Category: Garden

Hello, welcome back to my Gardening Blog – Jim’s Gardening Blog, actually! I never was any good at marketing! (Just ask my publisher!)

         Yes, I know that you all mostly love and adore me for my works as a pioneering author in the gardening space, constantly finding fresh insight in humanity’s oldest art. No, not that one, you fools – Gardening!

         And now I’m bringing all of my God-given talents to this – the Internet! What an exciting time to be alive, what with so much connection, the shifting of the dynamics of power, and an ever-growing list of ways to reach a sizeable potential audience through precise, garden-oriented written content.

         Oh, where was I? That’s right – you probably want to hear about my top tips for growing hippeastrums in Australia!

         Well, to begin, you’re going to want to make sure that your soil is at exactly the right temperature…

***

‘Done,’ I murmured to myself, hitting the Publish button with a smug grin. ‘That’ll drive them back to my books.’

         I chuckled and got up to pour myself a soothing cup of green tea, with an even more soothing splash of vodka in it.      

         The phone rang as I walked past it into the kitchen, and I answered it with a sigh.

         ‘Jim Bean speaking,’ I said, dryly.     

         ‘It’s Cynthia!’ crackled the voice on the other end, positively seething.

         ‘Oh, hullo,’ I smiled. ‘Did you see the new blog post? I think you’re right, this is going to be great for my online presence and image.’

         ‘You were supposed to send it to me first, you fool!’

         ‘I did,’ I frowned. ‘At least I thought I did? Isn’t that what the Publish button does?’

         ‘No!’ she screeched. ‘Why would literally anybody think that?!’

         ‘You forget I’m an old man,’ I said, sternly.

         ‘You’re fifty-three, you idiot,’ she growled at me. ‘I can’t believe what you wrote.’

         ‘What was wrong with it?’

         ‘Apart from the arrogance, sloppy spelling and general air that you’d rather be growing ground cover roses than touching a computer?’

         ‘What?’ my frown deepened. ‘What was wrong with my spelling?’

         ‘Take it down, now!’

I’m a very level person, I think. Only a few things actually make me angry, chief among them when a film that I was really looking forward to doesn’t even come close to living up to its potential. Like in Z-Men: The Stand Before the Last One where they completely mangled the story from the original comics and disrespected the characters. THAT made me mad. And on a similar topic, I also get angry when things just don’t happen the way they’re supposed to, and it’s totally not your fault. Last month I planted some daffodil bulbs, looked after them just like the guide on the internet said, gave them water and sunlight…and now they’re gone. Dead. No longer of this world. I did nothing wrong!

And when my friend Sandy came over for our Wednesday dance fitness class, she told me that I’d over-watered them. I trust Sandy because she worked at a florist for three months a few years ago, but that’s crazy. I actually measured the amount of water I was giving them, down to the last millilitre, and there was nothing wrong with that. Maybe the guide I followed was wrong? Thing was, all the daffodil guides I read said slightly different things, so I tried to even it out. Maybe next time I’m going guide-free and just doing it all on instinct.

Oh, and another thing: cooking. If you follow the recipe perfectly and your cake or brownies or cupcakes come out wrong, I’m sorry…that’s the recipe’s fault and you need to fix your stupid recipe. Cooking is not the same thing as rocket science, where one tiny calculation throws off the whole thing and causes an explosion. So long as you measure correctly, it’s not your fault if your cake ends up looking like a nuclear testing site. Same goes for those daffodil varieties that didn’t quite make it. How about next time I give you NO water? Because that’s the only thing I can think of that makes sense at this point…

-Leo