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I have grand plans for a garden on our new lot.  An abundance of fresh food shall flow from it, or something.

I saw this book called “The $64 Tomato” where Bill adds up all the costs of his garden and divides it into the amount of produce received, coming up with $64 per tomato.  It made me wonder “Do I really want a garden?  Is it really worth it?”  So, I decided to check out the book from the library to see what he’d gone through, trying to get a little perspective on what I’m about to get into.

I found this excerpt online, as well:

Bridget arrived for her interview late, breathless, and blond. As we drank herbal tea around the kitchen table, she dug deep into a leather portfolio, emerging with glossy photographs of gardens she had designed for previous clients. Anne ooh-aahed over the photographs, which looked like rather ordinary gardens to me, but to be fair, I was only seeing them peripherally. My eyes were riveted on the hands holding the photographs. Delicate, lightly freckled hands with dirty—filthy—fingernails. Real gardener’s fingernails. The effect was startling, at once repulsive and erotic. The phrase whore in the bedroom, horticulturist in the garden popped into my head. I tried to blink it away. When I finally looked up, Bridget smiled and squinted her crinkly green eyes at me. A winkless wink.

Had I been caught ogling her dirty hands? After reviewing her credentials and our project, we strolled through the property, Bridget and I falling into lockstep as Anne trailed slightly behind. Passing various anonymous plants and flowers, Bridget would point to what was to me some nameless weedy shrub and exclaim in a breathless whisper something like, “Ah, a beautiful Maximus clitoris.” She knew all the botanical names, the Latin rolling off her tongue like steamy profanity in the heat of passion.

We hired Bridget on the spot, without interviewing anyone else. It seems she’d made an impression on Anne as well.

“Did you notice her beautiful teeth?” Anne sighed as Bridget drove off in her battered Toyota, vanishing in a cloud of smoke and noise.

Beautiful teeth? Who were we talking about, Seabiscuit? My wife, a physician, tends to be a little clinical at times. Sometimes I catch her taking my pulse or listening to my heart murmur while I think we’re making love. So the fact that she would sit across from a beautiful woman and mainly notice her teeth should not have surprised me. In fact, Anne is fascinated with, and jealous of, anyone with better teeth than she, which is to say just about anyone born after about 1970.

“Her teeth? Not really,” I said, being more interested in my burgeoning dirty-fingernail fetish.

I’m looking forward to it.