Pay dirt

"A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust."

Gertrude Jekyll

AUBURN — I spent the afternoon playing in dirt like a child enjoying himself being caked in mud.

Dirt is cool stuff. Life comes from it, and as General Electric used to say in its commercials, they bring good things to life.

So don't I!

Carefully cultivated soil is life. During the winter, I have fed my loyal worms and hungry soil orange, potato and banana skins, along with wood ash. In the summer, I am like mole, digging potholes throughout my garden to bury scraps like egg shells and coffee grinds.

We are just a few weeks away from the growing season in New England. Nothing like fresh summer vegetables, and I grow the best stuff right here in my community. My tomatoes taste like sweet pares with little acidity that you get in the store-bought stuff

But if it wasn't for this beautiful dirt, I would have to rely on a grocery store to purchase vegetables from distant states.

No thanks. That's like buying fish from China. Really!

Right about now, some knucklehead is saying to himself, "Who has got the frigging time for this crap."

Hence the word — knucklehead.

Shut the frigging TV off and go outside and look what Mother Nature handed you in your own backyard. Start gardening and I guarantee you will loose weight and feel better, as well getting in touch with the Neanderthal side of your origins.

What do you mean you don't have time. Stay off Facebook and ignore Twitter and you will have time to get your damn hands dirty and get a good dose of vitamin D. The end result will be produce that is not tainted by pesticides.

The warm days that have finally arrived draw me to my yard and garden that is in dire need of tilling.

Terri and I teamed up to plant fresh lettuce in pots and decided to grow it inside our back porch, which faces the sun and often acts like a plant nursery. We laughed and discussed Anthony's night out at the prom as we plunged our hands into a fresh bag of potting soil. We also purchased Swiss chard and sun flower seeds and planted them as well in small trays. The sun flowers are Russian giants that grow to 10 feet tall.

We also spent some money on buying three new raspberry plants, which I immediately planted next to my blueberry bushes. 

In the next few days, I will knock on my next-door neighbor's door and ask to him use his industrial tiller. This beast tears apart everything in its path, aerating the soil and turning weeds into fertilizer. My lawn needs mowing every five days thanks to May's monsoons, but the grass, which offers nitrogen, is bagged and dumped the garden to smother weeds on the soil floor.

But it all comes back to good dirt that can nurtured a productive garden.

Thanks to a cold and relentless winter, the ground is still cold, but after the last weekend in May, the time will be right to plant a garden.

That's when I get down and dirty.