Jun-04.pd - Local History Archives

STRAlQIIT lEaTUGIY 8OUIl8GII WIII8lV • 86 PIOClF .0 AllClDlT AGElIISTllllllG COIIPMY. fRAlWOIT.lDI1UCllY
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When You Garden,
How to make yourself the envy and
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"TIFE HAS BECOME so competi-
.L tive," our next-door neighbor
sighed. "You struggle and
strain to get ~~ead in your job.
to buy everything that everybody
else thinks you should have.
You worry about who's ahead in
the space race, the education race,
the political race, and the National
League. It's hell. But when you
get to scruff around in your own /
lawn and garden, your whole outlook
changes."
Smart man, our neighbor. But
not quite smart enough. If he
thinks a cheap trick like that is
going to throw us off guard, he's
mistaken, as he'll soon learn when
he finds that we've wedged an
herb garden between our rose
garden and perennial bed while he
was away for the weekend.
You have to stay on your toes
every minute to keep the jump
on your fellow gardeners. You
have to sleep with one eye open
and your trowel close by.
The Technoloalcal
Race
Some homeowners imagine,
when they step outside with a
15-year.-old lawn rake or a hose
with friction tape over the leaks,
that contemptuous gazes are fixed
on their shoddy equipment from
behind curtains and pfitzer clumps
throughout the neighborhood.
They're right.
They are being snickered at
because they have fallen behind
in the escalating house-to-house
competition in lawn and" garden
technology. Pitchforks and sickles
may have frightened a few British
regulars at Concord Bridge, but
they're no match for a neighbor
with a self-propelled four-horsepower
rot~ry mower with i" grass
28 Suburbia Today, June 1964
catcher and a leaf mulcher .
Spraying thr. hydrangea o~ a
Saturday morning with a windowcleaner
bottle is just as damaging
to your rank and stature as having
bagworms in your saplings or
chinch bugs in your vetch.
What complicates this struggle
for prestige is the unwritten law
that you never buy a piece of
equipment that is identical to
one that your neighbor already
owns. You have to leapfrog. They
get a power mower; you get a
self-propelled power mower; they
get a sit-down mower with a 24-
inch blade; you get a small tractor
with a gang mower. If they get
a goat, you may have to move
away, but the other neighbors will
know that you won.
Keeping Up Appearance.
H you have a flair for the dramatic
and are willing to take a
chance, try showing up with a
hypodermic needle ("it kills rhgweed
painlessly") or mention that
you've developed' a new insecticide
from common household products
such as table salt, corn starch,
powdered gelatin, ammonia, and
carbon tetrachloride or that you're
using a spraying mixture enriched
with heavy hydrogen., so that the
weeds will grow upside-down and
never reach the sudace. The risk
is that one of the neighbors who
has studied a little chemistry
might cause an ugly scene.
Hor.
Your GNP?
But doo't let chemical warfare
take up all your time. There are
other battles to be waged. How
do you stand. in the production
race, for example?
Is your gross nahu-a! product
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