Gardening

We just about finished planting this year's garden yesterday – got in tomatoes, corn, peppers, radish, okra, watermelon, cantaloupe, and pumpkin; the spinach and peas will need to wait until later in the summer. Larger-scale gardening is a tough task for someone with poor vision and OCD tendencies! OK, it is not really THAT difficult, but my OCD-ishness kicks in and I want to make all the rows perfectly straight; find a way to make the garden edges smooth, well defined, and free from grass clumps; and make the dirt in the garden completely smooth. My mind tugs at these ideas until I think how much work that would be (the garden is perhaps swimming-pool sized) and then I let go, realizing that the things we plant will come up even though the garden might look “messy” to me. At least this year I will put the tomatoes in cages to make them a little neater!

My vision also makes it difficult. When planting the seeds, I cannot actually see where they fall in the row. I just move my hand along the row and drop in seeds at (seemingly) appropriate intervals. I mowed the grass around the edges of the garden, but when the grass is really short it looks very similar to the dirt in the garden (green and brown can look very similar when not seen in color), and I can’t easily discern where the garden ends and the grass begins. It is also very difficult to see where plants are sprouting up since my acuity is poor, and there is very little contrast between green plants and dirt. Tearing up the ground for the garden left dead grass clumps in it, which I don’t like partly because it does not look “neat” but also because the dead grass clumps look very similar to the live grass, tricking me into thinking that weeds are coming up in the garden. The corn, which we planted several weeks ago, is coming up but the plants are very small and I need to look very hard to find where the rows are. I accidentally pulled one of the corn sproutlings up, not thinking I was in a row and mistaking it for a weed!