In the movie “Field of Dreams”, Ray Kinsella is walking through a cornfield when he hears a voice say:
“If you build it, he will come.”
This line from the script has apparently been misquoted or changed to be:
“If you build it, they will come.”
The movie used the “he” version. Well, I can vouch for the second “they” version.
Now I’m not talking about a baseball field. Just a simple (we thought) organic garden.
Have you ever tried to grow an organic vegetable garden?
If we set up a well-prepared garden – tilled with rich naturally fertilized soil, a variety of vegetables planted with care – we expected “they” would come.
We did what we thought were the right things.
We were told to expect a few weeds. As a precaution against even that, and due to a suggestion from other gardeners, we laid down some of this gray liner material which was supposed to allow water and light to pass through, but would prevent or at least inhibit weed growth.
Well … “they” came.
I’d say we were very productive.
Only not in generating the “they” we expected or wanted.
The “they” was huge and pervasive weeds (some taller than I) that overtook everything we desired. They grew much faster and larger than the vegetables.
Our bush bean plants were surrounded and smothered by weeds. We got no beans.
Our carrots never really had a chance. The weeds smothered them. We got very short, stubby carrots, if anything at all.
You can see how useful the gray liner was. The weeds simply had their way with it and pushed it up over two feet.
That sucking sound we thought we heard sometimes was probably the fast-growing weeds sucking most of the nutrients from the soil, leaving small, weak vegetable plants.
The only plants which outgrew the weeds in height were the tomatoes. But even the lower branches of tomatoes were smothered.
Then the grasses moved in. We now have a grass and weed carpet everywhere in this garden jungle.
We’re still looking for a way to clear the grasses and weeds from our garden. Supposed experts that I’ve talked to don’t seem to have any organic solutions other than covering the entire garden with black plastic or pulling each weed and grass root by hand.
So is this the Garden of Shattered Dreams or Nightmares???