaps it's carrot tops, cut in the garden, so as to make them count as garden waste, not kitchen waste. Who knows? Like I said, you have to have a thesis in composting around these people.
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| Paul weeding the common pathways |
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Finally there was the business around the hoses. When you're done watering, you empty out the hose of all water in the line, turn it off, and roll it up. Don't be thinking that the pressure shutoff valve on the sprayer is enough to count as off, it's not. Don't be thinking that rolling up the hose is enough. If you haven't bothered to empty it, you haven't attended to the needs of the hose. Oh, and in case you've forgotten, get all that dirt off the tools before you return them to the shed. Hey, you, the HOSE, then the tools, okay?
You'd think that messing around in the dirt and making things grow would foster a sense of peaceful community. I'm not sure that's the case. One woman expressed her feelings about the rest of the gardeners quite openly by putting on her Walkman and refusing to communicate with one person the entire morning of the scheduled workday. Friendly, no? And Norman, he of the dandelions, didn't even show up, though it was actually that same Norman that scheduled the workday. What a community.
As we were working through our issues related to composting and tools and hose care, there was plenty of time for other subject matter. We heard all about the third grade class that comes to work in the garden. They're beside themselves, so excited about the garden that you cannot have a normal volume conversation when they're there. They shout and jump around and poke at every worm, bug, and seedling. They hurl seed in to the beds with no direction. They make funny little signs - Snap Pees - which doubtless they think are hilarious. They drive their teacher to distraction.
We heard about a trip to Venice in which one of the travelers complained about too many bridges. Too many museums. Too many paintings. We heard about a dog who's not much of a dog's dog, but rather, more of a cat's dog. We heard about Norman who's always busy doing stuff with his kids. The neighbors walked by and said good morning and smiled at us. We smiled back. We're not all that bad. Save Norman. He'd better come and get his dandelions out of there.
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