SPRINGTIME MUST BE my favorite time of year. When even though the days are getting longer, there aren’t enough hours in the day to get all the chores done.
The most important, given the economic uncertainty of our modern world of the future, just might be the vegetable garden. There’s nothing like harvesting your own vegetables to give you a sense of hope for the future.
Raising a garden can be a lot like writing a column. You want to use a lot of fertilizer and lay it on thick.
Gone are the days when you could back down to the river and fork up a truckload of spawned-out salmon for fertilizer.
Once the salmon were gone, we shoveled cow manure from the dairy farms.
Once the dairy farms were gone, we shifted to horse manure.
For years, the debate has raged over which manure is the best for gardening.
Horse manure is certainly the most expensive if you factor in the hidden costs of fencing, vet visits and medical bills.
Given the fact that very few people who own a horse ever actually ride them, manure may be a horse’s only redeeming feature.
It’s worth whatever it costs.
I’ve used cougar dung for fertilizer.
It’s easy to drive around and scoop it up from the middle of logging roads, but you’d have to put in a lot of miles to get a truckload.
Cougar dung is usually chock full of deer hair, which holds water like mother nature’s vermiculite.
Using cougar dung for fertilizer might even keep the deer away, but there is no money-back guarantee.
Once you’ve got your fertilizer for the garden, it’s time to plow it up. Your garden had better be plowed by the time you read this or else you’ll be in deep trouble like me.
One day, the soil was as soupy as a tide flat.
Overnight, it hardened into a Pleistocene concrete you’d need a stick of dynamite to bust up enough to get a plow through.
I should have known the fancy tilling machine I borrowed from the flatlander would not cut the mustard.
It sank in a damp spot, hit a rock, slipped a belt and flipped its lid.
After a couple of weeks, the guy said he wanted his machine back.
That’s not being neighborly.
Why would someone want their tools back after they loaned them out fair and square in the first place?
Man has been a tool user for millions of moons.
With recent advances in radiocarbon dating and computerized telemetry data, archaeologists have determined that most of the tools used by early man were borrowed.
This is my story.
Once the tilling machine broke down, I said to heck with it and decided to spade the garden by hand with a shovel.
Unfortunately, I have never been able to find a shovel that fit my hands, and if I injured my hands with an ill-fitting shovel, I might not be able to write good.
And besides, someone borrowed my shovel and didn’t bring it back.
Some people are like that. They have absolutely no consideration.
Eventually or theoretically, once you get the garden fertilized and plowed, it’s time to plant.
Deciding what to plant is crucial since the Olympic Peninsula is overrun with pests and varmints that include everything from the 6-inch-long banana slugs to the 600-pound, furry locusts we call elk.
I try to plant stuff they won’t eat, but they seem to eat everything.
All of which leads to my final tip for the beginning gardener — give up.
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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.
He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.
