VEGETABLE TRAFFIC

OK, OK, so I overdid it on the tubers. That can happen at the farm store when you stand in front of 10 different potato varieties to choose from quick before they're all sold out, but now my garden is full of stuff growing anew or just finishing up while I tap my foot beside the rows because I still have three bags of planting potatoes sprouting in the tool shed.

Potatoes never heard of wristwatches, understandably, but they always know what time it is; you can't fool them even in the dark, they're right at home in there tapping their own little sprouty feet while I'm out here telling my spinach and other greens to get cracking, urging my onions on toward bulbhood, what do they think this is, a public park, get them to hurry up and bolt or bulb so I can pull them up for lunch or dinner or storage and have new room for potatoes, but impatience has no place in gardeners, only in vegetables, and the potatoes are impatient.

They're on a fixed schedule after all, it's built in, they're on their hardwired way down the long and endless potato road, they have their destination all planned out and can't stop for my little traffic problems, they're not gonna restrain themselves for my convenience, they have their job to do and that's all that matters to a potato; they're gonna do it with or without me. There's nothing more dedicated than a tuber whose time has come.

So it's too angsty now, opening the tool shed door and seeing those eager wide-eyed sprouts ready to go, just pushing their pale way out through the net bags, purpling as they reach for the garden, so I don't open the tool shed much anymore I can't bear it, at night I toss and turn and it's not just potatoes you know, its beans, cucumbers, squash, tomatoes, it's a long alphabet and it doesn't end with zucchini.

I've got a vegetable traffic jam going here, and I'm not used to being a vegetable cop. Maybe I need a uniform...