Garden Wishes for Santa

December 18th, 2012

   If Santa Claus could work his magic in the garden like he does in the toy shop, what would he deliver to gardeners for Christmas?

What would gardeners like from Santa?

    Or maybe the other way around, what would we want from him?

   Decent weather probably would be at the top of the list. Who else gripes more about the weather (too wet, too dry, too hot, too cold, too humid, etc.) than gardeners?

   I personally would like to see an average year that really acts like an average year. Instead of our 40 inches of precipitation all coming in two thunderstorms over a total of 10 hours, I’d like to see an inch of rain every week during the growing season.

   Rain every Monday would be great, but never on Saturday or Sunday, unless there’s a Monday holiday, in which case rain all day Tuesday would be fine.

   A longer growing season also would be nice. About three weeks of winter would be enough, which would give us enough time to order seeds, read a gardening magazine and sketch out a new garden plan.

   I’ll bet good, old Santa could do something about the assorted bugs, animals, diseases and other foes that we do battle with each year.

   I’d like to see a fence that keeps deer from going over, groundhogs from going under and voles from going through — all while looking great and being cheap, of course.

   Instead of new pests like hemlock woolly adelgids and emerald ash borers, which always seem to be even worse than the bugs we already have, wouldn’t it be great to have a new James Bond kind of a bug?

   This good-guy bug would wipe out our worst pests and also feed on weeds instead of roses and tomatoes. I’m thinking here of, say, a saw-toothed wasp that would polish off every Japanese beetle in creation… or maybe a “debagger beetle” that feeds on those bagworms that devour our arborvitae.

   It’d be nice if Santa could change the diets of a few animal pests, too. Wouldn’t it work out pretty good if groundhogs preferred voles to cabbage, or if groundhogs ate rabbits and rabbits ate groundhogs. Then the two of them could scare each other away.

What we really need is a groundhog-eating species of rabbit.

    At the very least, I’d be happy to see a few new tasty vegetables that WE like but that animals and bugs don’t.

   Besides that James Bond bug that eats weeds, it’d be great to have a new weed-killer that works like a smart bomb.

   This product would know the difference between weeds and good plants and would be able to kill weeds forever while doing absolutely no harm to good plants or the environment. And it would be cheap.

   Our so-called soil is another thing that could use Santa’s touch. A soft, rich loam about 3 feet deep would work a lot better than the solid clay or the beds full of broken shale that masquerade as “soil” around here.

   At the heart of our lists, though, would be plant wishes.

   I’d be happy with a few plants that turn out to be even half as good as the catalogs say they are.

   And how about some flowers that actually smell good?

   But the plant everyone is waiting for — and not just gardeners — is the one we all go into the garden center looking for but never find. It would be called the “utopia plant.”

   This plant grows overnight to any desired size and comes with an off switch so it stays that size forever without any pruning. It doesn’t need water or fertilizer, doesn’t get bugs or disease, blooms all year long without dead-heading, smells great, isn’t messy, has no thorns and, altogether now, is cheap.

   Good luck on that one, Santa.

   If you can’t come up with a utopia plant, we’ll settle for a gift certificate good for at least one of every new plant — along with the garden space to cram it all in somewhere.

   I’d also like a pair of pruners that use the same technology as those lights that clap on and clap off. When I misplace the pruners for the gazillioneth time, all I’d have to do is clap and listen for a beep that guides me to the spot.

   OK. Maybe we’re getting a little greedy now.

   So if utopia plants and James Bond bugs are too much, then I think we can all settle for a 2013 garden that even remotely resembles the one in our winter dreams.