Worms and Bugs

I was in Okie City yesterday to do some radio interviews, and dropped by my favorite nursery and garden center, Horn Seed Co.  This place is awesome.  There are plenty of bigger garden centers, but none that have the old-time feel of the serious gardener that Horn does.  They have this wonderful old bar that's backed with a wall of drawers full of bulk seeds. You can order your seeds by the pound, and they'll pour them up onto a scale with a big silver scoop on top, and then package your seeds for you in a brown paper bag tied with twine.  You can get about 20 different kinds of beans there, and seed potatoes, strawberry or onion sets, peanuts... it's a gardener's heaven.  And the greenhouse has the best selection of herbs and veggies.  You can choose from about nine types of basil and six or seven types of sage alone.  It makes me happy just to go in there, even if I don't buy anything.

I went in, ostensibly, to buy a replacement zucchini for the one the cutworms got.  But I got to browsing, and ended up with six packets of flower seeds, two bedding plants, a plastic container of live ladybugs and an icecream carton full of worms.  Now that's shopping.

Live ladybugs and worms!  Awesome!  How could I resist??

Grayson and I released the ladybugs into the garden at dusk last night, giggling as they climbed up our hands and arms. What's ticklier than  ladybug on your arm?  Well, how about six ladybugs?  It's fun to see so many of them in one place:  little red spots of voracious predatory cuteness, unleashed on the unsuspecting pests plaguing my broccoli and potato plants.

The weather has been peculiar this spring:  cold and windy. And my garden has a cringing air to it:  like it's crouching down, waiting for the next blow.  Everything seems like it's holding off on growing until it sees what the weather is going to be like. All except the broccoli, which is loving the cool temperatures. Unfortunately, the broccoli worms love it too. You gotta hand it to evolution where those guys are concerned.  You couldn't make a critter colored more exactly like broccoli leaves. I hope ladybugs like them.

The worms are for my worm composting bin.  Red wigglers are tiny little scrap-devouring demons!  And they poop out the world's finest fertilizer. Plus, frankly, it's just cool to have worms eating your garbage. Grayson loves to go "feed the worms" with our salad scraps.

I'm telling you all of this because the worms and bugs really speak to some important part of me.  I know it's essential in some way to the Real Me. Gardening is in my genes. My great grandmother kept a huge garden and worked it herself into her 90s.  All spring and summer you could find her in the garden, leaning on her hoe handle, wearing the old-timey sun bonnet and bib apron my mother made for her every year, pulling onions or digging potatoes, or sitting on the back porch in the glider of a summer evening, shelling purple hulls or snapping beans. Those were some of the best memories I have from my childhood: time spent in the garden with her. I would go handle the butterflies that were drunk on apricot nectar from the fallen fruit by the back door, or eat fresh-pulled green onions with bread and butter, or stand on a low brick wall at the back of the garden, picking and eating handfuls of black currants.

I'm not a quarter of the gardener she was. But I aspire to be. Heck, I'm just 44, I've got a good 50 years yet to practice. 

So bring on the bugs!  Bring on the dirt, the seeds, weeds, worms and compost. When I'm with them, I know I'm home.