My green thumb wilted on the vine

As a boy I never knew what was the point of growing a garden.

Just look at it from the point of view of a 10-year-old:

You spend all that time cultivating the ground, planting seeds, hoeing the weeds and then bending your back to pick beans, peas, radishes, cucumbers and squash.

And if that's not enough, then you take the vegetables back to the house so you can string beans, shell peas and shuck corn.

Hey, you can buy all that stuff at the grocery store. We don't make our own clothes or build our own cars.

If you say it's to save money on food, then what about the garden tractor, fertilizer and seeds Daddy had to buy? Not to mention the hoes for us kids to chop weeds with?

Besides, all that space we use for the garden would make a great baseball field. That's my preference for exercise.

Then in the summertime when I'd complain about not having anything to do, Mama would point me in the direction of the garden.

"You can go hoe the weeds," she'd say. "The corn needs picking and the tomatoes are about ripe."

"Me and my big mouth," I'd mutter.

My distaste for horticulture was shared by my cousin, who grew up on a farm. (At least I didn't go to college and major in agriculture.)

I sometimes have a flashback (although my co-conspirator denies having any recollection) of the time I was at my uncle's farm and my cousin and I were dispatched to shuck a trailer load of corn. The more we shucked, the more exacting became our censorship of the ears of corn.

If we saw corn blight, the ear would be tossed onto the reject pile on the ground. Then it was wormy ears that got the boot. Soon, every other ear was spurned as less than adequate for our high standards.

Finally, when we took the shucked ears to my aunt, she quizzed us as to why the big load of picked corn had shrunk. My cousin tried to explain that we were being extra selective and that much of the corn was bad.

My aunt, mother of seven and fool of nobody, went out to look at what we'd done with the remaining corn. 

"See, that ear is wormy," we'd say.

To which my aunt told us in no uncertain terms that we would break off the wormy part and save the rest of the ear.

Which, of course, we did, relegating for much later our plans to perform other activities — known collectively as “play.”

As years passed and I became a husband and father, I was — for a season, at least — my parents. My young family was renting a farmhouse and there was an old garden plot to the side.

The landlord plowed it for us and I borrowed a cultivator to break down the soil. We laid off rows of tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, squash, okra, potatoes and even broccoli. After a time, with adequate rains, our garden was a sight to see.

We had tomatoes until November and beans well into the summer. As for the broccoli, well, we found worms in the florets and didn't know how to get rid of them.

The potatoes were ravaged by beetles, but we salvaged a few. The cukes and squash did OK and we picked a mess of okra.

I must say, though, that we got so far behind on the weeds and they got so tall that the landlord realized they were blocking the view from the highway in front of the house. In desperation, he got his tractor and plowed the garden under.

But our experiment in home gardening had reached its conclusion. 

As migrant workers often say, "No mas!"

That was my first and last full-blown attempt at a garden. Now my efforts are limited to three or four tomato plants next to the stoop.

If, in the future, I'm ever overheard to be contemplating a garden, you can bet your supply of Burpee heirloom vegetable seeds that I'm talking out of my head. Appropriate action should be taken.

I have nothing against home gardeners. I just don't want to be one.

Larry Penkava is a writer for Randolph Hub. Contact: 336-302-2189, larrypenkava@gmail.com.