Seed Packets are in the stores. I love looking at the nice pictures on the front and imagine that my plants might remotely look like the pictures on the packets. I always buy five or six packets a visit with every intention of planting them. I plan my garden as I drive home. I imagine how nice it will be to have fresh squashes and cucumbers and especially those tiny tomatoes that I can eat like candy.
Once I’m home I put the seed packets on the windowsill over the sink so the pictures will keep looking back at me and remind me that I want to do this. I make a plan to garden like my mother in law used to. She bought little kiddie wagons at garage sales, filled them with potting soil and planted them. This way she could garden from a stool, no pressure on her knees or back. Plus, she could easily move the plantings around the patio for more sun or rain, overall, a very clever idea.
Just to further prove my intentions, I buy a tee shirt with stencils of seed packets on it. This way, anyone who looks at me will see me as a serious gardener - who else would wear pictures of seed packets on their chest? I buy the soil, some new cutsie gloves that are always too small for my hands, but again, we’re going for affect here.
Somewhere around June I begin to become suspicious that I’m not going to plant any of the fifty seed packets that now face me with hateful stares from the windowsill. I tried to appease them by organizing them alphabetically into groups of flowers vs. vegetables. Still, they stare at me, the Zucchini whispering - “Why am I always last? Why not reverse the alphabetical order and let me at think you’ll plant me first. We both know it’s not true, still, I could enjoy the fantasy, however brief, of being first, before you put us all in the junk drawer with the seed packets from last year.” He’s got me there. Zucchini have always been a very wise vegetable.
Soon it will be July. I like July. The pictures on the packets have faded from the sun and I feel less guilty. It’s too late to plant them now and we all know it. I know my junk drawer has last years seed packets in it. I begin to slowly throw them out, just a few at a time so it’s not obvious to this year’s packets. I’m sneaky about it, but once in a while a few seed packet on the windowsill see what I’m doing- making room in the junk drawer that will soon be their tomb. Like brave Samurai, a few wait and choose their moment of demise. And suddenly I’ll look down and see them floating face down in the dish water. Their paper packaging soaking up water and disintegrating, freeing the seeds to feel themselves immersed in hot soapy Dawn grease cutting water is better than never having felt water at all I suppose.
By August, all of this year would-be crop will be laid to rest in the dark junk drawer, with screws that go to something, batteries that may or may not be dead, keys that can’t be thrown out until I figure out what they unlock, coupons that won’t be used, and receipts that are too faded to read anymore.
Next year, I’m planting at least six vegetables and three flowers, no, really, I will, and I’ll get the tee shirt to prove it.
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