There’s a famous New Yorker cartoon that pictures an old tire, a can, a bottle and a pencil on a flat, featureless landscape–save a few nondescript rocks–that stretches to dull gray clouds on the horizon. The caption reads, “Life without Mozart.” The most chilling part of this drawing (if you’re me), is that it uncannily evokes my own yard.
Read moreI’m not always the sharpest trowel in the garden bucket, but even I have noticed a recent trend in horticulture. Suddenly, gardening experts are getting all “sciencey” and stuff about growing things, and they’re debunking conventional wisdom left and right. If you do a search on the Intertubes for “garden myths,” you will see that there are more debunked myths about gardening than there are actual facts. And, as we all know, the Intertubes are the place you go for Science! and The Truth. And cat videos.
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It’s been that kind of year. I’ve been breaking all sorts of personal rules. I don’t know what came over me when I put actual information into this column (see Jul/August). I think I was suffering from a summer fever. And here I go again. I never repeat column ideas, but I’m reprising my holiday sing-along. Maybe it was the letter from the woman who said she read my songs and couldn’t stop crying. Or perhaps it was the letter from my editor who said, “If you don’t have a column to us by tomorrow, we’re putting a monkey at a keyboard and seeing what he produces.”
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If it weren’t for the holiday season, we probably would have legislated the month of December out of existence long ago. It’s not exactly a month that makes gardeners salivate–unless you’re a poinsettia freak, which is even more cause for worry.
So while you’re counting days until you can begin killing plants again (indoor varieties notwithstanding), I’ve come up with a few songs you can sing around the artificial fire in your living room. I’ve appropriated the music from some holiday songs for two reasons: 1) you already know the melodies, and 2) I don’t have to pay royalties.
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We are rapidly approaching Corn-Phlegma-Plethora-Terminus-Ucopia and I’m sure that all of you are planning big parties for this beloved annual gardening event. Basically, CPPTU or “C-Ptui!” (as it is popularly known) marks that time late in the year when we begin to realize that we don’t have anywhere close to enough storage space to save all of the stuff we’re about to harvest and we’re really not interested in spending the next three months chained to a cutting board inside the canning kitchen pickling Tree of Heaven root and making used-leather-sandal jerky simply because the editors of Organic Flotsam Magazine claim it can be done.
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