Mass Murder in My Backyard

So I'm sitting here this morning, contemplating how to kill nearly every living thing in my backyard, and I notice the call for a gardening blog on the Patch.

Oh, the irony.

I hate gardening. I'm sure in one of the mulitverses there's a version of me that not only loves gardening, but excels at it, but in this universe I hate it with a passion. I'm not an obssessive lawn mower. I don't prune my plants and trees. I don't have flower boxes or raised planters or any of the other decorations that mark the home of a Green Thumb. My yard looks more like Falujah, just green.

It's not that I hate the idea of gardening; it's just that I suck at it. I actually come from a long line of gardeners. My grandmother, Ruby Nell, could grow enough food for a family of 25 with nothing more than a small patch of dirt and a hand spade. She annually turns less than a quarter-acre of her backyard into a buffet of peas and beans and peppers and 'maters and corn and muscadines that just keeps on producing. She has canned goods in her pantry that show off the exorbitance of her botanical bounty, and it spans decades. Go to visit her house during the summer and you walk away with a bag of creamed corn, two bags of field peas, and a jar of homemade ketchup, not to mention a grocery sack full of fresh tomatoes. It's just how she rolls.

And my Pop Emmette used to garden too. He took pride in his tomato plants, which were surrounded by concertina wire baskets to help them grow tall and keep them safe (okay, not really - but I cut myself on those stupid baskets enough as a kid that they certainly seemed to be made out of the stuff). I'd go visit him during the prime 'mater growing season and he'd be in the backyard with his hose and metric ton of Miracle Gro, watering his precious plants, hoping for that one mutant tomato that would produce a slice large enough to cover an entire piece of bread from crust to crust. It was his quest. His holy grail. And usually, instead of producing one massive tomato, he'd produce two billion baseball sized ones that he had to give away to everyone, including traveling salespersons.

Sadly, I got none of that gardening genius. My talent with things that spring from the earth lies mainly in being able to kill them at a remarkable rate. Once, I even killed a fake plant. It's that bad. Well, there is one thing that I'm capable of growing, now that I think about it: dandelions.

I hate dandelions.

So as I'm looking out on my backyard, which right now - thanks to the rain of the past few days - looks like an experimental testing site for super-powered dandelions, I'm envisioning a time when I might be able to drop enough powder or squirt enough solution to kill everything green on the ground. I'm also reminded that part of the curse on Adam for eating the apple was that man would forever toil against the earth, sweating and cursing it just to get it to produce something.

One more reason for me to chuck something at Adam's head if I meet him in the afterlife.

All of this to say, I'll leave the gardening tips to those with gardening talent. I love beautiful flowers and well-manicured lawns. I love seeing people who can bring a desolate scrap of earth to gorgeous life with the colors of plants and shrubbery. I enjoy the peacefulness of those environments, the tranquility that comes from nature's own aesthetic. I just can't do it on my own.

Now, should there ever come a time when there's need for a blog on how to kill something grown from the earth...well, I'm your man. But I doubt there's much call for that.

For now, I'll just sit here, staring at my dandelion patch, wondering how to kill them all as efficiently as possible. Mass murder in my backyard, so to speak. Eventually, I'll get around to it.