The Ground is Hard

    If there’s something I remember about childhood forced labor, I mean gardening, it’s that the date when it’s usually safe to plant things outside happens to fall on Mother’s day. I remember this mostly because the Fire Department my father was a volunteer at also held a Mother’s Day plant sale, where usually the children of the department members would tag along/become convinced that unpaid labor was exciting, and help sell. Yeah, I’m pretty sure that it was also a borderline child labor sweatshop, but outside and for a good cause, so totally okay. If there’s one thing I excel at, (aside from emasculating men at the hardware store, which is a story for another day) it’s selling azaleas to people who don’t want or need them.

    Having said that, NYC is so large and full of heat absorbing concrete that it’s actually warmer than 45 minutes east of here, which is vaguely where I grew up. This means that the last frost date hits much earlier than outside of the city. Yay heat island effects! This also means that I was way behind schedule and now that I had a plot and a key, SHIT GOT REAL.
    The first afternoon I turned over, by hand the plot, which for reference is about 20 feet by 6 feet. Yeah by hand. I’m not even sure farmers do things by hand anymore, they have donkeys or machines or donkey machines to do these things. And this dirt was hard, rock hard, like spent the last year making sweet love to concrete and their love child was the ground I was hopelessly trying to make into black gold, hard. Black gold in the nice rich soil sorta way, not the Texas T, moving to Hollywood with granny sorta way. But hoe I did. Please note hoed side and non-hoed side, NOTICE HOW ONE SIDE LOOKS LIKE CONCRETE??

    Two hours later, covered in dirt, sweaty in impossible ways and my back, actually broken, it was PLANTING TIME. After Saturday afternoon was a bust, because apparently 2pm on Saturday actually means 3pm on Sunday, I had salved my angry/enraged/broken heart with good old-fashion consumerism. I BOUGHT PLANTS. Tomatoes and cucumbers and squash and seeds for all sorts of things, so I got to plantin', which did not help with the whole covered in dirt part. So dirty.

    Next time we'll have the grand reveal, I'm writing up a diagram of sorts and we'll have photos of PLANTS IN THE GROUND.