Tomfoolery!

When you have a very public garden (although garden may be putting too fine a point on it;  play-space may be a better term, although there is a giant compost pile, there is a canoe to collect rain, and there are things that grow, including, currently, collards, fennel, baby broccoli and bunches of seeds), you have to expect some foolishness, some playfulness. And I do. This time after taking a workshop with Bob Rizzo about assembling unlike items — like drilling and gluing a pig’s head on a stick — I put the final project in the garden only to pull up one day and see someone else had another vision, another use for the skull, something involving the plastic legs of a doll. Tomfoolery strikes again! Keep the party alive, that’s what I say.

Tomfoolery strikes again!

 

A prick and a dibble

A prick and a dibble: the answer to one of my biggest dilemmas — how to transplant seedlings before their roots wrap around each other and while they still have a chance to grow big and strong. Pricking is a garden term, I just learned from George. It means sticking something pointed like a letter opener into the pot of seedlings and separating a individual plant. Then you pick up your wooden dibble — great word — and with the blunt end make a depression in a larger pot, which is where your new fledgling seeding is planted. All of this standing up, not lying flat on the ground, separating the twisted seedlings. But really, prick? Reminds me of a political sign I saw in Pittsburgh for the feckless Rick Perry. It read, “Dump Rick.” But if you read it fast, well, try it. It comes out, “Dumb Prick.”

A prick and a