GODS IN THE GARDEN

You know how it is when you garden with no fence yet, but with deer, wild pigs and monkeys around, plus you're an eclectic kind of person, all sorts of stuff going on in head and out, you try any number of things, and in the nature of eclecticity often rather haphazardly-- depends on the day and whether you've had coffee or what, all matters of interest somehow, and now and then - almost inevitably - you forget some of all that stuff, like what specific carrots or where kinds of potatoes?

Well early last autumn I planted a few different kinds of interesting but uncommunicative carrot seeds and intriguing but mute seed potatoes here and there where space was available at the time - this was all pro tem back then in the imminent garden - and covered them all with hoops and netting.

Then a few months later during the grandgirls' visit they plucked some of the carrots and I weeded the potatoes once, then as winter passed and the snow deepened my mind drifted hibernationally away from the garden and closer to the woodstove, and I became somehow of the impression that the potatoes would revive in spring, send up new leaves and grow some more, to be harvested maybe somewhen early to mid-summer or maybe later, there would be a sign from a benevolent garden deity or something, gardening can be vague in a lot of ways; a bag of seed potatoes is not very communicative. Queries such as 'And where are you from, little potato?' or 'How do I grow you and when will your progeny be ready?' are met with that profound spud silence.

So I figured six months or thereabouts, what do I know, I could look it up on the net but they're already planted, I'll find out, what's the hurry, the gods will speak. You laugh. Well, I was out there a couple days ago learning what the edge of spring does to winter spinach, and through the netting noticed in one of the barren-topped potato mounds alongside there what looked like the skin of a potato showing through, where the Baron had been trying to push a hoof through the net and get at the spinach (which appears to be speeding up). I went out there later with the pitchfork to investigate the potato innuendo, and to my late winter amazement, from that one mound dug up 4 softball-sized potatoes. There are lots of ready potatoes out there in the ground, right now.

That's how I learned that the Baron is a garden deity.