"F" FarmVille.

That's right, screw FarmVille! Success in farming is not about how many friends you have on the Internet, it is about hard work, which according to Michael Bluth is "the sweet sting of sweat in your eyes."

Finally, Lib and I got to start working on our own little ten-by-ten plot at the community garden yesterday. Sure, I can't expand to the "great big ol' plantation" like in Farmville, but I can actually eat what grows in this farm. I don't need to fertilize my neighbors, and I don't lose myself staring mindnumbingly at the screen while a thirty-second loop of maddening country twang created by an intern in NYC (which was actually charming for the first three loops) plays over and over and over and over until my brain actually turns off waiting for the last percent of my pattypan squashes to finish "growing" so I can harvest. Thoreau would be rolling over in his grave, and he may actually leave his grave to stab me in the face with a loon if he knew that that is what I had resorted to. So I have decided to focus my efforts on the earth, the real soil that brings real life to nutritive vegetation.

It was a hard five hours under the baking sun, clearing grass and weeds with and breaking up our plot with a maddock. We worked some lime and corn gluten into the soil, put up a tiny fence, and got everything ready for planting. Even Lib took a few swings with the maddock to get things moving along.

So you can probably bet on seeing some garden blogs thrown in here and there, and I will try to limit it to the most exciting moments, but I'm not really sure what qualifies when it comes to gardening. Maybe I will eat one of the habaneros I plan on growing, or maybe I will attempt to make the world's largest salad...or maybe I will just keep posting busty pictures of Lib sweating under the sun every so often...or maybe she won't like that, so here is one. Enjoy.