Gardening In Hell

If there is anything more masochistic than working in the garden in long pants and a long-sleeved shirt when it's 500 degrees* and the sun is still beating down, then I don't want to know what it is. And I REALLY don't want to do it.

So! Yes! Welcome to another garden post, in which I go outside to sweat out every last drop of fluid in my body because I SO MUCH ENJOY my "hobby" of vegetable gardening.

When does it cross the line from hobby to crazy?

Don't answer that.

ANYWAY.

Yesterday afternoon I ran outside for a quick turn around the garden while Cubby was sleeping. Just to check in, you know, since it had been several days since I had been out there. By some miracle, I did not actually do any work while I was just looking. That miracle may have had something to do with the fact that even that five minutes spent out there in the sun drenched me in sweat and made my face redder than a ripe tomato. Of which I still have none.

ANYWAY AGAIN.

That's not the point. The point is that those five minutes convinced me that I really had to get out to work that night after Cubby was asleep. Even though it was so damned hot I considered parking my ass in the lake and not moving until the temperature dipped below 70. But no! Duty calls!

So after Cubby went down, I dutifully donned my long pants and long-sleeved shirt, in preparation for a blackberry battle. Blackberries, as you may know, have wicked thorns. And one of the things that needed doing was clearing some space around them so we could harvest the starting-to-ripen berries. We had very cleverly planted all around the blackberries with huge plants like potatoes that left very little access to the blackberries. Smartness, yes.

But the garlic patch was also next to the berries. And it was past time to dig the garlic up (early harvest this year, though), so I did that first, spreading it all out in the shed to cure. Then I pulled weeds taller than I am from around the berries, except for those evil pigweed plants that would not relinquish the hold their roots had taken in the hard, dried out soil.

I hate those bastards.

But then I moved on to the fun part of the evening: squishing Colorado potato bug larvae. WHEEE! Have you ever seen these things? They're obscene--all fat and orange and grub-like. They also squish quite readily, as they have not yet developed the hard shell of a mature potato bug. So I patrolled the many rows of potatoes, squishing the larvae with my fingers. My gloved fingers, thankyouverymuch. I am not generally squeamish, but I do draw the line at getting beetle larvae slime all over my fingers. As it was, some of the bigger ones exploded with such force that the slime landed on my sleeve.

GROSS.

But not as gross as I was by the time I finished all of this and made it back into the house for a cold shower. No matter. The most pressing of the garden duties have been taken care of, and I can now wait until next week to do more, when it will be a positively chilly 82 degrees.

Yay.

* Okay, it was actually more like 90 degrees. But it FELT like 500.