Garden of dirt

Ashley and I decided to plant a garden this year. When we moved into our house, we noticed a space on one side where the soil was really dark and soft; it looked like someone had planted something there before. We decided that would make a great place for our new garden. We didn’t get around to it last spring, but this year we were determined.

So we used the landscaping bricks that Ash’s mom had leftover after making her garden to frame ours. We used the handy “Garden Claw” to till the soil, painstakingly yanked out all the weeds (and about a billion onions… whoever lived there before us must have LOVED onions), and started planting all sorts of seeds that would eventually turn into big, beautiful flowers. We even dug out the area underneath our dining room window and planted three types of sunflowers and two types of pumpkins. We were standing back, admiring our work, when Ashley asked if it was time to spread the weed preventer. I said, “Sure.”

I was cleaning up our mess and gathering our tools, and when I glanced over at the garden again I noticed that she was putting down kind of a heavy coat of the weed killer. I said I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to put that much on, so we decided to read the directions. As we were looking through the 39-page, fold-out booklet that detaches from the back of the canister, I noticed something in big, bold letters: DO NOT USE PREEN ON FLOWER SEEDS. Son of a— what? Why not? It’s weed preventer. Don’t people use this in their gardens? Yes… yes they do. But not until the plants are at least a few inches tall. After doing a little research online, I discovered that Preen kills ALL seeds— even flower seeds. Apparently it knows the difference between plants and seeds, but does not distinguish between weed seeds and other types of seeds.

Luckily, we didn’t water it into the soil, or rake the soil after applying it. These are, according to the instructions, essential to the process of killing every single freakin’ seed in your garden. Also, if it is left on the surface, it will photodegrade, making it far less potent. The day after applying it, we decided it would be a good idea to sweep as much as possible off the surface of the now-dry soil— so we did. We agreed that if any of our neighbors saw us doing this, they would probably think we were insane. But after all that work, we had to do whatever we could think of to save our garden.

The worst part is we’ll have to wait weeks to find out if we killed it all.

Stupid Preen.