Grasshopper

I'm sure you're familiar with the story of the Ant and Grasshopper, where the ant works all summer and the grasshopper plays and thinks the ant is a chump. At the end of the season, the ant has plenty of food and the grasshopper is in a panic.

I HATE THAT STORY

Because I am always the Grasshopper. I am forever leaving things, blocking them out of my mind, thinking other people are chumps for paying attention to them and working hard, etc.

This time of year makes me sad, because other people are bringing in a lovely harvest of vegetables and enjoying their beautiful yards. I have weeds and rogue trees as tall or taller than me, sunken vegetable gardens full of clay, and weeds and crap everywhere.

I was owning it and taking control of it, looking up directions for raised planter beds and Zone 3 late-harvest plants that I can start now....and then I got another whack. So many of these things call for compost.

I have been composting for 2 years. I don't mean I've been out there turning and balancing and checking it, I mean I've been dumping shit in a pile for 2 years. Seemed easier. There are whole melons, logs, potatoes, etc in there. It's full of slime and mold and bugs. I figured underneath it would be that magical composted "black gold" but nope. Underneath is.......last year's melons, potatoes, logs, and a shitload of slimy heaven-knows-what.

Turns out when I read 6 articles on composting and decided they were all too damn much work and that I'd create my own new method....I was wrong. You actually DO need to do that turning and balancing and greens and browns and stuff in order to get compost.

This happens yearly with weeds in the yard too. I don't really go in the areas of the yard that grow a lot of weeds---if I don't see them, they're not there. And if I haven't planted anything, nothing is growing. Right? Wrong. I spent several hours yesterday hacking down trees and huge weeds and crazy shit I didn't even recognize.

It occurred to me that this may be why when I try to plant things, they don't grow, because the weeds have sucked out all the nutrients.

I've also assumed that weeds are just like plants that you plant---if you ignore them, they go away. This is apparently untrue.

I also find that gardening directions are unhelpfully vague. "Water frequently". Well, to me, watering frequently is once a week. I still am bitter over the rosemary tree I had that directed me to "water INfrequently" and died before the first scheduled every-two-weeks watering. Watering every day is more like "water constantly" or "water ceaselessly" or "water every time you brush your teeth" (I guess that would be twice a day).

The compost directions, too, said that I should dig up under the bottom of the pile occassionally. I've only been doing this for two years and I DID IN FACT dig up under the pile once. Isn't that "occassionally"?

And for a third example, the wildflower packets I bought said for "optimum" performance to till, lighten, compost the soil, and water three times a week. I figured I'd be cool with "mediocre" performance so I just threw the seeds down, soaked the hell out of them, and came back in a few weeks. Nothing grew. That is not what I call even "mediocre" performance! That's crappy performance!

So yeah, I'm bitter. Other people follow the directions and put in effort and get nice things. I laugh at those people and slack off and I do not get those nice things. And I do not learn.