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The squirrels will bite the heads off of the stalks and take them to various parts of the wall where they will chew the seeds out of the flower and leave huge messes of sunflower guts all over the ground below, which I get to clean up. Then, in July, the ones that haven’t been decapitated will begin their inevitable demise. That’s when the real fun begins: pulling them up.

Sunflower roots don’t go very deep, but occasionally you get a big one that puts up a fight. The real problem, though, is what to do with them. They’re so damn big, they don’t all fit in the yardwaste bin at once, so I either have to cut them up which takes time, or pull them out in stages which is usually what I do because they die in stages. So, one day a week for pretty much all of July and August, I get to wrestle giant flowers in the heat of summer.

Hopefully, we don’t get another summer like 2023 when Hurricane Hilary made landfall in California at the end of August, dousing the desert in my backyard and starting the cycle of life all over again, six months early. I spent my whole autumn and winter pulling weeds that year.

Yay, it’s summertime again. God, I’m a miserable son of a bitch.

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Free Water For My Free Garlic

The other day, someone left a comment on one of my YouTube videos telling me that water isn’t free. I told them that it literally falls from the sky. As such, I thought this week would be a good time for planting because of the rainy weather we’ve had. It seems like it’s been raining forever, but it hasn’t even rained enough to soak the ground more than a couple of inches down. Normally, we have enough rain to thoroughly soak the ground by now.

We usually get rain in November and December, so the weeds start growing in the fall, and they’re knee-high by the end of January. It never ceases to amaze me how quickly things sprout after the first rain of the season. It’s almost immediate. After months of nothing growing in my backyard, suddenly, there are hundreds of tiny green plants everywhere—hundreds of plants that I have to pull out of the ground.

Every year for as long as we’ve lived here, I’ve spent Super Bowl Sunday pulling weeds. The weather is always nice on Super Bowl Sunday, the ground is still soft enough that it gives little resistance to my tugging, and I don’t give a shit about football.

This Is More Than Just La Niña

This year, though, there won’t be any weeds to pull because it just rained for the first time in about 9 months last week, so the weeds won’t be big enough to pull by Sunday. I could go out there with a shovel or a hoe and knock them down before they have a chance to get any bigger, but that’s not very satisfying.

Life Is Frighteningly Arbitrary

It’s ironic that I have a yard full of plants that I plan to destroy, but I spent a few minutes this afternoon sticking new plants in the ground. It reminds me of the time Bonnie bought glue traps to catch a rat that was terrorizing the garage. I scolded her for buying glue traps because they don’t kill the rat. You have to do that after it gets stuck to the trap. Or, rather, I have to do it.

Later that night, I found myself dispatching a terrified Norwegian Blue while Bonnie stood on the other side of the garage screaming at me to “kill it,” with our son’s pet rat perched upon her shoulder. It’s a tough old world, especially for the little things. My life probably isn’t dependent on the value I bring to the world, but for things like plants and animals, it definitely is.

You Better Hope Someone Likes You

If a plant has no purpose, it’s a weed, and no effort will be spared to exterminate it regardless of how naturally and efficiently it grows. On the other hand, if a plant is edible or even just beautiful, it can stay, no matter how much of a pain in the ass it is to grow. The same is true of pets. I’m not really sure there is any difference between a pet rat and a wild rat besides parasites and disease, but I know I wouldn’t invite a wild one into my house.

The scary thing is, I know there have been times in the world when a person’s life was dependent on their value. There might be places in the world where that’s still true today; I don’t know. It seems like we could be heading to such a dark place in this country in the not-so-distant future, and that’s more than troubling. It’s harrowing to think that a person could be discarded just because someone else can’t profit from them. Fortunately, people will always need food, and therefore, farmers… like me.

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