I can laugh about it now. Finally.

That fucking garden..... I gave up on this planting. The only thing that sprouted in any edible quantity was the radishes and the starters that I bought are doing great. Matter of fact I had to take a tomato plant out of my patch 'cause them motherfuckers flat out exploded and there wasn't any air circulation in the middle of the patch. I didn't want to nurture those tomatoes only to have them mold up on me.

I germinated and replanted over a few days week before last and have sprouts already coming up. Beans, okra and lettuce and I already hit them fuckers with Sevin insecticide. I also dusted all the peppers, melons and cukes then hit the tomatoes last. I really hated to do the tomatoes because there were a bunch of ladybugs in there doing a job on the aphids, but they just weren't cutting it.
Keep up or die, bitches.

Then, I swear to God, the day after I planted I went out and motherfucking weeds are there, especially spurge. Shit's popping up everywhere so I strip off my shirt and commence to pull weeds. I got about 3 rows done and my back was beginning to ache from all that bending and besides, an hours' worth of sun was plenty for my lily white skin.
The next morning I get up early and knock out another 3 rows knowing that the shit that I weeded yesterday already has more weeds coming up. I know they're new weeds because the ones I missed the day before are 3 times bigger. I checked my back when I came in, just slightly pink. Oh well, at  least the weeding is saving me from my annual sunburn.
After noon on Monday, I did another 3 rows and the melon patch. About 2, I got a call from a root canal specialist saying they had a cancellation and could I possibly drive 15 miles in city traffic in 20 minutes for my consultation?
You bet.
As soon as I hit the vinyl seat of my truck I screamed, bounced off the top of the cab and maybe pissed myself a little. The kind of pain where you have a back spasm so bad you can't breathe. I had my annual sunburn.
So I sit straight up in my seat, damned near in tears with the music up loud so Hank III's caterwaulin' will cover up the sounds of my whimpering and went to have a root canal done. Might as well get the hurtin' over with all at once, you know?
I find the place and go in to the little room and sit in the chair. My back is so sore that I can't relax. The doc checks it and says yup, sure enough I need a root canal but luckily he's got an opening right now, otherwise I have to wait 3 weeks.
Fuck. My back is on fire but my mouth has been giving me fits for a couple months now. What to do, what to do...... Fuck it. I'm here. Bring on the root canal. Let's see if I'm as tough as I think I am.
I spent the next hour and a half in the dentist chair and the only parts of me that was touching that motherfucker was my shoulder blades and the cheeks of my ass.
Turns out I'm a fucking pussy, man. I was sniveling like a little bitch when he was done.
I ended up calling in Tuesday. I was so sun-sick I was puking and my back was so tender I couldn't bear the thought of cloth touching it.
I went in the rest of the week even though I was in fucking agony. I only have 3 sick days left and I want to burn those either fishing or coyote hunting, not waste them on a fucking sunburn.
Plus I wanted to show it off to all my buddies at work. You can imagine their reactions when they saw this:

When I showed this to my buddies at work it was hilarious - they'd get a horrified look on the face, cover their mouth and gasp. Every time. They looked like girls, especially when I could get a group of 6 or 7 together at the same time.

I must've gone through 3 cans of Solarcaine so far and I still can't take a warm shower or sleep on my back.

This picture also proves beyond a doubt that I am not a plumber - even bending over and pulling weeds, the crack of my ass is still untouched.

But sonofabitch, that motherfucker is still driving me crazy. Now the blisters are popping and it's starting to peel and ohmyGod the itching......

I remember a few years back I was fly fishing Modesto Reservoir for spotted bass in a float tube. It was January but a clear day and man, the temps came up to about 60 degrees so I stripped off my shirt and started catching nice sized spots by casting small poppers right off the point of this small island. After about 45 minutes I put my shirt back on but the damage was done. I had sunburned my fucking armpits. Between holding my arms up to cast my fly and the sun reflecting off that clear water, my shit was cooked. I walked around for a week holding my arms out like some exaggerated gunfighter pose.

Garden Report

At the ripe old age of 52 I have accepted the fact that while I'm pretty good at some things, I excel at none. Some things I'm so-so at and some things I fuck up so badly, I won't even attempt them again. Sometimes I fuck things up so badly I run away and blame them on somebody else.

I'm a pretty decent handgun shot, a fair rifle shot, a good reloader, a pretty damned good fisherman and the best husband I can be although my ex would probably argue with me on that. That's about it as far as shit that I'm pretty good at, but it's all important stuff.

Stuff that I'm just average at is handyman stuff (although Lisa would probably rate that as "Really Sucks"), cooking, cleaning, coyote hunting, stringing a barbed wire fence, and being patient with the general public.

Shit that I fuck up? I could go on and on but I'll give you just a few examples.

Anything mechanical - it is cheaper and quicker to put my vehicle in the shop right away than it is to thoroughly fuck it up and still have to put it in the shop to repair what I fucked up along with the original repairs. 

Getting lost - I can get lost faster than anybody I know. And not only that, I can fucking stay lost, thwarting all efforts by searchers to find me.

Pie crusts - I never have been able to make a pie crust from scratch. My retarded grandson can make a pie crust. Not me.

Training a dog - it's hard to train something that's smarter than me and has nothing better to do than out-wait me.

And now I'm adding gardening to the list of shit I suck at.

Just a quick recap: I had never started a garden from scratch, I had always work with an existing garden site - ground already broke, weeds under control. When we moved here I saw an area that had been used as a garden a few years before but was overgrown with weeds, so I sprayed the fuck out of it with Round-up, poisoning all those little weeds as well as our environment. Then I went in and pulled them all out a few weeks later, then spaded the ground up and built up the garden.

Then a few days later we got a string of 80+ degree days and I figured, "Well hell, Farmer Kenny. Let's get to plantin'" so I did and began anxiously awaiting my bountiful harvest so I could feed myself and impress all my family and friends with my harmonious relationship with nature.

All good so far, right?

Uh-uh. See, what I forgot about when I pulled those weeds was all the motherfucking weed seeds that were already in the dirt that was now formed into furrows and rows in my garden that exploded and choked most of my shit out. What's bad was that had I covered the ground with black plastic bags when it was real warm, it would've killed all those weed seeds from the heat. Then I could've planted and not have near the problems that I'm having now.

I don't know what kind of weeds these are but they're little bitty fuckers with 2 leaves and a red stem and they come up in a fucking carpet almost overnight. They started growing almost right away and even though I was pulling them on a daily basis, they kept coming up. I must've weeded one row 15 times and have yet to see something I planted there.

Then after a couple of weeks I realized that I was probably pulling seedlings along with weeds, so I stopped weeding for a few days until I could easily spot the seedlings. That was a fucking mistake. The weeds took advantage of my generosity and exploded.

The only thing that ain't taking no shit from any weeds are the radishes. One month from planting to harvest and they outgrow the weeds and choke them out. Maybe I oughta go with a straight radish crop this year.

One of my options is to pull my radishes when they're ripe and go ahead and cover the garden for a couple of weeks and bake the seeds before they germinate but that would kill the other plants that did actually sprout. That and I've got so much fucking time invested in pulling weeds that it's starting to turn into a pissing contest between me and them and I ain't ready to quit fighting yet.

CharlieGodammit took care of the cucumbers, squash and melons that I planted. That dog cannot stand to see a mound in his territory and flattens them every chance he gets. Actually, I think he thinks it's a gopher mound and the reason I think that is because I bought some starters to replace the ones he destroyed and they're still there, at least last time I checked they were. As long as there's a plant on top of it, he'll leave it alone. So far. Of course once we start getting melons and cukes it may open a whole new can of worms with him - probably start shitting on top of our ripe melons and using the cukes for..... I don't even wanna go there.

Then there's the bugs, specifically the ants.

I am not an advocate of organic farming or any of that hippie shit. I don't have the money to spend on organic foods and I'm too lazy to do the work necessary without pesticides and other God-given gifts.

My problem is money. I know I need to buy these things but I didn't think I needed them right then and I didn't have the money to spend on something that wasn't pressing at the moment.

I should've asked some blue haired old lady buying her squash and eggplant.

I had a row of bush beans planted and I noticed that I had 3 sprouts right in the middle of the row. Now I realize that shit ain't gonna be popping up all at once, but after another week I still only had three fucking plants and I was starting to wonder what was up. I started checking it out and I was seeing bean hulls on top of the row but no sprouts. And then I realized that I had a shitload of ants running back and forth on the row and they were all carrying green stuff back to their anthill about 10 feet away in that rotten stump. That was MY green shit they were carrying. I couldn't fucking believe it: Here I am with about a million radishes, 4 onions, a half dozen carrots, 1 fucking okra plant and 3 bean plants and they're running over 10 feet of tender succulent weeds to eat my food?

Oh, HELL NO......

I went into the garage and found a bunch of old half full bottles of insecticide, about 20 years or more old, shit that had deteriro degraded so bad that a toxic disposal site would probably refuse it and I'd get arrested transporting it and mixed it all together. Fuck diluting it, these motherfuckers done pissed me off. Then I put on my facemask and some felony gloves and attacked that stump. After I was done and was standing upwind, I saw that stump all soaked and glistening and toxic surrounded by ant corpses. What a beautiful sight.

The rest of the garden is stuff that any dummy with a garden hose can grow so I'm not including this in things I Suck At.

My tomatoes are big and in full bloom, even getting a few baby 'maters on them. I do need to go down and get some dust for them to keep the aphids and tomato worms off.

Squash and cucumbers and melons are not growing but they ain't dying either. That's a victory in it's own self as far as I'm concerned.

So yeah, I'm gonna add gardening to the list of shit I suck at. But you know what? I'm fine with that. I know that I can grow my own food if I needed to but I also feel just a little more comfortable going down to the supermarket to buy or supplement my vegetables and thanking Jesus and Juan for the sweat of their labor.

I knew this fucking picture would come in handy sometime. Now I can finally delete it.

Sorry. I got caught up in the moment.

We're sitting at the dinner table the other night, a wonderful home cooked meal, soft lighting, and alone with each other.

Lisa, thinking about all the new things this relationship has brought her says "I've never had a garden, I've never had a dog and I've never had a man that loves me so much."

"What? You've never had a fucking dog before?" It was out before I could stop it. Then I couldn't stop it - it just kept coming out about how it's child abuse to not have a dog when you're a kid, then questioning her about why she didn't get one when she was an adult, then I got started on the garden and kept it up with that.

She just rolls her eyes and shakes her head.

Yeah, Bushwhack, she's gonna need all the luck she can get.

Garden Report

Day 5:

Motherfucker! I got radishes sprouting. Or maybe it's onions. Or lettuce. Or spinach. Hard to tell right now - no, I didn't label the rows, I figured I'd know what it was when it came time to pick it.

But something green is definitely poking their little heads up out of the dirt. With my luck, it's a row of perfectly spaced weeds. But hey! they're my weeds.

I'm calling in sick tomorrow so I can watch them grow.

Garden Report

Day 5:

I have tomato blooms. I cannot fucking believe it. They taste pretty bitter right now, maybe I should let them go a while longer.

Actually I'm amazed that I have tomato and pepper plants after the rain this morning. It was coming down in a fucking stream, man. I have never seen it rain so hard in Kalifornia before - they have a stormwatch every time it sprinkles here - but it was flat coming down. When I walked out the door this morning I could not see my white truck 15 feet away because of the downpour and once I got on the road, I seriously considered pulling over until it passed. Fuck it, I'm invincible so I kept on. But I sure figured that it was gonna be a lick on the tomatoes, though. I just knew when I came in tonight I was going to find them beat to the ground, but they were standing tall and showing a shitload of little buds that'll blossom in a day or so.

Nothing else is even sprouting.

The garden rows took a pretty good beating though. With no root structure to keep them together, they kinda sorta melted a little. Not bad, but a lot of the soil washed away from the tops of them, more than likely taking away some of my seeds too. Won't be able to tell until they start to sprout, an event I've been anticipating since about an hour after I planted the damned thing.

I also saw a little damage from flying projectiles, great big ol' splats all over the garden. Nothing major but I'm thinking I need to aim a little higher with my wristrocket and maybe use beans or gravel instead of 44 caliber round ball. Scare the birds, not try to kill the seed-thievin' little shits, you know?

Garden Report

Day 4:

GODDAMN IT!!!!!  How long is this shit going to take?

I'm still eating store bought vegetables. You'd think after 4 days I'd already be canning and dehydrating my bountiful harvest. I bet it's a gopher that CharlieGodammit missed killing, that motherfucker is probably tunneling under my garden eating everything from below.

Maybe I'll lay some homemade bangalore torpedoes in between the rows, time them to go off at random intervals and shake that motherfucker up good.

Man, if that last sentence doesn't grab somebody's attention at DHS, they're sleeping on the job. Either that or they're waiting for the spanish translation.

Garden Report

Day 3: No harvest yet. Motherfuckers haven't even sprouted yet. I'm getting bored.

Decided fuck it, I'll put in a couple more vegetables so I went and got some okra, pole beans and bush cucumbers.

I finally got around to getting okra because when I planted last week, I couldn't find any seeds. They had plenty of starters but #1 They didn't look real healthy and #2 I ain't paying 3 bucks for one starter when I can buy a packet of seeds (about 60 plants) for half that price.

I have a couple different varieties of bush beans in already but I like pole beans and I finally found some seed today. Can't ever have too many beans, ya know? I like my fresh beans in a big ol' pot with some little taters and some fatback floating around for flavor. My mouth is watering already.

And the bush cucumbers? I got those because CharlieGodammit has dug out 2 of my 3 cucumber hills and besides, I've never heard of cukes on a bush. Plus they're only supposed to take up 1/3 the space and that's always a good thing, so I'll try those out.

I keep telling myself that the hard part's over, what garden space I don't use for winter crops I'll cover with black plastic to keep the weeds from germinating, the rows are already formed up and the water troughs are dug. Next year it'll be simple: touch up, fertilize and plant. That way I can get bored even quicker.

Garden report

Day 2: Finished planting yesterday. Nothing to harvest yet. I'll check again tomorrow.

Seriously, I got my shit planted yesterday - some melons and cucumbers in areas under the spigots and spare areas of the yard, then in the garden itself I put in a row and a half of radishes, a row and a half of onions, a row of spinach, a row of carrots, a row of lettuce and two rows of bush beans. Then there's a row that I haven't planted yet, probably in lettuce in a couple more weeks. Plus there's a shitload of peppers and tomatoes that I've been planting for the past couple of weeks.

CharlieGodammit's been living up to his name, digging up one cucumber hill 3 times, dumping a load right on the edges where I walk and last night Lisa thought she saw him in the middle of my freshly planted garden. Then this morning when I walked out there I saw those monster prints on top of two rows. He tried to deny they were his but I know his tracks well (he turns his right front paw in just slightly) and besides, he's the only fucking dog we have. I'm not real stupid, ya know?
Motherfucker is fixing to get educated to a wristrocket. I just gotta be careful not let him see me pop him - that dog has a l-o-n-g memory. He'll nail me right on the ass hours later.

So yeah, it's been a long while since I've put a full garden in and probably only the second time I've put in a new garden which is a bitch because I was breaking ground that probably hasn't been turned since the 60s. No, I didn't use a rototiller because when I look at something I need to do, I still look at it with a 25 year old's eyes instead of my bleary old 52 year old ones. But don't worry, my back quickly reminds my eyes about their mistake.