Where to start?

Where to start? I guess with what this blog will be about. The truth is "I don't know". I'm just going to throw it out there and see what, if anything, stinks, I mean sticks. Probably both.

But what's that? How about the name? David's Folly. If you look up Folly in the dictionary, you find many definitions. I'd have to say that I'm going to be using several of them.

Most appropriately there's the "costly and foolish undertaking". I come up with plenty of them. Is this it? The blog itself? We'll see. I'm great at starting things, and thinking about things. But doing things? And sticking with things? Will this blog become a love and a passion, or just another folly to be labored on briefly and left by the wayside? Time will tell.

And it's not one folly. I tend to go from folly to folly. Some people learn, or die trying, or just give up in despair and go off to Tibet and join a monastery where they are abused and oppressed by those damned Chinese (guess this blog's going to be banned there). I'm 44 and still haven't really gotten over the whole practice of moving from one folly to the next.

Currently I'm gardening. This isn't in and of itself foolish, but there should be limits on the quantity of gardening one should attempt to get going at once, and I think I left that behind back in March somewhere. Hopefully the garden police won't come by and whack me over the head with a stick or something. Now the watering police ...

I haven't been vegetable gardening lately for any number of perfectly good reasons (lousy sun, lousy dirt, no time, kids), but I do love being out of doors with the plants and enjoy both the freshness and the taste of home grown produce. So I'm going to produce some. Hopefully.

I've also been inspired lately by a wonderful book called (and this should really scare you away from gardening, not attract you) "The $64 Tomato" by William Alexander. I actually read it last year and loved it, so picked it up and read it again this month. It details the absurd lengths someone can go to in a garden. He's a very ... anal I guess is an appropriate word ... or maybe more politely proper ... person, and some of the lengths he goes to to get the perfect garden are ... well ... lengthy.

My garden beginnings are a bit more modest. I've been interested in a gardening method for years called square foot gardening, and this yard is the perfect place for it. We bought this house 5 years ago, and our back yard was in the former life a horse rink. Now the previous owner was a bit into folly as well. She decided one day to get some horses, so she knocked down half an acre of trees, scraped away all the top soil down to the red Georgia clay, and stuck in a couple of barn stalls. For five years horses walked around on this red Georgia clay, compacting even more what 5 million years of evolution had already done quite a good job of doing, resulting in a lawn that has the rough tensile strength of concrete. It's so hard that crab grass sees it and runs away screaming! Kudzu isn't even interested in growing there.

So, when spring came and with it that primal urge to dig in the dirt (now I warned you I'm a better thinker than a doer) I pulled up my garden plans from LAST YEAR (the ones that looked so beautiful last year and didn't get done, and set to work.

Here in Georgia, March is truly the month you should begin working on that vegetable garden, maybe sooner. The cool weather crops should be in the ground and you should be getting the rest ready from planting, but in March I am a Set Builder for my eldest daughter's ballet company (another folly) and am usually quite busy enough thank you very much and the garden sits. Last year I got ready to garden, purchasing lumber and compost and other materials that I'd need, but by the time I was ready to start it was May, and last year May was quite hot and very dry and not at all a good time to start a garden and I had some other projects I was working on and I think that's enough excuses already and that this sentence is not at all grammatically correct and has run on to the point that Imodium could no longer stop the running.

Anyway, my plans on paper didn't quite make it to any sort of physical manifestation other than I had an impressively large pile of compost that had sprouted an even more impressive batch of crab grass (which had no problem at all sprouting there), a bunch of pressure-treated lumber, several rather large bags of vermiculite, and a bunch bills to pay. $64 tomato hah. I paid a couple of hundred and had nothing.

This year, I had all the materials and started immediately after the spring show was over. The spring was very nice this year too. We've been getting some rain and it's been in the 70s and 80s. Very nice weather for gardening. By April 15, the fairly secure last frost date for this part of Georgia, I was ready to plant.

Enough for now. More on that later.