In The Garden Of Evil

This spring I planted a vegetable garden in my back yard, just like the last two years. I’ve never had huge luck with the garden, there’s too much shade in the back yard to ever have a bumper crop. But there’s still something satisfying about seeing little sprouts magically come up from the dirt, blossom, grow little beans and peas. So it’s worth it, even if I only get a few good feeds from my crop. This year I hoped would be different. Last year’s hurricane cleaned out some trees, making it slightly sunnier in the yard. I bought about 250 pounds of compost and manure to help bolster the mediocre soil. I was ready. The ground was ready. This year would be different.

So I planted. And then…

Nothing.

Nothing I planted came up. That’s a slight exaggeration; I did see two or three bean sprouts and a pea sprout. But that was it. No rows of little sprouts, no carrot tops. Certainly no green onions. As the spring turned to summer, I grew more disheartened. I gave up weeding the garden. There didn’t seem to be any point.

Nature took over, meaning a whole bunch of things that I didn’t plant started to grow. Soon one plant in particular began to take over the entire garden. I ignored it at first. Then I noticed blossoms forming on the plants. A lot of blossoms. And my hopes began to rise. Maybe some stray vegetable seeds floated through the air and found their way into my little garden and decided to grow. Or perhaps when I rinsed out the compost bucket and threw the water into the garden there were a few seeds at the bottom. Maybe I’ll get some kind of harvest after all! Some peppers, or some kind of exotic tomato variety?

The blossoms turned into clusters of little green berries. Dammit. Mystery berries are usually a bad thing. Mothers always tell their little kids not to eat berries they find. Everyone knows that unless you buy berries at the grocery store, they’re poisonous. It’s one of the first things we learn about. You’re born, you learn to walk, you learn to talk, you learn that wild berries and wild mushrooms are deadly. One bite will kill you.

Not wanting to completely give up on my hope that I’ll get something edible, I described the plants to a few of my friends. “The leaves are…leaf shaped. You know, they’re green and leafy.” Okay, let’s try again. “Dark green, broad leaves. Pointy at the end, and the edges are a bit jagged, but not as jagged as they could be. There are clusters of little green round berries. They look like miniature green tomatoes. Maybe they are little green tomatoes?” Lisa said, “That sounds like nightshade.”

Aw crap. They also call that stuff deadly nightshade. It’s like, the most poisonous of all poisonous berries. Just look at the name. I’m probably going to die just by looking at them. A quick internet search confirmed that what I was growing was a variety known as “Black Nightshade.” So it wasn’t deadly nightshade, but it’s just as deadly. It will kill your kids (hey, your mother was right!), and it’s not so great for adults either.

I should probably rip the stuff out, but now the idea of having a garden full of poisonous berries is starting to appeal to me. It gives me goth cred or something. And maybe I’ll try to make some enemies over the next couple of weeks, and then bake a nightshade pie. I’ll offer it to my newfound enemies as a peace offering. Ha ha! Goodbye enemies! Yup, it’s time to find some people I don’t like.