Growing Groceries

Growing Groceries would be a great name for a band. It only describes my gardening prowess if you define groceries as “enough to keep you alive, maybe, but you’d be mighty gaunt.” Some seasons are more productive than usual, others aren’t quite makin’ it to the pennant race, if you catch my drift. I get a feeling you do. You can find a way to relate just about everything in life to baseball, and you probably wont have to think too hard about it.

So maybe I strayed in the off-season…not properly closing-up shop, putting the earth to rest, tending to the soil in preparation for the next planting season? Aw hell no! Football is on, that green-thumb crap can wait! Order some pizzas, I’m runnin’ for more beer! And so it goes.

So I show-up for Spring Training, out of shape and overrun with weeds, wondering where to begin with this mess. And the raking, hoeing tilling and turning commence, yanking and chopping until the rows are ready to receive and nurture tiny seeds and seedlings to a Major League maturity. The outfield grass trim like a tight green crew-cut, the mound pristine, a fresh rosin bag awaits. What will I pitch this year?

Of course, in the game of vegetable gardening, I didn’t throw the fist pitch until May first. Late in the game, but at last my towering tomato plants have some fruit turning color, the eggplant look to be on their way and we’ve already sliced a couple cucumbers, and there are more on the way, as they seem to not be bothered by the heat so far. I have several pepper plants of various varieties, but they’ve struggled to get much beyond tennis-ball size. Hey, sometimes you’re gonna have men left on base, not every manager is a Hall of Famer!

That ‘mater