Twenty Reasons Not To Garden (And Why I Ignore Them All) by Ruggenberg Luke

Author:Ruggenberg, Luke [Ruggenberg, Luke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-07-15T03:00:00+00:00

Reason #11

Zero Chance Of Iced Teastorms

So it's hot out. Well, at least 90°F—is that hot for you? We'll say it's whatever passes for hot where you come from. In the Pacific Northwest, anything over 75 is considered hot. (And anything under 70 is cold; we don't do extremes here.) In any case, it's way too hot out. You just spent eight or more hours on your feet, out in the aforementioned hotness, veiled in a half-inch slathering of SPF 300. Working. Maybe your job involves lifting and moving hundreds of plants while doling out sweat-stained shreds of customer service to red-faced patrons—maybe not. But probably, in this case, it does.

You are dehydrated, on the verge of heat stroke. Maybe you start to hear voices.

Find a new job! they might say. You've made unwise career choices!

But then, just when you can take no more—salvation. It's quitting time. That's right, you're free!

You tear off clothes even as you stagger to your car—which, if 90° is too hot, then the inside of your car is, by this point, a fully-functioning kiln. This is a perfect opportunity to bake any unfired pottery you have lying around. Once on the road, you suffer hallucinations the whole traffic-snarled, asphalt-melting commute home.

Your visions are of snowstorms and iced tea—iced teastorms. Sometime later, and no time later (for time has ceased to exist; it melted, Dali-esque, somewhere on the freeway on-ramp), you arrive home. You stagger through the door, half-naked and delirious. Now, at long last, you may assert some measure of control over your own (dis)comfort. You get to choose how to unwind, how to cool off, how to relax.

So what do you do?

The sane person has any number of perfectly reasonable options. Take a cold shower; draw the blinds and turn off the lights; watch TV; find the sweet spot between three oscillating fans; stick your head in the freezer. Even for those courageous—or masochistic—enough to return outside, there are numerous refreshments available: go jump in a lake; sit in the shade with a keg of iced tea (someone's gotta make that iced teastorm dream a reality); follow the creepy, warped siren-call of your local ice cream truck and rediscover popsicles; skulk to a big-box store and splurge on an AC unit you'll use two weeks out of the year; stop by the kids-only wading pool at the city park and act like a proud parent; linger in the cool rush of air conditioned store fronts.

All great choices. But since no gardener has ever been mistaken for a sane person, I have this nagging suspicion you do something else, don't you? Because the garden does not take days off, after all, and, after all, that lilac stump you cut down weeks ago isn't going to just dig itself out.

Brilliant! Yes, that's what you, in your fevered idiocy, decide to do—remove a stump. In the most merciless, sun-broiled corner of the yard, at the hottest time of day you lug out the pick and mattock and REMOVE A STUMP.

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