Gentlemen, start your rototillers!!!

Whoo boy, after the cool and uncertain weather of the past few days the heat arrived today with both feet!! High 80’s here in northeast Connecticut — spring is nearly over and summer is just about to begin.

As he does every year, my Sweet Baboo planted his seeds (tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, etc.) in pots indoors to get a good start, then moved them out to our little greenhouse. (Not a fantastic greenhouse, but it works just dandy — it was a major selling point when we bought the house.) He also planted many, many zinnia seeds for me — I love them for cutting and the blooms last nigh onto forever. I’ll be spending alot of time outside this weekend to get them into the ground and to start digging out weeds, etc. But I’m getting sidetracked here.

The story that I want to tell you is about Sweet Baboo and his gardening philosophy, which is “never throw away a perfectly good, growing, green thing”. He has never thinned carrots in his life. If he plants 40 tomato seeds and 40 tomato plants spring forth from said seeds, he will plant 40 tomato plants. Never mind that we don’t begin to have enough room in the garden to support that amount of plants. Never mind that I tell him every year that we will have tomatoes the size of golf balls. He will plant all forty plants.

Another good story. When we first bought our house, the prior owners had planted spiderwort everywhere — and if you’ve never tried to dig up spiderwort, you just haven’t lived!! I have bent my shovel trying to disengage those roots. Anyway — my job was to dig it up, Sweet Baboo’s was to take it to our deadfall at the end of the street via wheelbarrow. After the second load that he took, I became curious — it seemed to be taking him an awfully long time to return with the wheelbarrow. So, up the driveway I went searching, around the back of the house, over near the pool — oh yes, there he is — diligently replanting the spiderwort in another part of the lawn that I couldn’t see from where I was digging it up at the front of the house!! It all made perfect sense to him — I didn’t want it where it was and after all, it was green and growing, yes?

Although I laugh about this, I consider myself blessed that I have such a wonderful, caring man in my life. I was lucky enough the second time to be chosen by a very rare nurturing man, who is also endowed with strength, humor, and the ability to pick up after himself. He is a very rare gem indeed and I wouldn’t change a thing about him!!