Where corn don’t grow…
…by which I mean not once again to defend the voice and career of Travis Tritt, though I still think the body of his work is worth defending.
…by which I mean to type sadly that the three and a half rows of corn we put in some weeks back haven’t come up. Probably the spring rains washed them out, or caused them to rot in the ground; possibly birds got at the seed, but I doubt it.
So, when we get back from a little jaunt to one of the places I used to live, we’ll plant corn again. And beans.
Yesterday, just before the rains came back — we’ve been planting all spring in very tiny windows when the sun has been out long enough for the ground to be dry enough to work and walk on — we got two rows of tomatoes in the ground, along with a few basil plants (they grow well together; on the second row we stuck a basil plant between breeds just to keep the organization somewhat coherent…then we took the rash step of actually planting surveyors’ flags and marking out what we’d planted!). That amounts to about 50 plants, plus the half dozen we spotted that we’d forgotten about, and so we stuck them down were some of the blackberries didn’t make it. Not sure the tomatoes will like that soil, but it was what we had to offer. And then the rain came again.
Which reminds me, oddly enough, that I saw and deleted an e-mail about some new Scott Walker retrospective DVD something-or-other.
And so it goes.
Everything is, at least, green. And the potatoes came up, most of them, which was a bit of a surprise because we’d thought THEY had rotted in the ground. Instead, they look healthy as all get-out. The last couple days we’ve hoed (my father-in-law has hoed, that is) and surrounded those rows with shredded paper, by way of mulch. The paper is free from the recycling center here, and I note the irony of an old magazine guy covering potatoes with shredded newsprint.
My ancestors, way back in County Cork, are probably laughing.