Post #94
Part 4: Good Advice, Bad Advice, and News About Investment People (continued)
Gardening doesn’t save money
Having a back yard garden is not a good way to save money. You think that all the produce will lower your grocery costs. But you forget about the cost of actually growing the garden! So you should raise vegetables only for the psychological benefits.
I can’t believe how much my wife loves her garden. She gets an incredible sense of satisfaction seeing the vegetables grow.
I get a different sense. It’s called pain!
Putting a fence around the garden is not fun. It costs about $250 in materials for an eight foot fence to surround a 15 by 20 foot garden. It’s got to be eight feet high to discourage the deer from turning the garden into a salad bar. Even then, they can get in via other methods. Sometimes they hang around near the gate, hiding behind the shrubs. They slip in unnoticed when you go to weed. One deer tried to parachute in last summer. Luckily the wind shifted and he wound up putting a hoof through my neighbor’s roof.
Rototilling hurts. First you have to go to the local rental place and find a tiller that fits in your car. Unless you drive a four by four truck, you wind up with a little one. The little ones weigh about two pounds and just skip along the top of the soil. This means you have to push the blades of the tiller into the hard, semi-frozen, unyielding ground as they are spinning. Try doing that for two hours when your usual exercise is hoisting a wine glass and a remote control.
Then you have to help the wife dig holes for the seedlings. OK, they are small holes. But digging is not fun unless you find buried treasure.
After a few weeks, if it doesn’t rain too much, but it rains enough, and the rabbits don’t sneak through the fence you then get to weed and do a little harvesting.
- I try to be in another location (like Montana) when the weeds come up, but sometimes I forget to book a flight and get roped into the weeding. Then I get to spend four sessions at the chiropractor’s office while he makes a few adjustments so I can stand normally again.
- Harvesting also requires a lot of stooped labor. Just pick one bag of bush beans and it’s back to the chiropractor, who just bought a small yacht from the fees I’ve paid him during the gardening season.
When the kids were younger we had a much bigger garden and always planted too much.
We used to grow four zucchini plants each year. What normal family can possible eat the fruits of four zucchini plants? We got so much zucchini that we had to give it away. We loaded the kids into a little red wagon, covered them with zucchini, gave them breathing straws so they wouldn’t smother, and marched down the street. All of our neighbors got vegetables. After a week or two, the neighbors heard the squeak of the wagon wheels as we made our rounds. They drew their curtains and locked their doors. Nobody was home in our entire neighborhood.
What to do with the extra zucchini? We set up a zucchini stand in our driveway. Our daughter, who could sell sand to Arabs and ice to Eskimos, was not able to give away our produce. So the wife uncovered recipes for zucchini soup, zucchini fritters, zucchini cookies, zucchini popcorn, zucchini a la mode, and zucchini under glass. At night, I would sneak out to our garden and secretly feed birth control pills to the zucchini plants, anything to stop them from producing.
My wife also grew lots of eggplant. I had never heard of eggplant until I moved from Queens, New York to the wilds of New Jersey. Of course, most people in New Jersey didn’t know what a vanilla egg cream was, so that evened things out a bit. Since my wife is from Yonkers, I can’t even imagine where she ever got the idea that eggplants were something that normal people ate. Nobody in Yonkers ate eggplant. Egg Foo Young maybe, but not eggplant.
Anyway, I didn’t like the idea of growing eggplant or eating anything that contained eggplant. It had a funny color. Who ever heard of purple vegetables? It was too mushy when it was cooked. It gave me cholera, or warts or something like that. No matter, we grew plenty of eggplant. Every night we played hide and seek. The wife would hide eggplant somewhere in the dinner, and the kids and I would try to identify it and drop it on the floor.
We complained so much that the wife went on a cooking strike. That was bad. We survived for three days eating my dining concoctions. Then the kids threw in the towel. I held out for another twenty minutes, to show them that I was made of sterner stuff. Then I also surrendered. After that, it was eggplants R Us.
Tomatoes were the coup de grace in the garden. Each year we planted twelve, yes I said twelve, tomato plants. I tried to cage them. I thought it would limit the output. But the suckers grew right through the bars of the cages. Every year, all the tomatoes ripened within eight minutes of each other, on the third Thursday in August. This has always meant one thing, tomato sauce.
I hate making tomato sauce. It takes about three days. First you have to pick about three thousand tomatoes. Then you have to throw them in a pot of boiling water. We usually build a fire under the upstairs Jacuzzi and use that as our pot. The tomatoes scream when you throw them in. It’s a terrible thing to hear. Come to think of it, the noise actually comes from me. I always throw the tomatoes into the Jacuzzi a little too hard and splatter myself with scalding spray. That hurts!
After a few minutes, you have to take the tomatoes out of the hot water and peel them. They don’t like being peeled. They squirm and slide and try to get away. You can’t let them slide through your grasp or you get The Glare! The Glare is a look that my father experimented with, which my wife has perfected. I can feel The Glare burn through me as I chase an escaping, half naked tomato into the dining room.
When the tomatoes are all peeled, and lie shivering on the sideboard, you have to take out the seeds. I can’t tell you the anguish I feel as I take one after another of the poor little things and squeeze them until their many little seedies pop out. How many future generations of these tomatoes have been squashed by my calloused fingers, I can’t tell you.
Finally, you chuck the tomatoes in a blender, turn them into puree, and hand them to your wife, the master sauce maker. What unspeakable acts she commits from that point on, I do not know. I usually run from the kitchen after the puree part. But I do know that the result tastes great, so I don’t lose too much sleep. Unfortunately, three days work with three thousand tomatoes results in about a half a cup of sauce, so the rewards are fleeting.
As I write this, I am remembering the smell of tomato sauce coming from the kitchen. It was a wonderful smell.
These days, our garden is a lot smaller. Thank God for little favors. The wagon is rusting in the basement, the wheels still squeak. The kids no longer are here to play hide the eggplant. The neighbors are out of town, just in case we try to share with them.
But the garden still costs a lot more money to maintain than it saves you on grocery bills. I did the rototilling for this year’s crop last April and I’m still walking like a man carrying a 50 pound stone on his back. Got to get to the chiropractor!
