Gardenicide: a response

Yeah, I admit it. I’m the dirt killer. It was greed, I tell ya. Greed and maybe a pinch of pride led me down the dark path to gardenicide. The desire to have bigger plants with bigger yields, so I could crow about my superior garden growing prowess drove me over the edge of reason.

It took months of mixing rich redwood compost with chicken manure, sand, wood ashes, the finest coffee grounds Starbucks had to offer, and egg shells to create the perfect mulch milieu. Any organic gardener will tell you that we really don’t feed plants with fertilizer. Rather, we feed the living soil with material that the worms and microbes love to munch. The product of our earthy partners is water soluble food that can be immediately absorbed by plant roots. All the nutrients necessary for plant life are available, in the soil, in the correct amounts, and are carried to the plant, above ground. The sun magically combines them with chlorophyll in the process of photosynthesis to create the plant structure and the fruit. So wonderful, so simple, such a gift from God! Why would anyone, in their right mind, tamper with such a perfect process??

I couldn’t leave well enough alone, though. Noooohoho, not me. I had to try to goose the plant growth and production, with some man made concoction to satisfy evil urges of greed and pride. I mistook the “Weed and Feed” lawn fertilizer for high-nitrogen lawn food and fed the poison to my beautiful, trusting plants. Watching them wilt and slowly starve to death was unbearable. I tried everything to thwart the poison but to no avail.

It was a painful lesson. I’ve been properly chastened and I’ve resolved to repent from my foolish ways. I’m naming my garden, “East of Eden” as a reminder to avoid any more deadly sins. Most of them, anyway…
submitted by a gardener under the pseudonym of " Gardenicide"

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