News You Can Bruise for 2003 May 6

For those bored to tears by my previous entry, I present Square Foot Gardening! (Gather 'round as I actually remember where I got a link; I got it indirectly from Unqualified Offerings, which also has a good original poem today). It's like regular gardening, except you recursively divide your garden into a myriad of tiny square plots and plant one thing in each plot. You can stagger your planting by time so that you have four fresh potatoes every week. You can weed one square at a time and keep a running total of your average time per square and estimated time to completion, thus distracting you from the dull monotony of weeding. Many leading scienticians believe that if you didn't have a lot of squares, you could weed one square every day and actually turn weeding into some sort of semi-pleasant ritual.

I sent the link to my mother and asked if the Square Foot Gardening guru was for real or some sort of gardening crackpot. She said "His book and methods are the ones I go by. Have for years." That settles it--he's a crackpot! When I was a kid I was always having to dig plots in my mother's garden or weed or rototill, or mow the lawn or wash the windows or some such thing. This fellow's claims of an end to workaday drudgery and washday blues are clearly nothing but hogwash oil!

Actually, I am (mostly) kidding. My mother doesn't do the grids but she does plant in wooden boxes, which now that I think about it makes things a lot more manageable than just planting things willy-nilly or in enormous garden-spanning rows. I think that if she planted grids it would become proportionately easier to manage. And it would look a lot cooler (but the boxes would be harder to move).