Gardening With X

So, I’m poking around in my garden a couple of weekends ago, raking and weeding and whatnot. Walking around the side of the house, I see the blackberry cane that I had planted a week or two prior. It’s showing no visible signs of growth, just sitting there like a thorny stick.

This would be a good time to mention that your faithful correspondent has an impressive gardening record. Every year I plant a bunch of seeds and plants and a full 20-30% of them live. If that’s not a green thumb, I don’t know what is.

In the interests of tidiness and not wanting visitors to know that I’m a natural born plant killer, I decided to remove the obviously dead blackberry cane and bury it in the compost pile with the rest of my victims (don’t even ask about the rosemary bush).

I went to the garage to get a pair of work gloves to protect my soft, supple, almost feminine hands from the evil thorns. Armored with heavy gloves, I grabbed the cane by the base and yanked it right out of the ground.

And you know what? The tricksy bastard was growing under the soil line. Healthy green leaves shooting right out from the cane. Sneaky.

So I did what any master gardener would do. I shoved the cane back into the hole I yanked it from, patted the soil around it, and walked back to the garage to put my gloves away.

Whistling. Innocently. As though nothing ever happened.

And now a certain someone is going to get me more plants to kill take good care of. If they’re smart, they won’t try to get sneaky with me.

Yours truly,
Mr. X

…garden gnome…