Garden Lore

So in preparation of the Great Foster Ozark Adventure, Wifey suggests that “we” (meaning yours truly) do some stuff in the garden before we leave, like pull up onions, beets, turnips, and dig potatoes. Since I have put off this task until the temps reached triple digits, I am not looking forward to doing it much, but if there is one thing I can do well, it is doing things I don’t want to do, anyway. So I grab my ‘tator fork, my four children, and my innocent bystander sister-in-law, whose only crime was to not having a pressing project at the very moment that this was going to take place.
For some reason, things weren’t that great this year, production wise. Out of close to 100 potato plants, we only harvested about 10 gallons, though it felt like 100 gallons when digging them out of clay dirt and it is 100 degrees. The rest of it did just “OK” this year as well. It comes as some small consolation that I do have one thing that never fails to grow, particularly in the garden when my children and I are working together. My stories!
I don’t know why I do it, its all just baloney to my older kids and it just confuses my younger kids, none of it makes any sense even to me. My sister-in-law thinks I’m demented and that my kids will grow up very messed up, not knowing who to trust, or when, but I’ve seen first hand that they figure out fairly quick when dad is feeding fibs. Like when we kept digging up Toads in the garden, they didn’t believe me that there is a specific Toad that migrates yearly from Canada, one hop at a time, comes and digs in freshly tilled gardens and then out of that buried toad comes a tuber plant… why else would that plant be called a “potatoad”? Seems like good logic to me. I even had my mother-in-law going for a bit later when I went inside about the migratory toad bit.
Other fibs include how we got our pond; a “herd” of geese were swimming up north and it got so cold so fast that the pond they were in froze around their bottoms. It scared them, and they started flapping and just took the whole pond south with them, until they got tired enough they had to land, and that was right on our place.- lucky us!
One time while at the river, I told them about the strange and mysterious “Goodyear” fish, that is round, black and has scales that look like treads in order lure small children into thinking that it actually an old tire so that it can tackle them and drag them into deeper water to eat them.
I do admit surprise, however, at the occasional tall tale that I can actually pull off. Take the other day when I was asked how the GPS worked; I carefully explained how I captured a small British woman (hence the accent) and put her in a box just under the hood of the pick-up, with just enough holes to see the road ahead with binoculars. Oddly enough this was pretty much absorbed and thought of as generally a good idea. I’m not really sure how I feel about that, but on my old truck I had a “self destruct button” that I was only to use when I knew that I was going to be caught by bad guys and had information that I couldn’t let them have. The only disbelief expressed by my girls at this point was that it was right there in the dash, towards the passenger side, and down low so it could very easily could be accidentally pushed, and thereby blown to bits. “Well,” says I “I never said it was a total picnic having a world-famous yet secret international spy for a dad.” It’s true; it isn’t a total picnic, neither is having a pathological liar for a dad, though.