I've released chapbooks about dieting, and the holidays, and this week brings my latest venture: Longo Looks at . . . Gardening. But to be honest with you, I'm kind of tired of having a garden year after year.
I've written before about why I do it every year: I have fond memories of the family garden Mom and Kim and I did year after year. (Dad had to run the farm, but even he got in on the planting, putting in a pumpkin patch every spring so his two daughters could sell them on the front lawn every fall.) See? Even typing this paragraph makes me smile. That's why every Memorial Day, you can find me outside, poking seeds into soil.
The problem is, I tend to get so caught up in those happy childhood memories that I forget everything else that goes along with putting in a garden. Like the weeding, and the mulching, and the worms.
Oh, the worms.
See, I call them worms, but they're really larvae, I think. And every vegetable has its own special kind. the corn gets these pale squirmy horrors, curled up in a slimy mess where kernels used to be. You have to have a keen eye or you might bite into one. Yecch.
The broccoli and cauliflower are no better. Their grubs blend in even more, so that you have to soak the heads in salt water to get the jade green broccoli bugs and white-as-snow cauliflower caterpillars to release their hold on your vegetables. (Honestly, they'd be remarkably beautiful if they weren't hiding in our food.) And who wants to eat anything after seeing thirty worm corpses float out of it? Not me. In my decades of gardening, I've never actually eaten one floret of the cauliflower I've grown. Double yecch.
Finally, there are the tomato hornworms. These buggers actually carry their eggs on their back. They're something right out of a horror story, which may be why I often write in that genre--these little serpentine monsters, crawling along with a hundred white eggs sticking up out of their flesh, fueled many a nightmare in my youth. Every May, I plant a tomato plant or two, and as soon as the first tomato gets a blush of orange on its skin and these suckers show up, I yank the plants up by the root and throw them in the woods.
So why bother doing it every year, you ask? Because despite all these icky worms, I still have it stuck in my head that gardening is fun.
My mother and sister, incidentally, haven't have gardens for years. Too many worms.
Want to read more? Pick up your copy of Longo Looks at . . . Gardening on May 5, when it gets unleashed upon the world! Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and wherever books are sold.
I've written before about why I do it every year: I have fond memories of the family garden Mom and Kim and I did year after year. (Dad had to run the farm, but even he got in on the planting, putting in a pumpkin patch every spring so his two daughters could sell them on the front lawn every fall.) See? Even typing this paragraph makes me smile. That's why every Memorial Day, you can find me outside, poking seeds into soil.
The problem is, I tend to get so caught up in those happy childhood memories that I forget everything else that goes along with putting in a garden. Like the weeding, and the mulching, and the worms.
Oh, the worms.
See, I call them worms, but they're really larvae, I think. And every vegetable has its own special kind. the corn gets these pale squirmy horrors, curled up in a slimy mess where kernels used to be. You have to have a keen eye or you might bite into one. Yecch.
The broccoli and cauliflower are no better. Their grubs blend in even more, so that you have to soak the heads in salt water to get the jade green broccoli bugs and white-as-snow cauliflower caterpillars to release their hold on your vegetables. (Honestly, they'd be remarkably beautiful if they weren't hiding in our food.) And who wants to eat anything after seeing thirty worm corpses float out of it? Not me. In my decades of gardening, I've never actually eaten one floret of the cauliflower I've grown. Double yecch.
Finally, there are the tomato hornworms. These buggers actually carry their eggs on their back. They're something right out of a horror story, which may be why I often write in that genre--these little serpentine monsters, crawling along with a hundred white eggs sticking up out of their flesh, fueled many a nightmare in my youth. Every May, I plant a tomato plant or two, and as soon as the first tomato gets a blush of orange on its skin and these suckers show up, I yank the plants up by the root and throw them in the woods.
So why bother doing it every year, you ask? Because despite all these icky worms, I still have it stuck in my head that gardening is fun.
My mother and sister, incidentally, haven't have gardens for years. Too many worms.
Want to read more? Pick up your copy of Longo Looks at . . . Gardening on May 5, when it gets unleashed upon the world! Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and wherever books are sold.
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