gardening tips

Several years ago I tried to do a garden. It did me instead. I wrote about it way back when and decided to dredge up this old column to warn any would-be gardeners about the perils of one particular veggie.

Column follows:

BURIED TREASURE
The article seemed harmless, a trifle about the joys of gardening. It described the wonders of becoming one with the earth and watching a miracle of nature unfold before your very eyes. It also said you could save some dough on groceries.
I decided to give it a shot. The first decision was what to plant. I finally settled on beans , peas, tomatoes, squash and cucumbers. I should have stopped there, but decided to take a shot at one exotic planting. If you learn nothing else in life, learn this:
DO NOT PLANT POTATOES.
They are sneaky, devious plants and will lead you down the road to gardening heartache and frustration. I didn’t learn this until too late.
The article said to prepare the soil by doing fancy things like digging and mulching. Since I knew weeds grew in the cracks of the sidewalk where nobody ever mulched, much less dug, I passed. Instead, I mowed my garden area down close to the dirt and then made trenches for some plants and built hills for others.
For a while all was well. Every day when I went out to admire my handiwork, I was rewarded with genuine home-grown groceries. As soon as a new plant ripened, I rushed it inside and gobbled it up.
Trouble is, I wasn’t the only one who enjoyed my garden goodies. Every day I noticed some critter trying to take advantage of my green thumbery. Birds strafed my pole beans. Squirrels stalked my tomatoes. And I couldn’t see them, but I knew the moles were down there munching on tender young roots.
I wasn’t about to surrender my cheap eats to a bunch of vermin, so I fought back. It wasn’t cheap. My total investment in seed was about five bucks. But when I added the cost of iron pipe for fenceposts, a five-pound sledge hammer for driving said posts into the ground, hog wire to keep out chickens and hogs, mosquito netting to foil the birds and a used 50 caliber machine gun to blast the squirrels, I was out about 900 bucks. Not counting ammo.
It worked out to about two dollars per mouthful. Not exactly budget cuisine, but the project was still fun, and all-in-all, things went fine.
Except for those potatoes. The hills I built for them just sat there like leafy yard pimples, not a potato in sight.
After the last harvest I went to fill my trenches and flatten my mounds. I was stunned to find lumps under my potato hills. I dug deeper and to my amazement, discovered dozens of big, brown, beautiful potatoes.
What treachery. They’d been there all the time, but didn’t have the guts to come up and face me. They just cowered beneath the clay, probably watching the whole time and laughing at me.
Sure, it was embarrassing, but how was I supposed to know? The magazine article never mentioned that spuds were subterranean. Did they think people were just born knowing this stuff?
There’s nothing like being outwitted by a carbohydrate to take you down a peg or two. That incident with the potatoes put an end to my gardening career. These days, when I want potatoes, i go to a fast food joint and order fries. I especially like it when they dip those potatoes in that sizzling hot grease. I hope they suffer.