2009 - A lean year in the garden– no money and no water

2009 – A lean year in the garden– no money and no water

By Leon Moss, your cash advance news source

This is gardening cut-back year. Soon we’ll be down to weeds

If I don’t plant anything in my garden will I raise a nice looking crop of weeds? Every year we refresh the soil by mixing in compost and fertilizers. We rake it smooth and then we plant nice fresh seedlings that we buy at the nursery, carefully selecting the colors unto we have a pleasant mix. Then we water liberally, and adjust the drip irrigation system and sit back to listen and to watch our garden grow. If it sounds as though it covers a few acres, that’s fine – we treat it as such. It’s actually 170 square feet in area, it’s up on the third floor and all the plants are in containers around the edges.

Avid gardeners

We have always been keen gardeners and wherever we have lived we have created colorful gardens that we enjoy immensely. Living in apartments is different; if there is a balcony it is generally narrow and difficult to transform into a garden. But when we saw this apartment we understood that we could have a garden. The architect sacrificed a room and in its place is a room-sized balcony. So we’re back in the gardening business, bringing bright colors back into our lives. But this is going to be tough summer.

Take Cash Advance

I suppose I could apply for a Cash Advance and take another trip to the nursery and spend on plants, but I’m not sure – my ‘must have’ list grows longer by the day and the garden is about halfway down.

The money shortage

This summer there are 2 shortages – money and water. The money one has been going on for about a year and there is no end in sight. Now and again there is a flutter of movement but it is brief and all it does is mislead everyone into thinking that major change is talking place. The truth is that nothing has changed. Unemployment is up and the amount of work around is down.

The water shortage

The water shortage is easier to understand. The amount of water available to us humans is pretty static – we have not learned to make new water in any appreciable quantities. All the water we use is recycled and we just keep using the same water over and over again. The big recycling plant up in the sky works pretty well. It’s called rain and we depend on it for our very lives. This year there are floods in China and a drought in England, next year there will be droughts and floods in different countries. This year we are having a drought year right here and water is scarce – and therefore the rates go up making it expensive as well. Plus there are restrictions about watering gardens.

At the nursery

Our visit to the nursery this morning wasn’t the usual happy-go-lucky affair. We looked for the cheap; we selected perennials instead of annuals so we got less color than usual. We also looked for hardy plants, those that will thrive on little water, lest the water department discovers what’s going on up here on the third floor. We rushed home and pulled out the dead plants from last year, added compost and fertilizer and planted.