So That's How People Can Like Gardening

I bought a blueberry plant a couple of weeks ago while accompanying Robin on one of his garden purchasing adventures. I'd heard they grow here, and I'd heard there's even a native one, but I hadn't done the research.

I looked up the actual variety I had bought when I got home. The good news is that this variety likes our weather just fine. It likes the sun, can handle the heat, and can handle the occasional freeze. The bad news is that it hates our soil (too alkaline) and our water (too calciferous).

So the thing to do is to plant it in a half whiskey barrel full of peat moss and water it only with rain water.

I actually do collect rain water in a rain barrel. And Robin got me a half whiskey barrel on his last gardening shopping trip. And today I went to buy peat moss.

I had a choice between peat moss laced with fertilizer and peat moss that had been baled. I went for the baled in case my dainty plant would spontaneously combust upon meeting up with this random commercial fertilizer. That means I had to take a big compacted clump of peat moss and break it down into a proper crumbliness.

This turned out not to be difficult at all. I could barely break a piece off before it crumbled into oblivion.

Well, if this is the sort of thing gardeners work with, of course they like gardening. This stuff just does what it's told. If a weed grew in it, I could just pull it out.

Just so you know what I'm comparing that to, here's what The New Central Texas Gardener has to say about what I have:

In Central Texas we have two basic choices of soil: poor and worse. Poor soil is what one of our gardening friends calls "ten o'clock dirt": at 9:55 a.m. it is too wet and heavy to plow; at 10:05 a.m. it is dry and concrete-hard. The only time you can till it is at 10:00 a.m. It is, in short, thick black clay.

The "worse" (and these terms are relative) is caliche, which anyone but a Central Texan would call rock. Actually, much of it is rock--limestone--mixed with expansive clay. While it is only a few inches deep in some parts of the area, many gardeners find that out goes down about a half-mile in their yards.

I am lucky. My yard is straight-up clay. With enough conditioners (compost or pretty much anything other than clay), you can turn it into better soil. I'd rather plant things that like it this way (native plants) (as is explained in a punch line I've borrowed from "True Stories").