Bob Sanders: I never grew a green thumb

Many people garden. A neighbor up the street has a nice vegetable garden. Luxapalila Rose gardens in a big way. She hands out fresh-picked goodies to her friends.

I even know a newspaper columnist who claims to garden; he has grown one squash and enough tomatoes to give me a couple. I’ve heard of someone taking it so seriously that she pollinates her vegetable blooms individually with a Q-Tip, since there is a mysterious shortage of the honeybees that usually do the job.

I grew up with a garden. We had the perfect spot, out by the road in front of the house. Good sandy-loam soil, easily cultivated. I plowed and hoed and staked and picked in that garden ‘til I went off to get one of those college educations I’d heard about. I’m no stranger to gardening. I have cut hundreds of sassafras bushes to use as stakes for butterbeans and other climbers.

I’m always amused when I remember the nationwide exhortations during The War to Grow a Victory Garden! We were way ahead. We grew a victory garden even when there was no war.

With a lot of people, there seems to be a natural built-in hunger to get out and plant things... and a certain know-how to get the job done. There’s nothing prettier than a pristine garden, neatly plowed and staked, with not nary a sprig of crab grass showing.

I would have only a very hazy idea of how to start a garden. Oh, I know you have to break up the ground with a shovel or Roto-Tiller or something, then lay off rows, and ... follow the instructions on the pack of seeds. But, really, I don’t know much about how to go about it.

“You were raised in the country, weren’t you?” they ask. “Most definitely,” I reply. I mean, in the country.

“You had a garden, didn’t you?”

“Certainly.”

“Well? What seems to be the trouble?”

I don’t know. Maybe my mind tries to blot out those hours of picking beetles from the ‘tater plants or worms from the ‘maters, or the general hoeing and tending so necessary. I remember that I used to hate having to plow the garden. You had to be so much more careful than just out in the field, plowing corn or cotton. When mother said she wanted the garden plowed, there’d be loud groaning and complaining. (It was even worse with her rose garden. We didn’t know about mulching then. We had tons of good mulch those roses would have loved, dried — and otherwise — cow and mule manure, not to mention the piles of rotten sawdust peckerwood sawmills had left behind.)

Something is obviously missing. I don’t have any desire to get out and garden, especially when I have friends like Rose. And besides, my lot is almost completely shaded, and I do know that the one thing absolutely required by vegetable (and most other) plants is sunshine.

A very wise person over on Ag Hill once said, concerning shady areas, “If you don’t have a place to garden, don’t garden.” Official. Aha!

That’s the reason I don’t garden. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Bob Sanders is a longtime radio personality with WAUD in Auburn and writes a weekly column for the Opelika-Auburn News.