The Vegetables Have Arrived

Well, the radishes and lettuce, at least. Now we understand why you plant several times. Anyone for an all-arugula breakfast? There's plenty.

There also seems to be plenty of snap peas for the damn gopher, who may have gotten over his aversion to the organic rosemary-and-molasses anti-gopher plant spray. Something is eating things that are not ready to be eaten. If we don't have a good harvest, I worry that the bank is going to come seize the old John Deere. At least the locusts left us alone.

Watching the vegetables come in is a little nerve-wracking, even though you'd think most people plant gardens to relax. What if we harvest too many too soon? What if not enough grow? What about the gopher? Can anyone eat arugula every day? If the radishes are too spicy, does that say something about us as gardeners? It's a lot, I tell you. Plus I miss the plants while I'm at work all day.

Overall, though, turning $1.15 in arugula seeds into somewhere around 20 bunches of arugula ($2.09 ea. in your local Whole Foods), seems like the best ROI we've had around here since we bought Cisco stock in 1997. Unlike Cisco stock, though, it is easy to tell when your arugula has had enough and needs to be harvested. There's no chance that we will pass through whatever gardening analogy corresponds to watching a company that, really, you don't understand, go from 10 to 80 and then come back to 22 and stay there for 3 years. Stupid market.

A plant, on the other hand, can be eaten while you are standing in the garden. These are about a week away from bitter and woody, and so we will be eating very nice free salads all next week and then composting what's left to plant new arugula. Less this time, and staggered.

It seems like a better money saving option that the Governor of California has adopted. Yesterday Conan said that he's switched all Capitol toilet paper from two- to one-ply, saying, "It's not anymore the two-ply." While the New York Times maybe didn't have to leave his quaintly Teutonic phrasing intact, one still wonders if there are other ways to balance the books in the world's fifth largest economy. Farm stand, anyone?