Lazy Vegetable Planting

Collards, one of my favorite greens, thrive in extreme weather, especially the extreme Missouri summer heat, and I bought what I thought was four plugs of them but it was six and I let them sit in their tray for a week not knowing how I was going to get the muscle and vertebrae to weed and turn over a patch of soil big enough to plant them 18 to 24 inches apart. It seemed impossible. The little plants' leaves began turning yellow. I had to act or throw them away. I asked the powers that be to solve my problem.

It so happens there are two eight-foot boards left in the lawn from a coldframe that was built around 2001, which I dismantled in 2011 except for those two boards I couldn't move and let lie there. Where the coldframe's vegetables were is now a tangle of wildflowers and weeds (see top left of photo). Yet over the years the boards rotted and weakened a bit and I jostled  one around, pulling it backward; and behold, beneath it was an eight-foot strip of fresh, rich, worm-happy, almost-weed-free, sun-facing soil just right for planting my collards 18 to 24 inches apart. No weeding, no digging, simply planting. How lucky! How great! How lazy! Divinely inspired.

All Thingz Must Pass

Ten years ago Demetrius built a wooden cold frame for raising greens. Twelve feet long by four feet wide, it had four separate glass lids made out of old windows and hinges. Thanks to this we had lettuce at Christmas. But one day the landlord said "no more gardening," and later Demetrius was gone ("no more gardening" certainly a factor). The untreated wooden frame was so heavy and well braced I couldn't dismantle it except to remove the windows, which had broken, and after a few years I never really saw it anymore, even as it rotted and fell apart and became an eyesore--a Whole Foods version of a car up on blocks in the front yard. Instead of vegetables I planted in the frame native coneflowers, and they thrived in the soil originally mixed for growing organic vegetables. Winters, it filled with oak leaves; good for the soil. Once in a while I'd dig in here get myself some night crawlers for fishing.

Braced inside and out

Well, recently a truck (Snow plow? Surveyor? Propane truck?) trying to turn in the narrow lane backed into the cold frame, bending the steel braces and crushing and snapping some of the wood, resulting in a genuine eyesore, meaning it's an eyesore to me. So today I picked up hammer and screwdriver and began removing and bagging all braces, hinges, nails and woodscrews so nobody throwing the wood into the firebowl would get hurt and metal wouldn't be fed into the environment (or the lawn mower). Advanced rot helps me pull apart some pieces with bare hands. I got the job half done today and here's what's left. Undoing the work of 10 years ago -- ain't nobody gonna do it for me -- I thought about the summer it was built with such high hopes, and how we couldn't have foreseen what would happen. It felt kind of like washing the body of someone who has died. You wish you didn't have to. But you have to.