Read by Michael Flamel

I have had a GREAT year in my little garden.

For which I SHOULD feel guilty.

That garden, you see, really IS (as I have previously reported/claimed) carved out of a small corner of old-growth forest. I had to take down about six trees to clear the space (less than half of which ‘counted’: two because they were on respirators already, one because it looked like its health insurance was going to run out at around four that afternoon and one because it was a larch-the mistake of the tree world: an evergreen that loses its needles and looks like The dog’s breakfast all Winter long; what a great idea!) which only left me with about 637 on an acre-and-a-half property, most of them somehow right behind my poor garden . . .

AND there’s a row of HUGELY tall pines across the road whose only purpose in life is to keep that nasty morning sun off the majority of my raised beds till the lunch whistle blows.

It’s like gardening in “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” but in reverse. Come to think of it, I would WELCOME the LIGHT Brigade-what I got is “The Shade Brigade.” -Trees to the Left of Me! Trees to the Right of Me! Trees all #@!*ing Behind Me! And there must be 637 (or more)!

So, if we get “a normal Spring” -lots of cloudy weather and lots of the falling water that accompanies same, I get bupkis; I am, as they say on the farm, “Manure out of luck.”

April showers may bring YOU May flowers.

Me, they bring sad little tomato plants that beg me to use Roundup for the first time and put them out of their horticultural misery, blackspot with a little roses on it, and slugs that are aiming for the first entry in a new department in the Guinness Book of World Records (And yes, I WOULD like a pint right now, thank you very much.) for Best Continuation of the Biblical Plagues.

The famous “Summer Without a Summer” back in the early nineties (Pat: You remember a year here? I keep forgetting to take my gingko.) was the worst. Two tomato plants survived (one of them an ‘OGS0’ that was initially named for the 50th Anniversary of Organic Gardening magazine, but is now known, I believe, only as “Park’s Whopper Improved,” and one of those cool ‘black’ [actually a dusky purple, but in the right light you could convince a city boy] heirloom tomatoes: Black Krim) and I was harvesting mushrooms off my rose bushes.

But this past Spring? Oh, baby!

Winter was dry. Spring was dry and warm.

And I had The Never-Ending Well at my disposal. Legend has it that an underground river runs close by our house, into which taps our ridiculously shallow, more-skinny-than-Twiggy Ally-and-Kate-Moss-put-together well.

No matter how dry the surroundings, that well has always lived up to its legend. (When they drilled it back in 1930, it went artesian and the geyser stayed up two stories high till they could cap it.) The only time it DIDN’T was in the drought before last. (Sounds like directions in a Springsteen song, doesn’t it?)

Take the drought before last till you get to the end of the night, and then, boys, you’re on your own … and my garden was blamed.

“You’re running that big sprinkler in too much,” the experienced wellman said, echoing the words of all the other professionals who had cruised along blithely in their respective professional careers of carpentry, plumbing, etc., until the McGrath Fun House brought them to their knees. His specific knees probably STILL hurt from sweating and reconnecting ancient plumbing in a vain attempt to prove The Underground River Well a falsehood.

He SHOULD have been right, after all: It hadn’t rained for weeks. Shallow wells were going belly-up all around us. And I was running that danged sprinkler all night long twice a week. (And frogs and toads were STILL holding up little signs that read, “Will eat pests for water.”)

Turned out-at the end of some 14 hours of fruitless correct plumbing-type investigative work-to be a break in the line behind the well and the house. Haven’t seen the guy around town since, come to think of it: used to see him all the time, but …

Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Waterfull!

Anyway, for most people in this part of the country, 1999 was a hellish season. All heat-TRUE record-breaking, not by just a measly degree or two, but “Did we accidentally wake up on the SECOND planet from the sun today?” heat-and no rain.

Unfortunately (for them, anyway-not for me), those dust-bowl conditions almost ensure a GREAT year. No clouds to speak of AND the dry Winter made the non-evergreen trees surrounding the garden VERY slow to leaf out. Finally! A good FIVE HOURS of sun a day on the garden! Whoo! Let’s put them big sunglasses on the amaranth and crank up the Beach Boys, honey!

The worse it got for others, the better I did. The sprinkler, jammed into an old pipe that is itself jammed into the corner of a raised bed in the back, is positioned so that it hits about 90 percent of the raised beds in the veggie garden proper. It also moistens more than half of the wild tangle of raspberries that brings up the rear while watering the smallest possible patch of weeds in the driveway. (That’s a crescent-moon-shaped thousand-or-so square feet of berries in the back, surrounding an equal-or-so square footage of raised beds [three or four rows of ’em depending on how you count the parts in the Raspberry DMZ] where the UN peacekeepers always show up to yell at invading berry canes in the driveway in front of that, and then the conveniently located road into which I toss my garden slugs; higher powers decide their fate from there.) That year, my sprinkler ran and ran.

And then, ‘they’ told me to stop. Mandatory. Can’t wash your car; can’t use a sprinkler. So, we tried to be good. We saved wash water, shower water, and put a big trash can under a rain gutter (which is a great idea unless it don’t be raining).

A month went by without rain. We picked a record number of ‘first crop’ raspberries. (You get two runs from most kinds-a ‘Spring’ and a ‘Fall’ which actually turn out to come in early Summer and late Summer.) No rain= no moldy berries! AND, none lost to ambitious acrobatic slugs that somehow make it safely up (more likely around/ on leaf bridges) those nasty canes!

The first crop done, I cut back all those canes. They had fruited their second time, wouldn’t fruit again, and already looked like fire hazards less than a week after the last berry was picked. Then something scary happened.

The patch minded its manners. No new canes popped up in the driveway, where they previously used to amuse and annoy me. No new canes invaded the raised beds, where they heretofore had toppled over small plants, popped seed potatoes right out of the ground, and tried to wrestle my car keys away from me once.

And, then I noticed that no new canes were even coming up in the actual raspberry patch. And the canes that HAD appeared in the Spring-fom whence we would (make that should) get our Fall fruits-were in suspended animation: frozen in time. Copulate the salt line coming up the Delaware-this was MY RASPBERRIES we were talking about!

Their location, a rocky ridge with a thorny plant-infested gully behind it, made hand watering impossible. Their spread-outness made hand hosing a lifetime career. So, I did it.

I sprinkled.

Yes, I did it! I did it and I’m glad! C’mon-come and get me, coppers! Yadda, yadda!

Sorry. Anyway, I set my alarm for midnight, got up, moved our new minivan (I resisted this icon of suburbia for years, but my wife is a Girl Scout troop leader, has a lot of cookie-hawking midgets to transport, and some days it’s easier to just let the bear eat you, ya know?) to a spot where the illegal device was concealed from the road, turned it on, and checked it out from all angles.

Perfect. The stealth sprinkler. Someone driving down the road (unlikely, anyway, till around 6 a.m. or so) wouldn’t see a thing. Set the alarm for five to turn it off.

So, there you have it, PrintsPeople-I was a water-use criminal during the drought! The raspberries survived-I wouldn’t say thrived, because no amount of water seems to take the place of a good hard rain. And then, of course, we got smacked around by a hurricane or three and the drought was canceled faster than a new network TV show.

The berries finally appeared and ripened, and we once again had to face the usual losses due to mold from all the soaking rains … and, hey, is that? Could it be? Yep, there it is. The first nasty slug of the season that has somehow made it all the way out to the end of a cane, munching away on a previously beautiful, fat, red Heritage berry.

Never thought I’d say this, but, gee, I kind of missed you, Sluggo. Now out to the road with you!

SPLAT!

Hey, what are you, nuts? I didn’t miss them THAT much! ❖