When friends and blog readers think a blog writer is soon to be the Julia Child of gardening, they send the blog writer articles and anecdotes about gardening. It’s interesting and unsettling all at the same time. Since today is “Tiny Steps Gardening Day” I thought I would share a few of the gems I receive in the course of a week here at old Aunt Tomato’s chicken coop-sized condominium.
One of my good friends reads The New York Times religiously and “Amen” to that. It saves me a lot of time because she’s like a personal reading service, sending me articles that might help or benefit the blog. Her recent contribution came at an interesting time because I have been contemplating the “natural world” and comparing it to the “techo-mechanized world.” My first reaction to the piece was that it must be a boulder of an article, given that it had taken not one but TWO writers to roll it up the mountain of the NYT’s “Technology” section.
The words “tiny drone” in the first sentence made me anxious and the second paragraph needled me with “there is no aspect of nature that can’t be improved with a rechargeable motor and a sensor or two.” My shock continued as I learned that the VegiBee, invented by a department store executive, could help me pollinate my tomato plants by touching their flowers with a vibrating device.
This seemed like the height of impropriety; Aunt Tomato’s tomatoes grow on Pleasant Street, not in Kim Kardashian’s backyard!
Unfortunately, the two Sisyphus-like authors had to keep rolling their boulder of a story back up the hill because their credibility was lost with me. The bombastic and absurd writing style revealed that although the authors may be able to grow profits for gadget-makers with their promotional pens, they know nothing about growing food. Here’s a snip of their foolishness:
“Outdoors, gardeners are constantly battling voracious creatures. It never fails that, just when you’re ready to pick that perfect tomato, a squirrel snatches it away.”
A squirrel? A SQUIRREL?
Before I throw a blood clot, let me conclude with one final piece of sensationalism. The garden drone used as a teaser in the article’s opening was actually an engineering project at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, but the students “didn’t test their device to see if it deterred garden animals.”
Oopsie!
I hope my New York Times reading friend will forgive me for being such an old stick in the mud when it comes to garden gadgets. It’s possible that this quote by American author and essayist Edward Abbey caused the cognitive dissonance:
“The domination of nature made possible by misapplied science leads to the domination of people; to a dreary and totalitarian uniformity.”
In other garden related communiques, Reggie Black tells me his cucumbers have not only sprouted but “those happy little dicots are a good two inches high already!”
Oh, La! Now that is a Pleasant Street kind of story. Alert the media and THE SQUIRRELS!
Julie-Ann Baumer 