One of the appeals of vegetable gardens is a sense of self-sufficiency. If I had to live on what comes out of my garden, I’d last about a week, but I still enjoy the illusion. I put eating from my garden in the same category as imagining that I am an explorer when I go backpacking. I always drive to a restaurant as soon as I come out of the backcountry, but I’m Kit Carson right up to the moment I sit down to a burger and fries.
A second attractive feature of vegetable gardens is that gardening is a DIY project where mistakes don’t matter. If I get impatient in the spring and plant before last frost, I am out a couple packages of seed. If rabbits get through the fence and eat my salad greens, I tell myself that I prefer store-bought iceberg anyway. If my cucumbers blossom, but don’t produce fruit, vendors at the farmers’ market sell cucumbers by the basketful. Unlike plumbing or other home repairs, I’ve never hired a professional to fix any of my gardening errors.
Yesterday I took on two home projects. One was to replace the parts inside a toilet tank. The other was to prepare the raised beds of my garden.
I thought that I’d replaced all of the parts in a toilet before, but apparently I hadn’t. Putting in a new flapper requires lifting the tank off the bowl, and I don’t remember ever doing that before. That one step almost stopped me before I got started, because the bolts connecting tank to bowl were so corroded that I had a hard time getting them off. Once I got past that problem, the actual replacement of parts was fairly straightforward. My only concern was that the project included four different threaded connections. This means that there are four places where my efforts could cause a leak. I finished the project and saw no water dripping, but I still put down hand towels all around the water closet. This morning I will check to see if any of the towels are wet. I should have checked as soon as I got out of bed, but toilet repairs kept me from my writing yesterday. I’m not going to let that happen today.
After the bathroom I moved to the garden. There I noticed that some of the 2” x 6” boards surrounding my raised beds are punky and need to be replaced. My first inclination was to immediately drive to the lumberyard for new boards. My second was to wait until fall, and my third was wait until next spring. I decided that nothing significant could go wrong if I waited, and it would be foolish to unnecessarily expose new boards to the harsh weather of next year’s winter. Unlike a constantly running toilet, everything in a garden can wait.
Some of my first generation Asian American friends are surprised when they discover that I do many of my own home repairs. In Asia, university professors always hire out. I’ve never asked my friends whether they think that professors are too important to be wasting their time on manual labor or too much in their heads to comprehend the proper use of hand tools.
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