I could have said “I bought a tomato plant”, but considering the current fad of using present tense to describe things that happened in the past, I figured why not. Yeats did it in his autobiography, and so can I. I buy a tomato plant, hoping it will bear fruit.
In truth, I buy two tomato plants, hoping for nothing. It’s a gesture, that’s all. I got two plants of ‘Early Girl’.
I don’t subscribe to another fad, growing “edibles” in hopes of mitigating world hunger (you would do that by contributing money to organizations like this one), but bought them just because I felt like buying tomato plants, and they were on sale, and organically grown.
Tomatoes don’t do very well in the spot where I always put them, but I put them there anyway. The real plan is for the plants to provide food for tomato worms, which turn into this:
A dead specimen of Manduca sexta, with a couple in the plastic case below it. My wife was working on a drawing of Yucca harrimaniae when she died, with moths fluttering around it. The unfinished drawing is now in the Hunt Institite for Botanical Documentation along with several other watercolors which she painted.
I digress slightly. I’m fairly sure that the dead moths were purchased, not caught; they fly at night and are harder to catch than the Hyles whose picture I posted a couple of days ago. We did engage in some catching and killing activities in the past, and there are probably some karmic issues to work out here, though the Buddha did say that karma was intention, and the end result of this activity was both my wife’s watercolors, and a vow on my part not to kill creatures that visit my garden.
So I don’t kill bugs, I don’t grow vegetables. What is it that makes me a gardener?
the miserable gardener 