The great thing about a garden is how quickly it humbles you. You make these perfect plans on paper only to find out that due to forces beyond your control they just won't work.
Thursday night this was the plan - spend an hour at the garden mixing compost into the soil and laying down mulch (newspaper covered with cocoa bean shells). I figured that wetting the newspaper down as we went along would be enough to keep it from blowing away until we were ready to pour the cocoa bean shell mulch on top. Apparently not.
So my carefully thought out plan of laying down three layers of newspaper with cocoa bean shell mulch on top in one hour turned into a frantic hour and a half of Matt and I holding down the corners of newspaper sheets with one hand while trying to reach into the mulch bags to throw cocoa bean shells on the other corners. Sometimes while one of us had the hose, spraying down the sheets as we went. Which still turned their corners up into the wind, leaving rumpled blank spots in our weed barrier.
But in the end things mostly worked out, as you can see here. What's all that white pipe you see? An experiment I'll explain another day.
This isn't the first time the garden has stymied my best efforts. The first year I learned that while your seeds come up, so do a bunch of other weeds that also have two leaves and look remarkably like the herb you're trying to grow. I ended up digging up that whole corner of the garden and letting volunteer dill take over. (Fresh dill is lovely in a salad even if you don't like dill pickles.) The second year, my herb garden failed miserably, but that left room for my neighbor's yellow pear tomato plant to lean over the fence and introduce me to what is still my favorite variety of tomato. The third year my squash plants died an untimely death due to some very nasty looking worm things and instead I planted a pineapple sage plant that was leftover from someone else's garden. We're still using the dried pineapple sage from that little plant which grew into a small bush.
All of this proves that line from that old song, "You might not get what you want, but you might get what you need". And this is why everyone should garden at least once. :)
