In God we trust, all others pay cash.

You know, for a house I didn't especially want in the first place, it's been a hell of an ordeal to get the thing put in my name. I agreed to do that during the divorce: take the house on when I could. For the last year, that really didn't seem viable. Closing costs run about $3500.

Do I have $3500?

No, I do not have $3500.

According to my latest bank statement, I have about $13 until payday. I have a few bucks in savings: enough to buy an OK television or have a fair weekend in Dollywood, but nowhere near enough to clear a refinance.
Of course, that was until I heard about an FHA streamline, which is supposed to be a magic bullet for people like me. Put together as a way for people to lower their interest rate with little or no money for closing costs, it can also be used to modify an existing mortgage --in this case, amend who owns the property in question.
After several months of periodically bringing up this with the guy who wrote the first mortgage and being mostly blown off, he finally decided it was in the bank's best interests or his best interests or someone's best interests to go ahead and start that up.

Honestly, I got no traction until I said, "Either you can help me or I'll just find somebody else who's willing to try."

Finally, he said, "I can get you $700 a month with no money for closing."

That was his first offer.

Then a thousand to two thousand dollar closing cost fee appeared. Then it disappeared. Then returned as around a thousand dollars, but a monthly of $675.

I have no clue what it will be tomorrow.

The whole process gets crazier and crazier all the time, which in my mind explains why the banking industry tanked a few years ago. They're all fucking high on something.

Currently, I'm halfway approved, but there's a list of things the underwriter's need, which today includes documents from a consumer creditor counseling service I used for about five years and dropped seven or eight years ago. It was kind of a scam, actually. The company was supposed to be able to clear up my debts, but that's not really how that played out. They paid themselves very well and every month put a little  money on my debts.

The only thing they managed to do was keep people from calling my house, bitching about how much I owed them.

I got a loan from my mom that turned into a gift to just pay off my creditors. After that, I very pointedly left the counseling program, talked to a nice man who seemed to think that was just swell, what I was doing. It was and I was glad to be out from under those people.

Why the bank thinks I need permission from these people now to streamline my mortgage in order to remove my ex-wife's name from it sounds insane. I'm about ten minutes from just telling them to go fuck themselves and just put the house on the market.

Selling the place would solve getting my ex's name off the mortgage.

I've been thinking about that more and more lately. I like living here, mostly. I like feeling like something is mine. I like having a garden and like not having to worry about the damned neighbors hearing me if I snore or laugh at the stupid television, but I don't like feeling like the place owns me.

I'm not sure I'm cut out to be middle class and a homeowner. I'm not even sure if I'm cut out to be a local anymore. 

Seeds from the slacker: End of summer

The garden didn't do all that I'd hoped it would do, but it did a lot of things I didn't expect. I should have planted more tomatoes and put up an electrified barbed-wire fence, dug a moat then filled it with piranhas to keep out the fucking deer (They got my peppers. Oh, yes they did --except, amusingly enough, the ghost peppers which can raise a blister on bare skin. I have pleasant dreams of the deer biting into one of those then doing elaborate ballet in the backyard, unable to quench the fire that is consuming their wicked tongues).

I am not a vindictive man. Seriously.

There were many failures. My eggplant never came in. It barely even tried. The zucchinis performed well then were wiped out by a creepy looking white grub that looked like something out of "Alien." I still managed to get plenty of them before that happened, however.

We will not discuss the okra again.

The watermelons came in late, while the pumpkins arrived so early. I'm still looking at different ways to use the latter and the kids who said they loved the watermelon won't eat it now.


And now, the garden is about done. The tomatoes wither and I do not think my peppers will last much longer. I planted a couple of things that are supposed to do well in cooler seasons, but I'm not optimistic I'll see any spinach or lettuce before the real cold sets in. I'm too late.
 
The main thing is, I think, was this year was a building year, a learning year. I knew, not a lot about gardening, and now I know a little more. I learned that you need to keep better track of where your plants are and what they are. I could have used the sun better, controlled the space, fertilized and watered with something like regularity.

Still, it was a good year to try something new and stick with it for once. In the past, I'd put in little gardens then given up on them because of distractions, boredom or just because the work seemed too arduous.

And while I didn't get as much food out of the garden as I wanted, the work bore fruit in other ways. It gave me something to do with my hands when I didn't know what I was supposed to do. It gave me a place to go, to meditate and focus my attention back to the world of the here and now and not whatever my current aggravation was.


The garden also gave me something to share with people. I made pumpkin butter, which delighted my son, and I brought it for my friends at work. I gave the 80-something man I work with at the radio station zucchini for he and his wife after he told me the stuff was big in Mexico. His wife is Mexican. I shared tomatoes and a few peppers and talked gardening with whoever would let me bend their ear.

It gave me something to share with my father and I loved that.

With my meager tomato supply, I made the best marinara sauce I've ever eaten and shared it with my girlfriend. I shared the joy of getting filthy dirty with the dog and we bonded over a mutual distrust of rabbits.

It has been a grand garden and already I can't wait to start all over again bigger and better in the hopes of making new mistakes. 

Green Acres: slacker in springtime

Some of what I grew took off:

Beets. I chose a variety of blood red Russian beets. I had never actually eaten beets before, but I figured they couldn't be that bad --and they looked cool, like the internal organs of some very weird animal.

Red leaf lettuce. I chose that because I buy it. Red leaf is my favorite, and I figured if I grew lettuce, I wouldn't have to buy it at the store, which would literally save me pennies a day!

Spinach. I eat a lot of that. I cook with it, use it in salads and when I can't find anything more appropriate to snack on will stuff my mouth with that --not because it's sweet, but because a handful of spinach typically kills any desire to eat --and sometimes live.

Zucchini. That stuff is going nuts. I can't keep up with it and nobody wants it. I've tried giving it away. People just glare at it. I've frozen a few pounds of it, will dehydrate some more and may see if I can make a few dozen loaves of zucchini bread.

Pumpkins. Also doing well. I have half a dozen already on the vine, a couple almost the size of a volleyball.

Tomatoes. The jury is out on them. I haven't harvested any, but I have tomatoes on the vine so that goes in the "win" column.

A lot of what I planted did not:

Carrots. Technically, they grew. I picked some variety that was supposed to be able to grow anywhere, but the roots never dug down more than two or three inches.

Eggplant: That flat out failed.

Peppers: I planted four different varieties. What the zucchini plants didn't outright crush, the fucking deer devoured, along with my beans.

Okra --Oh, that's a funny story.

The patch of ground I chose to begin my garden was completely overrun with weeds, mostly poke weed. Back in the winter, on a warm day, I'd spent hours hacking my way through them, digging up roots and filling plastic bags with vegetable matter that smelled like the corpse of a three-day-old possum.

It was lovely.

I'd tried to get rid of as much of the weeds as I could, even though I knew the only way that was possible was by spraying the ground with gasoline and setting it ablaze for several days.

I planned on weeding --the only problem was with my limited experience growing things, I was sure what constituted a weed and what didn't.

With the carrots, lettuce, spinach and the beets, I got a leg up. They liked cooler temperatures and sprouted in neat little rows and by the time other plants started cropping up, I could figure out which was which.

Now, some of my garden (the tomatoes, the eggplant and the peppers) I started indoors, but that left a lot of other things I had to try and feel my way through and as the weather warmed up, everything began to sprout. It started getting confusing as to what was what.

The worst of it was the okra.

I eat some okra. I like it fried and I like it in my chicken stew. I don't buy it often, but I thought I could grow enough to freeze, use all winter long, and it would be a  nice little reminder of what I'd accomplished.

I planted my row, followed the directions on the package and hoped the weather would be warm enough to encourage the plants to grow, to thrive. I babied them, because they seemed like a very southern vegetable. I wasn't sure if they'd actually take, but I kept them watered, weeded devotedly; and made sure the other plants didn't crowd.

By the early part of June, I had a nice row of hearty looking green plants, but they had a funny smell --like cheap perfume, kind of oily and they also seemed to have spread to other parts of the garden, in places they really couldn't be.

At some point I'd pulled all my okra plants up and cultivated an entire row of ragweed.    

My father says every year you gardening is a learning year. Nature is a school.

Apparently, I need to repeat a grade.

Green Acre: Seeds from the slacker 2

I never got a tiller, never was even able to borrow one for an afternoon. A friend of a friend offered to bring his and come cut up the ground for me, but his schedule never coincided with mine or the weather's. The weeks dragged on, but I was already working on planting.

I started hitting the flea market in February, looking for a shovel, a rake and a hoe --these seemed to be the minimum I'd just to plant something.Winter was mild and I was antsy to do something with my hands.

The only patch of ground that looked remotely likely for being something I could work without a tiller was a strange square protected by a rusted and sagging fence.It reminded me of a pet cemetery, forlorn and half forgotten, a place where countless goldfish of another generation had been laid to rest along with a couple of good dogs and maybe a cat.

The soil was dark, but the whole patch was overrun with poke weed. It looked deliberate, like the previous owner had planted the stuff, but nobody does that. In all likelihood, the land had been prepared, but never used. The old man's wife had become ill. The whole house is a living document to her decline, with little changes made to accommodate her growing frailty and immobility.

Birds probably took the land over. They'd brought the seeds and weed the weed had thrived unchecked.

I decided I could make my stand here or at least try.

I got a shovel and a pickaxe from my mother's basement; the same tools my father had used to dig and maintain his garden when I was a boy. I remember watching him and being part of the whole excavation of the lower quarter acre. He'd used the pick axe to pry out rocks, some of which had become part of the low stone wall at the bottom of the yard.

Pieces of that wall still remain, but not many.

The garden patch was worse than I imagined. The poke weed had grown deep. I spent half a day pulling up dessicated stalks and cutting and digging up swollen roots that looked very healthy. I pulled out chunks the size of basketballs and tossed them in a stinking pile on the other side of the fence. I filled something like ten leaf bags full of debris from the plot not much bigger than a couple of parking spaces.

I was a little too pleased with the job and on a whim decided to go ahead and plant a couple of rows of greens, carrots and some beets.

My father suggested I hold off, but he lives about an hour or so from Canada. His winter and growing season are very different than West Virginia.

I'd already started tomatoes, peppers and eggplants in little peat pellets indoors. What would be the harm to go ahead and try to get an early jump on things?

The back of the packages swore they'd grow in the cold, that they loved the cold and I hoped they were right. To be honest, I was kind of counting on them getting a head start on the weeds. The weeds would return. All the books said they would and when the new plants grew, I wouldn't know which was which. I had no idea what spinach or lettuce or beets looked like when they first came out of the ground.

I hoped it would all turn into something I recognized before I yanked them out of the ground.

Green Acre: seeds from the slacker

While I wasn't writing, through the spring, I kept busy with a garden. The old guy who'd had the place before me had been one of those "alpha" gardeners when he was younger. The back yard was still furrowed and dented from where a tractor had passed over it many times.

In my mind, I can see the tall stalks of corn growing neatly, the perfect turnips poking up out of the soil, peppers and tomatoes practically bursting from the vine. 

His garden would have looked just like the slick pages of a seed catalog.

But that garden would have been many years ago, before his wife became so ill, before the old man, himself, grew tired of the leisurely work of growing food for fun and began talking to real estate agents about selling the place.

The garden was gone, but a kind of scar remained covered by a green overgrowth of thick clover; clover, that choked my mower and left me sweating and swearing under the mid-day sun after I'd worked the whole morning; clover, that made me regret every footfall by the end of each wasted Saturday and wish for something like napalm.

Starting a garden seemed like my only option. If I couldn't cut the grass, I'd carve it out and replace it with beans, beets and watermelons for the kids. I'd make the garden so big and massive, the neighbors would think I'd turned Amish.

I had no idea where to start. My few attempts at gardening had been typically sad and depressing. It always sounded so easy: just scratch some ground, put in a few seeds and cover them up. Remember to water them and let the sun take care of the rest.

It is not that easy.

Too often, I'd wound up with sickly plants with slick, black roots that looked like they'd been drenched in motor oil. They bore little fruit and their lonely, wilted foliage always suggested unspeakable abuse. In a good year, I might get a handful of tomatoes and a couple of pencil nub carrots. The rest would go to weeds or to seed and become bait for moles.

Through the winter I poured through books --some of them I read --and I looked for advice on how to plant, what to plant and when. I glanced through catalogs like I teenage boy with his first porno mag and gazed with something approaching lust on weird, Russian tomatoes and exotic African gourds. What was the point of even trying if I was just going to grow what I could buy at Foodland?

Everything looked amazing. I chose half a dozen varieties of this and that, sent off an order then did it again with another company. Some of this was bound to grow, I figured.

But I didn't have much in the way of tools: a couple of plastic hand tools generally used for flower gardening (purchased from a dollar store and probably meant for a child) and a snow shovel (bought at an auto parts store and not especially good at removing snow).

Pretty clearly, I needed a few things.

For months, I told myself I needed a tiller: front tine, rear tine; some kind of tiller. It would solve all my problems. It would chop the ground up like hamburger, reduce the weeds and grass to rich, organic confetti and I could just cast my seeds out over the perfectly sculpted rows like rolling dice. All I'd have to do after that was get a watering can and remember to make sure to dampen the ground every once in a while.

Yeah, that was the plan...

Farmer Bill: Opening remarks

I remembered my jaw dropping after the nice neighbor lady next door explained to me --gently -- the length and breadth of my domain. It came many weeks after I'd moved in. The backyard was twice the size I thought it was and suddenly the thought of having to mow all of that grass seemed terrifying.

It was a serious commitment with a push mower, which is what I had at my disposal: a second-hand refurbished mower that looks like something Mel Gibson might have used in a Mad Max movie.

I made plans to start a garden almost immediately. Of course, I recognized I started with some handicaps: a lack of actual, working knowledge, no tools to speak of and little idea where to start.

All I had was some vague encouragement from the neighbor next door that the previous owners of my home had always maintained a wonderful garden.

So it was at least possible for me to continue that tradition --if not especially likely.

Over the years, I've repeatedly tried my hand at growing small gardens. Mostly, I've grown nothing, not even weeds. A couple of times, I did manage to create small toxic areas that remained bare for years after I quit attempting to cultivate them.

But this year, I'm gardening. I'm gardening, not so much because I want the delight of homegrown tomatoes and peppers. I'm not gardening as competition with my neighbors or to earn some hippie, homeowner cred. No, I'd just like to continue eating in the fashion I've grown accustom to --you know, continue eating actual food.

So... we'll be blogging a bit about the garden, along with the other threads.

Don't expect to learn anything.