Gardening should get you dirty

Let me be clear: I HATE shopping, and will put it off almost forever. Nevertheless, as has been true all too often this spring, I spent most of my gardening time yesterday in the car doing errands. Gardening time! In the car! Ack! More money than I care to admit has gone into the garden in the form of fencing, amendments, row covers, strawberries, and a dozen other items.

My voice lesson took me out towards the northwest end of town where the big box stores and the biggest nursery around both lie, so I swore to polish off a list of gardening errands. I reached Cashman’s at a point so close to six (closing time) that they could easily have closed the door in my face, but they didn’t, so I rounded up a strawberry planter, mesh climbers, and bamboo poles before my brain gave out on me, refusing to divulge what else it was that I needed. There was something else on the list I hadn’t had time to make…

“Take your time,” the two women still working urged me, and they seemed to mean it, though I was the last customer there.

They were running my credit card when I asked if they had rebar, the purpose of which was to hold up – “Row covers!!” That was it, the missing item. So I grabbed those too before heading off to Kenyon Noble, the local huge hardware store that can actually compete with Lowes and Home Depot.

There I bought twenty pieces of 3/8^th inch rebar, each twenty feet long, destined to support row covers through this unholy hail-y summer. My SO and I had bought rebar there before (it’s the framework for the greenhouse) and had managed to tie it down on the roof of the Subaru, but driving the few miles home with those long metal bars bouncing gently both before and behind was a bit nerve-racking. So when the fellow at the rebar rack fold me that they’d deliver the things for free the next day, who was I to object?

By the time I got home at nearly seven, it was time to make supper, so aside from a brief, sweaty stint earlier in the day securing the netting over the strawberry plots (after releasing a robin who’d somehow gotten underneath), my only garden tasks yesterday consisted of collecting lettuce for ourselves and one neighbor.

But then I got to make pesto from the three-year-old-parsley that won’t quit, plus cilantro gone wild. I swear, this parsley has delusions of being a tree. And this is the third cutting this spring. Ah well. If the rest of the garden fails, we can probably live all winter on the pesto that’s going into the freezer.