Saving the Planet Through Inertia, Laziness, and TV

Well right now’s the time of year when you’re supposed to be looking through seed catalogs and planning your garden. While I don’t disdain such activity, I can’t say it gives me a great deal of satisfaction either. After a time, you know what works and what doesn’t. You also know what part of your property gets the sunshine and what part the dark. Remember that spot along the treeline where the sun rises? That’s the East. From there, the sun heads South. Eventually, it ends up in the West. Once in a while, it evaporates into the ether. That generally means it’s a cloudy day. The wet stuff is rain, sleet, or snow. If it’s snow, you can plan your garden by drawing lines in it with your boots as you long for spring, but I prefer to shovel it.

About the only thing I like to do this time of year is prune the trees and grapevine. I only do that on a warm winter day. You run the risk of hurting the plant if the branches or vines are brittle from cold.

The other think I think about is those plants you buy in containers from K-Mart or Wal-Mart. The discount stores have the least expensive selections but not always the finest plants. People who work in the discount stores seem not to like their plants too much. It’s as if the plants are undergoing basic military training in preparation for the Big One. The Big One is the war where the urban homeowner recently located to suburbia drives to the store to load up a bunch of plants they will torture until dead. Really, I don’t think that such gardeners as these are so much sadistic as they are inclined to be distracted. Many homeless plants bought from K-Mart or Wal-Mart become the victims of adult attention deficit disorder. Some are half-buried because the people who adopt them find the soil too hard to dig with those cute little garden tools they found in Home Depot or Lowe’s. A common mistake made by urban gardeners is to believe that all plant life originated in the Sahara Desert. This type of gardener does not believe in spoiling the plant with an excess amount of water. That notion ties in neatly with other ideas of environmental conservation. Laziness, slothfulness, inertia, watching television—these are the things which will save the planet, so long as they are combined with the fasting which will be inevitable when the food supply fails to appear in the summer months.