Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Piers Anthony's Garbage Garden


We had a grindalator thing under the sink that chewed up stray kitchen garbage, but it broke, so I started taking the garbage out to compost in our little flower garden square in the back yard. That worked, and also led to spot gardening adventures. Some of those leftovers were alive, and grew: potatoes, tomatoes, squash, avocado. I care for them as well as I can, trying to give them their fair chance to find their destinies, but this is not native soil for most and they don't do all that well. We do get tomatoes on occasion, but freezes take out the avocados before they can get big enough to bear fruit. This year when I was about to cut up a radish for our supper salad I saw that it was sprouting, and I thought if it was that eager to grow I should let it, and I planted it. It put out a fine cluster of leaves. Then something ate them off. We do live in a forest; wild creatures come. But it survived and grew new leaves, and flowered with little white four-petaled flowers. Things like to dig up our freshly-buried garbage, so finally I laid chicken wire on the ground, making it undiggable, and that helped. Sometimes I dose the garbage with hot chile sauce. But mostly I just water it and it's on its own. It doesn't look like much, but it's not for show anyway. I'm a vegetarian because I don't like to hurt animals, but neither do I like to hurt plants unnecessarily.