Gardening for Stupid People

June, 2009

By Jim

The first sign of Spring I get the shovel and start digging up the ground. Usually, the first person walking by says, “Digging a garden?”

“No.” I answer, “I’ve been hired by Pennzoil looking for fossil fuel.”

“Oh!” he says and smiles.

Just a few minutes later, a lady walks by, “Garden?”

“No. The wife wants a pool.”

“You don’t have to be sarcastic!” she says.

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

As I was digging, I thought of all the stupid things that people had said and done. I remember last year a man asked me if the plants took much water. I told him, “Just enough for them to get wet.” He didn’t like that.

Word has gotten around the coffee shop I go to. Everyone knows I grow lots of tomatoes and a small amount of plants. Some People just want to argue. They ask me what kind of plants to get and I tell them. They say, “Oh, they aren’t any good.”

I had a man call from out of state to tell me that there was no such thing as tomato food. I sent him a box of if. I’ve never heard from him again.

I have a big fence around my beans, radishes, squash, watermelons, tomatoes. I buy little white fences to go around my flower gardens. I still have footprints in the dirt. People step over the fences and say, “Garden?”

“No.” Just a little white fence.