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Tales from Exit 22 by Al Batt

I’m an apex predator hunting for radishes, vital ingredients in a radish sandwich.

I picked a couple of cucumbers while I was at it.

No, I didn’t have a cat that needed scaring. I’ve never known a cat that was frightened of cucumbers.

I like cucumbers. I share them with my neighbor Crandall, who misplaced his glasses and planted a packet of M&M’s instead.

I was a master gardener for years. I enjoyed growing things. My fingernails always had dirt under them. I read “Organic Gardening” and watched “The Victory Garden.” I took no photos of produce or entered anything at the county fair. I should have; I raised some blue-ribbon weeds.

I turned all unemployed ground, unable to scurry away from me, into a garden. I was concerned with global worming, not warming. I had raised beds, square-foot gardens, permanent mulch gardens, straw bale gardens, container gardens and I grew potatoes in a stack of tires. Gardening was calming and comforting, even with ravenous insects, rabbits and deer. Then, I began to spend much of my time traveling for work. I couldn’t tend the endless gardens. The weeds ceased control. I grew weeds as big as oak trees and the fattest rabbits in three counties. I was the sole support of a mythical creature called a jackalope, a jackrabbit with the horns of a pronghorn. Frankenstein’s rabbit. I unintentionally fed tomato juice to the chipbucks. Like their cousins, the chipmunks, chipbucks chew the underside of a perfect tomato and slurp the juice. To them, the juice is always worth the squeeze. Chipbucks are a chipmunk X deer hybrid, which produces a small rodent with large antlers that make it unable to enter its burrow.

I raised everything from broccoli to kohlrabi to okra to zucchini. I grew popcorn and peanuts. Rhubarb, asparagus, peppers, cucumbers, Brussels sprouts, eggplant, radishes, potatoes, cabbage, lettuce, carrots and tomatoes caused me to salivate like Pavlov’s dog. I regularly grew vegetables resembling Richard Nixon.

I was born into a gardening family. I began working in a garden when child labor laws were lax. I drank the same water the plants did. The water tasted the best when some of it ran down my chin. Grandma told me to plant marigolds around the garden. They were supposed to be to rabbits what garlic is to vampires. The rabbits ate my marigolds.

I put a radio in the garden to keep the raccoons out of the sweet corn. I made the mistake of tuning it to a station playing polka music. The raccoons danced to a Whoopee John tune while eating the sweet corn and knocked down all the corn plants.

I have tools to dig, chop, cut, hoe and weed away a day because weeds never sleep and they always bat last.

Zucchini is a green balloon without all the flavor. Teach a man to garden and everyone gets zucchini. I raised so much that I put zucchini into any car whose owner had neglected to lock its doors outside the small-town café. Now folks double-lock every door in town during the zucchini season.

I planted herbs in alphabetical order. You might wonder how I found the time. It was right next to the sage.

I grew many varieties of tomatoes, looking for that perfect ‘mater. My favorite is one of the ugliest of the heirloom love apples — Brandywine. Fried green tomatoes is a good movie and are good eating.

I made mountains out of molehills. I swiped soil from pocket gopher mounds for the containers. I’m down to molehills now. I still garden, but it’s a drop in the proverbial bucket compared to the old days. My garden is humble and shrinks each year. It gets smaller because the world is getting smaller.

I garden in a big way, too — at the farmers market, where it’s easy to find something in my size.

I still raise zucchini. Just one plant this year. In the past, I’ve always planted more than one because you never know. No zucchini ever perished on my watch. They produced prolifically.

My wife makes zucchini bread. That’s a grand thing.

If you have zucchini bread, you are living an abundant life.

Al Batt’s columns appear in the Tribune every Wednesday.