Today I was forced to make the ultimate decision and play the Grim Reaper. Yes, today was the day I had to thin the overwhelming mass of green leaves also known as radishes. Befitting this solemn occasion, I dressed in my best black tank top (it’s hot outside) and black running shorts, along with my Wellies, of course (they’re blue, but what can I do – it’s not like I’m going to wear my Jimmy Choo’s out there). Plodding across the backyard, as if you could do a sexy catwalk strut in knee high Wellies, I gently bowed my head as I approached the garden boxes, cutting my eyes to the cucumbers to avoid looking directly at the radishes. It was like when you don’t look at the dog because he’s going to the vet to get fixed (a tangent moment – why do they call it “fixing” anyway? It’s not like he was broken to begin with. And you never hear of a vasectomy or hysterectomy being called a “fixing”. Anyway, I digress.)
Kneeling down on the garden box frame, it was time for a little prayer to Mother Nature for blessing me with such abundance (hey, I wasn’t about to jinx myself, I still have more vegetables to grow) to create this thinning problem. However, I didn’t know where to start. The first square was planted as it should be, before ADHD took over, with three lines and each budding radish perfectly spaced at 1.5″-2″ apart. Martha Stewart of the Green Thumb would have been proud. This 12″x12″ square was a textbook photo of how to plant a square foot garden. Except that it would be difficult to crop the adjacent 3 squares celebrating their chaos from the high definition postcard photo. Where the first model square held 18 perfectly spaced creations, the other 3 squares resembled a 3 year old’s first experiment with a Sharpie on the kitchen wall – patternless scribbles of lines drawn with a child’s pure delight. This is what adult ADHD-fueled creativity does – creates the perfect “color outside the lines” example that would have probably generated a take home progress report letter from my pre-school teacher “Steffie loves to garden, but she needs to work a bit on her focus and attention to details and following instructions.” Good to know not much has changed since Kindergarten.
It was time to decide who was going to live and who was going to the great compost pile in the sky. I began to gently fold the leaves over and see how many radishes had congregated in little tribal bunches (it does take a village). Tentatively, I pulled two from a group of three, then three from a group of four, over and over again. Sometimes I pulled too many, sometimes too few. Soon, my giant spaghetti pot was full of cute little future radishes, wilting in the sun. Spaghetti pot is probably raising a few eyebrows, but I don’t have a bucket or an apron and I wasn’t about to put them in my pocket because they might have bugs on them, for goodness sake. When in need, improvise.
Finally my arduous task was done, all 4 radish boxes were at least more hospitable for the remaining “selected to live only to be harvested someday and eaten, pickled, dried, or otherwise used (maybe a front door wreath)” radishes. To those radish souls who gave up their space for their fellow superior genetic specimens, thank you for your sacrifice.
Now, I need a drink. Wonder if I can make radish wine or radish-infused tequila??