Saturday Single No. 182

It’s a rainy day. The windows of my study are streaked with the passage of water obeying the law of gravity. In the dining room, the morning newspaper is spread on the table in order to dry a few places that got soaked as it waited for me on the front step.

It’s not raining hard, but it’s supposed to continue for most of the day, and that’s changed our plans. We likely won’t be getting into the garden today.

We spent an hour the other evening staking off our territory for this summer in the community plot and then putting up a short chicken wire fence. It’s still too early to do too much, but the Texas Gal had planned to plant a few seeds this weekend: peas, radishes and maybe cucumbers.

Last weekend, we got a start on the flower beds around the house, putting in some coleus and some petunias, planting some cosmos and marigold seeds and installing a swatch of ground cover called red nancy. It’s been warm most of the week, but there was one morning when temperature hovered near freezing, and the red nancy looks a little bedraggled.

The Texas Gal is anxious to get into the garden and to get the rest of our summer hopes planted: We’ll do tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, yellow squash, onions, broccoli and maybe eggplant, some from seeds and some from plants we set in. Given Minnesota’s northern location, I’ll be reluctant to set any plants in the ground until the middle of May at the very earliest, but I think the Texas Gal may veto that and move earlier than I would.

Even she agrees, however, that the folks from the apartment building next door who put tomato plants into their garden plot this week are on the wrong side of the caution and risk dichotomy. I shrugged. It’s their garden, I thought. Last year, the same folks planted in early May, and I thought they were lucky not to lose anything to a late frost. This year, they’re two weeks earlier than last year, and I think they’ll be very fortunate to come through the next three weeks with their plants intact.

Of course, for all of us, it’s a hobby. Losing a cluster of plants to a late frost would be a disappointment, not the disaster that it might easily have been for our forebears. Having moved our plot to a sunnier location this year, all we’re hoping for is a few more tomatoes and peppers and other vegetables than we had last year. Our lives or livelihoods don’t depend on the success of our garden this year. And – hopes aside – that’s probably a good thing.

So here’s a song whose title, at least, matches up with all of that: From In The Garden [1971], here’s Gypsy with “Here (In the Garden), Parts 1 & 2,” your Saturday Single:

The album is long out-of-print and evidently quite rare on CD. You can find some copies of it here or at GEMM.

Tags: Gypsy