If you are unemployed, retired or just a deadbeat, you have probably already been spending lots of time in your garden.
If you have a job, you still have weekends and evenings to dig the earth.
Your first task is to turn the soil in your vegetable garden. Either relish the exercise, or be a wimp and rent a roto-tiller.
Next, you need to buy seeds. If you are a cheapskate, like me, you’ve saved seeds from last year’s crop. I saved string bean seeds from year to year for a decade until last summer’s drought left me with nothing but desiccated stems.
If you forgot to start tomato seedlings, maybe you have friends with greater foresight and extra sprouts that they just might pass on to you.
A tip for planting tomatoes that may or may not be valid, scatter egg shells in the soil under the seedlings to avoid blossom-end rot. You need to have been collecting egg shells since January.
By the time you are ready to use the shells, they should be really ripe, and will repel all vermin as well as members of your household.
One baleful tragedy is flowers that don’t flower. When one of my five peonies repeatedly failed to bloom, I consulted the source of all wisdom — Google — and rediscovered that peonies need lots of sunlight. My failed peony was in full sun in the spring but by early summer, was completely overshadowed by a 10-foot butterfly bush. I transplanted the peony, and can’t wait for next summer.
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The most essential requirement for gardening in Hopewell is to set up a system to counter predation by voracious, disgusting, hateful deer.
In addition to an appetite for all vegetables, deer love are azaleas, hosta, lilies, and hydrangeas, among other plants.
Among the plants that deer don’t like to eat: bee balm, bleeding hearts, daffodils, irises, lavender, mint, peonies, poppies. and zinnias.
Among the deer that I like to eat: all of them.
To protect your vulnerable vegetation, you can start with stinky spray and netting, but you have to spray regularly. Sometimes, out of sheer perversity, the deer will ignore the spray or develop a fondness for the stench.
Despite what it says on the container, a good rainstorm washes away the spray, so that when you come out the morning after a downpour, your just-about-to-bloom Therese Bugnet roses have been reduced to a thorny stalk.
I’ve given up on defensive measures. Currently, all my plantings are surrounded by electrified barbed wire, anti-tank mines and a pack of underfed Dobermans.
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Is this the year to plant a natural wall between yourself and your neighbors to enable some discreet nude sunbathing? Or, perhaps, you want to shelter yourself from your hard-to-look-at neighbors indulging in indiscreet nude sunbathing.
Much worse, you might be living next to one of those pathological hoarders who stores a dozen junk cars in the yard or rows of dead washing machines or broken lawnmowers awaiting some catastrophic shortage for which they will be prepared.
Yews make a fine shield year round, but deer eat them.
If you want something really wall-like, plant bamboo. But for sheer self-destructiveness, that’s like taking a stroll in the fast lane of the New Jersey Turnpike. Bamboo spreads fast and is impossible to eradicate.
Take a look at the grove next to the Borough’s Gazebo Park to see bamboo at its most overwhelming. If you insist on bamboo, it’s best to acquire a pair of hungry pandas to keep the growth in check.
Green Giant arbor vitae fills in quickly, a wall that deer don’t eat.
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If you want to go to heaven, there are two direct gardening paths. The first is to collect water by attaching a rain barrel to your roof’s downspout. Not only can you keep up with watering your garden, but you are also lowering your water bill and saving a drought-stricken planet.
The other direct route to heaven is to set up a compost heap. All those cucumber and carrot ends, orange rinds and banana peels, apple cores and bits of rotty lettuce that came as a surprise from the supermarket can be transformed into wonderfully rich soil.
To speed up the composting process, it’s best to add manure, available from local farms or harvested from speeches by certain members of the U.S. House of Representatives.
You can buy an elaborate composter that turns with the touch of a remote control or make a simple enclosure of fencing that gets turned by pitchfork periodically.
Despite all temptation, do not compost the neighbor’s dog that barks day and night or the neighbor who yells at the dog day and night.
Saving the earth from your garbage will atone for all sins, including coughing without covering your mouth, blaspheming and laughing inappropriately during sad movies.