Oh Nooooooooooo.

Approximately 5 minutes before leaving for the airport, the merits of having a new dog in the family were momentarily overshadowed by the sudden awareness of a certain squishy heaviness clinging to the bottom of my Chacos.

I suppose I should know better than to walk blindly out through the backyard and toward the garden without swapping my Traveling Flip-Flops out for my garden clogs, but I clearly don't. And that is why I was to be found standing barefoot and pissed by the side of the house, hosing off my shoes and swearing into the wind when I should have been packing snacks into my purse and making out with Bubba before leaving for the airport.

Perhaps one day I will learn.

Thankfully (for my sake and the dog's I suppose) my squish-squashy trip out to the garden was not in vain. Oh no! I managed to come across the first ripe strawberry of the season.

?

Oh yes! For some reason, in the midst of our cool, rainy April weather, there was a perfectly ripe, perfectly ready strawberry just ready for the picking.

Well, hot damn.

I had to pluck it and hold it aside for a moment, however, so that I could enjoy it without the whiff of dog doots hovering about. Can't be plugging my nose while mowing the first berry of the season. That would just be retarded.

And the fun thing is that that is not all there is to be enjoyed in this early spring garden. No way - there's snap peas, some lettuce coming in, a couple bunches of promising looking Genovese Basil and a handful of wee plants that haven't somehow succumbed the random onslaught of naughty chewing bugs. Que milagro.

I'd like to think it's because of the careful Companion Gardening that I'm trying my hand at this season, but I'm having a hard time believing that the sparse cosmos and marigolds that I've planted are really having that big of an impact.

To share a little side dish of garden dorkiness with you, I will say that after last season's lackluster crop, I spent a good deal of time (read: an entire afternoon) carefully testing the soil in each vegetable bed so that I knew just how much amendment to add to each to produce the ideal home for two tons of 2007 vegetables.

Normally I would abandon the dorky project at this point and retire to the couch where I would pontificate on all the bushels of fabulous vegetables I would be hauling in, despite the fact that I had not done any *actual* work in the garden that would cause it to yield such results. BUT, this year I actually did something about the alarming deficiencies in the soil so that I'd have a better chance of actually getting some edible produce.

Who's to say if I really did it right, or if there will be any change from last season, since I'm still in the blissful it's-too-early-to-tell stage where the plants are all teensy and I can't be responsible for the lack of produce just yet. Later though, you'll know if I'm full of shit or not.

To balance the odds, I planted some flowers and herbs with my vegs, like the book said, and since the bugs are gone, I'm hoping that will mean that my plants will grow and I won't have to cry into the keyboard like last year.

I know. No one likes a crybaby.