To Everything There is a Season...and Some Thyme. :-)

To everything there is a season
A time for every purpose under the sun.
A time to be born and a time to die;
A time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill and a time to heal ...
A time to weep and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn and a time to dance ...
A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to lose and a time to seek;
A time to rend and a time to sew;
A time to keep silent and a time to speak;
A time to love and a time to hate;
A time for war and a time for peace.

~Ecclesiastes 3:1

Every year, I plant a garden.
Well, it’s not this massive patch of horticultural wonder in my backyard, and I in no way need major farm machinery to care for it.
Um, I only need just a hose to water it with. :-)

Funny, but my gardening aspirations have never taken me further than five feet beyond my backdoor.
My garden is spread throughout 7 or 8 planter boxes on my back porch.
And, actually, I grow more herbs than anything else.
Yeah, yeah, catnip, of course!

For what it costs me each year to start my garden and for what I yield in produce, well, I’m in the red from the moment I enter the Groton Nursery & Garden Center in early May.

Tangent herb fact: DID YOU KNOW that there are like a bazillion different types of thyme?
Well, yeah, there are time zones, time travel, GMT, time in a bottle, and time bombs.
Oh, um, yeah, not the same "thyme". :-)

Tangent time-related musing: These are all words related to time...indefinite, interval, interregnum, season, chronology, chronic, dusk, astrolabe, heliochronometer, pelekinon, gnomon, equinoctial, sundial, twilight, dawn, matins, compline, retrograde, serendipitous, vespertine, aphelion, perihelion, equiluxe, midnight, noon, celestial, eclipse, ecliptic, nocturnal, zenith, solstice, equinox, diurnal, sidereal, nadir, post meridian, ante meridian, precambrian, anthropocene, hadean, epoch, archaen, eocene, holocene, pleistocene, neolithic, paleolithic, mesozoic, tempus fugit, antediluvian, orology, era, millenium, century, aeon, pre-cambrian, singularity, fleeting, and soon.
Gawd, are most of those SO like SAT words…words I didn’t get right on that test, I’m sure. :-)
Use them in a sentence...um, k!
I’m leaving at dawn to go visit my Ante Diviluvian in Vespertine, Arkansas. Gnomon on the bus better try and pick me up, cuz I’ll hit him over the head with my heliochronometer if I don’t have my pet pelekinon, Doris, [she is a large water bird with a distinctive pouch under her beak, k? :-) ] bite his ass first!

But, back to my story...
There are a bazillion different types of thyme, and, of course, I wrote down all the types when I went to the Groton Nursery & Garden Center in early May.

Hey, you never know when you might be asked (on a job interview, going through airport security, or on a date, well, if you’re dating a horticulturalist) if you can name at least five different types of thyme.

Red
White Creeping
Pink Creeping
Pizza
Silver Edge
Gold Edge
Oregano
Silver Lemon
Lime
Mother of
Variegated Lemon White
Lemon White
Lemon Common
Doone Valley
Pink Chintz
Lavender Wooly
Lemon Frost
Highland Cream
Golden
Bressingham
English

Yeah, the pizza thyme smells just like pizza!
I would know. I have pizza thyme.
Hey, who doesn't always have time for pizza? :-)
K, that was lame.
One lame comment allowed per post, k?

You know, that’s probably the biggest reason I like my garden.
The smells.
Well, there IS that Hippie-Chick-Earth-Girl aspect about me.
Yeah, believe it or not, though I like shoes, clothes, Sephora, the color pink, and Hello Kitty, I do have strong leanings toward that whole hippie chick genre.
Come on...these ARE my favorite jeans!



I’m a zealous recycler, and I’ve often thought about how I could live without a car, well, unless it was an Alfa Romeo Spider convertible, cuz then I couldn’t live without it!

I don’t know if everyone is like this or if it’s just me being me, but I strongly associate smells with events and people.
I love smells in general, err, well, good ones.
I absolutely hate the smell of HOT wet cat food...just in case you're wondering.
(And, how does one ever smell HOT wet cat food you ask? Well, this occurs when you rinse the can out, cuz you're gonna RECYCLE it! Yeah, I rinse out all the recycle stuff, too. Is that odd?)

Anyway, I love perfume, too.
I have Spring/Summer scents, and I have Fall/Winter scents.
I wore "Pleasures" by Estee Lauder all the while my friend Bitsy was dying .
After she died, I put it on, and I just couldn’t wear it anymore.
It was like whenever I put that scent on, I was watching a bad movie (um, like let's say "Baby Geniuses") all over again.
So, I gave it away to someone who could love it and think of "The Sound of Music" while wearing it. :-)

In my garden, I have cherry tomatoes and basil.
For me, I guess this alone justifies my garden’s existence in my mind.
I love a basil, tomato, and mozzarella salad.
It could be my favorite salad actually.
I think I figured if for the months of June, July, and August I grew my own, well, I would somehow be saving tons 'o money.
Not!
Of course, since it’s rained almost like every day in June here, my basil is stunted and droopy, and my tomatoes flourished but now have some kind of strange spots all over their leaves.
It must be some kind of tomato fungus.
Um, yeah, now would be a good time to be dating that horticulturalist. :-)

K, so, err, here is my FIRST tomato.
Isn’t it a beaut?
Proud Hippie-Chick-Earth-Girl here!



I also have lettuce.
Err, enough for maybe two salads, ah, not to mention the fact that I probably could have bought the same amount of lettuce at the store for less than what I bought these plants for. :-)



I have parsley and the previously mentioned stunted and droopy basil.



I have rosemary and oregano.



I have mint (peppermint and spearmint) and THYME (only four kinds though, and most of it has drowned with all the rain!)



Oh, back to smells...

Dill has always reminded me of my grandfather, Stanley Szymczak.
He always had a garden, and he pickled his cukes and grew the dill for those cukes with wild abandon.
Unfortunately, there must be some secret to growing dill because mine died on me last year.
And this year, it looked like it was SO gonna be my dill year.
It was green.
It was growing.
It was smiling, well, if a plant could smile.
Then came the rain, and then so died my dill.
Ah, there’s always next year. :-)
Every time I smell dill, I think of Dziadzia.
Sometimes, when I'm not even cooking fish or making a tunafish sandwich, I just open the bottle and smell it to think of my grandfather.

I love rosemary.
Rosemary could SO be a perfume!
Well, if you’re a Hippie-Chick-Earth-Girl it could be. :-)
I bring my rosemary plant in in the Winter.
In the middle of January, I love to take a leaf, crush it in my hand, and then bury my nose in the scent of it on my palm.
Um, if you really want to win me over, bring me rosemary foccacia bread, yeah, it’s even better than shoes!
Yeah, I can’t believe I just said that, but carbs are my food vice.

I love mint.
K, mint could be perfume, too.
Mint always reminds me of the iced tea my Mom used to make from tea bags in the Summer.
In it, she’d put the mint that grew outside the house.

I love basil.
See the aforementioned favorite salad and the currently stunted and droopy plants.
Ah, basil could be a perfume, too!
K, maybe not, but in a pinch, it could be. :-)

I am not a big parsley person, but I grow it every year, cuz Nate and Iz like to pick it and munch on it raw.
Ewwww.

Which reminds me, every year, I must go over with Iz, upon first planting everything, what’s edible and what’s not.
She goes around the porch, points to things, and then asks, "Can I eat this? Can I eat that?"
She definitely knows that tomatoes are okay, because for the last two years, I have come down in the mornings, and found her out on the porch eating all my cherry tomatoes right off the plants.
Yeah, she usually eats them all before they make it into one of my basil, tomato, and mozzarella salads. :-)

While my garden will probably never make it beyond the back porch, it gives me a huge amount of consolation most days.
Not that I’m saving money by growing my own produce or anything like that.
It’s the scents, the growth, Iz stealing all my tomatoes...it’s just the joy of being able to grow something, care for it, and then see it reach its fruition...hmmm, much like parenting, I think. :-)

"I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green."

~Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from and Old Manse

P.S. And a shout-out to one of my most devoted readers...that guy who plays a mean sax and is married to that woman who I adore and run with...not naming any names this time, Steve. Oops! :-)