Texas gardening

I've moved every summer for the past six years. But this year, I'm staying put, so I decided to plant a garden. You know, grow some roots or something.

Bright and early on Friday morning (well, bright, at least) I pulled into a feed store, where the accents were about as thick as the Texas summer heat. Maybe even thicker.


(I didn't have my camera with me, so this picture is from Denton RC.)

I squeezed my little Honda into the row of pickup trucks filled with mulch and fertilizer and walked up, noticing that I was the only customer not wearing either overalls or a long floral dress. Farmers and ranchers were ordering supplies while old couples planned their flower gardens and a man on a forklift loaded bags of soil into trucks. "Where'd you get them freckles," I heard, and I looked up to see a man with a belly so big his overalls wouldn't button around it. He helped me make my plant selections and told me how to get my tomatoes to grow on a patio. "The mainest thing is your soil," he said. So he helped me pick out fertilizer and compost.

After I'd chosen fertilizer, compost, six plants, and four pots, I went inside the musty little feed store filled with seeds, coyote traps, sulfur fertilizer, and old John Deere signs. An old man was sitting behind the counter offering farming advice to customers and scratching out sums in a little notepad. Dennis was his name. "Now, you can buy that compost at Calloway's, but it'll cost you 18 bucks," he was telling a woman. Another old man in worn out overalls sat sprawled out on a bench across from the counter talking with the customers crowding the building (because who wouldn't want to sit and chill in a feed store?).

"Where d'ya want us to load your bags?" Dennis asked. "Oh, out there into that car with the dog in it," said the customer. So the assistant hauled the bags over his shoulder and carried them out to the car with the dog.

"How's Merwin's finger," Dennis asked a lady a little farther down the line, and all I thought was, "Thank you, Lord, that you orchestrated my steps so that at this place, at this time, I'd be standing right here to hear that sentence." The other customers gathered around, and each chimed in with advice for Merwin's finger. The man on the bench recommended a special ointment he had. "It looks like water, but it acts like medicine," was the glowing praise.

Dennis answered the phone right as I was stepping to the counter, so his assistant started jotting down the prices of my purchases on the back of a feed catalog. My two unpriced buckets confused him. "How much are these two little'uns?" he asked. I thought he was asking Dennis, but he must have been asking the public at large. "They's half the size, they oughta be half the price," one customer volunteered. "How 'bout two dollars?" another suggested. "$2.50?" "$2.75?" The whole store had convened to help solve this puzzle. I began to think that I ought to jump in and say something if the prices of my pots were going to be decided democratically.

And just so we're clear:



Not half the size.

Fortunately, Dennis got off the phone at that point, and he was called upon to settle the dispute that was throwing the whole store into a frenzy. "Hell, I don't know," was his helpful response. "How 'bout $1.50?" So 1.50 it was. After that he made a few scribbles on his notepad, gave me the total, and his assistant helped me carry everything to my car.

After a trip to Home Depot to get a spade and morning glory seeds and a few hours of mixing soil and planting, I ended up with this cute little patio. Hopefully things will grow.