I'll be in the garden hooked on 'ponics'
Klonie JORDAN

My wife came in the house last night bragging about how she had planted the lettuce and onions and how she had mowed the back yard.

This means, I guess, it's that time of year for me to discuss vegetable gardening.

Let me begin by telling you the most important thing of all on this topic, and that is do not - I repeat, DO NOT - ever have a bigger garden than your wife can tend.

Last year we had tomatoes for months and it was due primarily to the fact that we kept our vegetable plot at a size that my wife could go out and take care of in the evenings after work and on weekends while I was keeping up my end of the bargain by doing what we men are best at doing and feel most comfortable with during the warm-weather months - watching baseball.

This seems to annoy my wife, who will occasionally come in with a sweaty face and dirty blue jeans from turning the soil, and fertilizing, and tying-up and doing all the other things it requires to make plants grow.

She will say something to me about not helping with the actual manual labor part of the endeavor. At this point I explain to her that I am helping the struggling economy because SOMEBODY has to watch all those sporting events or else ESPN's ratings will decline and the next thing you know there will be downsizing and budgetary restraints and it will be, at least partially, my fault, and I don't think I could live with myself if that happened. So by watching sports I am contributing to the stability of our capitalist form of government and helping to maintain a healthy employment rate and keeping money in circulation, which, in turn, keeps down the price of seeds, and shovels, and other diggy things she uses in the garden.

And even after this in-depth analysis of my contributions, she still sometimes doesn't get it and will roll her eyes and sigh real big and storm off while saying something like, "One of these days I'm going to plant me a husband seed and grow me a new husband, that's what I'm going to plant," and she says it under her breath but sometimes I can still hear it.

"I heard that," I will yell as her silhouette fades into the far end of the house.

"GOOD!" she yells back.

So after watching the various commercials that I find while flipping around the channels between innings, I have found at least two items I have ordered that will help me take a more active agricultural role around the house.

One of them is something called "Grass Patch," or "Patch A Lawn," or something to that effect. It's this superduper kind of grass seed that's supposed to take root and grow thick and lush no matter where you toss it, which is exactly the kind of stuff I've needed to handle those bare and/or mossy patches around the trees in the front yard. They showed them putting these super grass seeds out on top of a cinder block and they took root and grew - ON A CINDER BLOCK.

And it was on TV so you know it has to be real.

The other thing is something called "Hanging Tomatoes," which, as I understand it, is this upsidedown hanger that allows you to grow tomatoes sort of like they would in a futuristic society in which personal vegetable garden space is at a premium.

I know this can be done because I saw it at one of those Disney World exhibits. They call the process "hydroponics" which comes from the Greek "hydro" meaning "water," and "ponics" which … well, I don't know what the "ponics" part means but it must be something pretty cool if it means you can grow stuff upside down.

I don't know exactly how the hanger thing works but as I recall, at the exhibit I saw the vegetables were suspended in mid-air and water and plant food was sprayed directly on the roots.

I can't wait to try this because, well, I just want to be able to point out that I grew tomatoes upside-down in a space-age "ponics" sort of way.

I just hope there are no weird side effects, like, say, you slice up one of those tomatoes and put it on a sandwich and then get this incredibly strong urge to eat the sandwich while standing on your head. Do you know how difficult it is to digest bologna while standing on your head?

But mainly I want my upside-down tomatoes to be bigger, and brighter, and tastier than my wife's conventional in-the-ground/on-the-vine tomatoes so I can rub it in.

And I will continue to do this just to remind her that I can grow better vegetables upside-down than she can right side-up.

At least until I come home one day and find she's got a hydroponic husband growing in a hanging basket on the back porch.

Happy mater-ing, y'all.

Klonie Jordan (editor@gaffneyledger.com)

is executive editor of The Gaffney Ledger.