Only badass gunslingers plant pink petunias

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Today is yet another day when I don’t have anything substantive for this blog. Art has an article posted about using rifles and shotguns for rural home defense and Jason writes of his lustful yearning for the Masterpiece Arms Tactical Carbines. Me? I have petunias (and maybe an unrelated case of the crabs).

Damn, these flowerbeds are huge, I made them far too big; getting them ready is still a work in progress and I have been putting in no less than two hours work on them each dry day since March 16th. There have been some hardware problems; somewhere in this great big world, somebody must be able to produce a garden hoe that I cannot break. That old hickory-handle iron-blade garden hoe my Grandmother used back on the Tennessee farm probably lasted her a lifetime. It was also part of her home-defense system; she would not waste a shotgun-shell on a copperhead or a rattler. Like a master-class hillbilly samurai warrior, she would hack serpents into chicken feed sized pieces with that hoe. All of the made-in-Asia garden hoes that the stores sell today must be for use in rice paddies; they sure cannot hold up in this northern Illinois soil and clay; Grandma would have never trusted using one against a viper.

It is only April 12th so I am definitely risking a killing frost by setting my first few flowers today. I bought two flats, one of petunias and the other of variegated marigolds, and only planted about a half-dozen plants from each flat today; I want to see how they do while I keep an eye on the short and midterm weather forecasts. I’ll set a few flowers each fair weather day until we are clear of potential frost. There is plenty of plastic sheeting on the rack in case I need to cover the new plantings.

As far as getting rid of the crabs, I believe I’ll try an old down-home remedy that involves a straight razor, a lighter, and an ice pick.
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