HOW TO GARDEN ON A GAY PROUD DAY

You look at a patch of ground in the yard and wonder, ‘could that mess every grow anything worthwhile, worth eating?’

So you throw some seeds one year, sprinkle some water.

And nothing.

After hardscaping with walls and patios, cleared space to grow vegetables one proud day, you end up with a bowl of rocks.

It’s not fair, not right, and not what you expected. But you did it wrong and won’t admit it until one proud day.

Then you get to work the right way.

Instead of dropping seeds on a hard packed dirt strip with a gravel locked top layer, break out the pick, the pick axe, the chopper.

Just don’t chop any wires or irrigation hoses while you’re at it. You wear gloves? Check. Use a steel pry bar with a knob tip opposite the spike end? Check. But still you feel something on your hand.

If you feel something in you gloved hand, it’s a blister. STOP doing whatever caused the blister.

Check out the hand, then adapt your grip. Use the spike to lever up the stone pathway, then check your hand again.

Now you’ve got skin in the game? Now it means more? It’s got your attention on this proud day.

But it hurts.

While you tend the wounded hand your glove takes on a life of it’s own. It made you stop, and now it’s taunting you?

With the left hand.

Listen, you don’t have to take that.

With a saw and screws you turn a small pile of lumber into a box, a raised garden bed. The proud day just got better.

But it’s too high, which means a ton of dirt to fill. Unless you crawl around under yard bushes and rake up piles of old leaves then run them through the vacuum attachment to your blower.

Leaves turn into mulch and fills up the box more.

Your proud day attitude is changing with the amount of work it takes to make something that might work. Or will work.

It looks like a casket with the top off? Good, time to bury the ignorance you started with when you dropped seeds and expected a garden. Not. The. Way. It. Works.

See, you’ building a garden box, not just a box or casket, or storage unit. Food grows here if you nurture it correctly.

Part of that is filling the final inches with a combo bag of dirt and compost and nutrients. Maybe ten bags.

Spread the dirt evenly and keep filling until you’re near the top. Since the leaves will shrink, the dirt will drop down.

Add a drip hose to the plant starts you buy and wait. The sun shines, rain pours, and you are now an official gardener this proud day.

Thank you for reading this far, because this post isn’t about gardening, it’s about planting the right seeds to create a garden.

Skip any part here and you’ll end with a stretch of dirt holding the same weeds you started with.

Speaking of same weeds, my regular readers know my hometown of North Bend, Oregon. It’s on the southwest Oregon coast near Coos Bay. If you’re not a regular here, but heard about North Bend in the past few days, then you heard about these high school girls.

They live where I grew up, going the high school I graduated from. For longer than ‘anyone’ knew they’ve been hearing about their life choices. Were they hearing it from their parents? Their clergy? Maybe, but the news is hearing it from, brace yourself, their school principal.

Now North Bend High School gets a new principal, along with a new police officer, on campus. The two men couldn’t see the value in their students’ choices and let them know. The lack of  value seeped out when the two young women had had as much as they wanted.

Their outcome reminds me of the white skinned California lady who called police on people barbecuing in her vicinity, people who didn’t share her skin shade.

It reminds me of the more recent ‘My next call will be to ICE’ man who heard people speaking Spanish, or the border patrol man in another part of the country who heard a language other than English and jumped into action.

If two gay people are in high school, that makes them a target? No. Should it? Again, no.

When social media savvy administrators and officials hear national leaders speak of people as ‘animals’, and when his second in command gets praise from the top with ‘don’t ask him about gay rights, he wants to hang ’em‘, and the chief refers to shithole places people immigrate to America from, there is a trickle down effect.

Anyone can feel empowered. Why not make personal empowerment a useful tool.

There’s no more empowered high school students in America than the kids from the Florida school shooting. North Bend High School just upped the ante on empowerment.

Good job, ladies.