Say It Isn't So


          Recently Lorraine donated two dollars to the Arbor Day Foundation. They use the money to do something with trees. (If you need to know, look it up.) For this donation, she received eleven trees. Not very big trees, just little sticks actually, about twelve to fifteen inches tall, not counting the roots. So of course, we had to plant these ‘free’ trees, which took eight pots. The instructions told us that we could not use any kind of enhanced soil but had to use plain dirt. That created a problem. In our yard, we have dirt that somebody brought in to fill some raised, and the rest of the yard contains natural dirt, or the dirt that came with the lot. That dirt is good for growing sagebrush and a few other deserty type things like juniper trees.

     I didn’t want to rob soil from the raised beds, and I knew better then try and use our natural soil, which left me having to go and---get this---buy dirt. For a person who grew up on a farm where if we needed dirt we could just dip in a shovel anywhere we happened to be and get all the dirt we might want, this idea was traumatic.

However, I sucked it up and went down to Lowes to buy dirt. I thought, it’s good the folks can’t see this latest development in my life. They would have laughed themselves silly, and certainly would not have told anybody about what their boy was doing. The embarrassment would have been substantial.

     I walked into the Lowes Garden Center and asked a clerk, “Where do you keep your dirt?” She looked at me for a couple heartbeats to make sure I was real, then waved an arm toward a wall of pallets and bags of stuff and said, “If we have dirt, it would probably be over there someplace.”

     Being a good clerk and evidently curious, she lead me over to this wall of bags and helped me look for dirt. Either that or she was afraid to leave this crazy person alone in her department. Take your pick.

     We found seventeen kinds of potting soil, with ingredients including chemicals, manure, fertilizers, and other additives that would need a chemist to decipher.

     Then there were ten different kinds of top soil, all with added chemicals, plus manure from various animal species, some named, and some left to the imagination.

     Then there were several kinds of straight manure. Steer Manure being the most prevalent. I wanted to ask this sales clerk if she was sure that the manure in these bags actually only came from animals that had been relieved of their sperm producing equipment. Or was there perhaps some manure in there from other male bovines who were still in possession of their sperm producing equipment, or from some who were never going to be relieved of---well---we’ve been over that, or heaven forbid, some manure from cows. However, I kept my thoughts to myself, as she didn’t look like the kind of person to become voluntarily involved in a technical conversation about manure.

     Then there were all sorts of lawn and garden enhancing fertilizers. All promised to make stuff grow and make your yard look like the south lawn of the White House.

     Finally, we found some plain Top Soil. As much as I looked, I could not find any additives. It looked to be just plain dirt, although with the up-market name of Top Soil. That name allowed these people to sell this dirt for $2.89 for two cubic feet of this stuff.

     I thought, “Someplace there is a farmer who is so financially strapped that he’s selling his farm for $2.89 a bag full. Of course, the poor farmer is probably only getting $.35 out of the $2.89.

So I went home to plant eleven free sticks, with almost six dollars worth of dirt that I, (did I mention this?) HAD TO PURCHASE. Depressing.