Weeds? What weeds?

Weeds?  What weeds?

By Nikki Pelezo / Dirt Roads

Charlie and I have a love/hate relationship with vegetables.  Charlie will plow the garden in the Spring, plant the vegetables, pick the vegetables and eat the vegetables.  I will plant the vegetables, pick the vegetables, cook/process the vegetables and eat the vegetables.

Did you notice a certain function left out of the above paragraph?  That’s right…weeding the vegetables.  Neither one of us will take it upon ourselves to weed the garden.  Some years we have even put up a privacy fence so the garden can’t be seen from the highway.  If you call and want to come over and visit our garden, we will be out of town and the gates locked.

Charlie and I are the only people that take a machete to the garden to pick lima beans.  My neighbors are forced to lock their car doors for fear of finding a four foot zucchini in the back seat.  When you have waist high weeds zucchini have a way of growing out of eatable proportions.

We’ve been deep frying green pods for years, thinking they were some kind of vegetable.  Last year we found out we’ve been eating poisonous weeds. Who knew?  Since we quit eating the suspect weeds, we no longer have those pesky rashes and night sweats

We were out sitting on the swing and talking about whose turn it was to weed.  We tossed an idea back and forth about hiring an old couple to live on the property in a little house we would build.  They in turn would do the garden chores.  What an idyllic solution.  Charlie looked and me and I looked at Charlie, each knowing that the old couple would probably spend way too much time in front of the TV, computer, cell phone, and the GPS for those trips to Walmart.  Here we would be paying old folks to sit on their duffs, too busy to weed.  Hell, that’s what we do. We figured we would cut out the middle man and live with the weeds and have a little more money in our pocket.