Planting a garden must be in my blood

As someone who operated a printing shop many years, I often heard the expression, "Printer's ink gets in your blood."

I can vouch for that. It also gets on your trousers. And, heaven forbid, it sometimes gets on your Sunday-go-to-meetin' white shirt you forgot to take off. It also gets under your fingernails. I can also vouch for that too because it took several weeks for my fingernails to get free of ink after I unplugged the old press and called it quits.

I mention this because the season is upon us when I like to get dirty fingernails; it's garden-making-time.

I know there are many of you -- possibly most of you -- who enjoy digging in the dirt. They say it's a habit which has evolved over the centuries since mankind began tilling the soil. That must be true because it's an ingrained desire which surfaces each spring.

A week or so ago, I began clearing off my garden plot. C.F. Byrnes, who edited the then "Southwest American" newspaper in Fort Smith, often wrote about his "postage stamp garden." Mine qualifies for that description. It is small. But by early summer, I'm glad it's not larger because of the weeds and those pesky squash bugs, potato bugs and corn worms, to say nothing of those hot summer days. They all, individually or collectively, seem to take the spirit out of me.

But, in spite of that, the old yearning returns every spring. So here I am contemplating what to plant, and where, and at the same time begin looking for the fence charger and wire which has to be strung to keep the deer out of the tomatoes and peppers and green beans.

The rain (and, yes, another snow), forecast for this week end -- this is being written on Friday -- has put a little damper on my enthusiasm. But we do need the moisture and, if we get a good soaker, that will rejuvenate the spirit. Of course it will slow down working in the dirt.

So, I'll reminisce a bit. I remember my folks always put out a garden. How they managed to get lettuce seed in the ground on Valentine's Day in a special little plot and then have the ground worked up by a neighbor who brought his horse and plowed the soil, which he then harrowed, I've never figured out. My first job was to help pick up the clumps of sod that surfaced and also toss out any bigger rocks that always managed to arrive from China -- quite a trip through the earth to surface in Northwest Arkansas. Somehow, the spuds always managed to get in the ground on St. Patrick's Day.

I'm convinced there is so-called climate change from that time decades ago, since now the soil almost always is too wet to do anything until April. So there's no hurry to think about planting anything until income tax time.

I used to have an old tiller, which bombed. Then a friend gave me one a few years ago, and it bombed. I'm not much of a mechanic for fixing those things. I guess I'll grab the spading fork and, when it's dry enough, scratch out a little spot.

But back to the climate change. Of course there is climate change. There has been since the beginning, however many centuries ago that was. While many discount the idea of climate change, some so-called experts say it is caused by too much carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere which they say is caused by fossil fuels.

I'm convinced that any climate change is probably caused by the population explosion that has enveloped the earth. With billions and billions more people exhaling carbon dioxide, compared to the several million of a few centuries ago, that alone could throw the CO2 ratio out of balance. After all, we haven't stopped breathing, have we?

That's enough for this time. I'm quitting to go drool over those pictures in the seed catalog and decide on whether to go for broke and fill the postage stamp farm or just sit back and enjoy produce from the Farmer's Market.

Any bets?

Dodie Evans is the editor emeritus of the Westside Eagle Observer. He may be contacted by email at [email protected]. Opinions expressed are those of the author.