Sometimes, I get the very best ideas. Wake-up in the middle of the night, slap your forehead, I need my own cable talk show good ideas.

I'll wake up my husband with my brilliance, and after he says, "No, Lucy, you can’t be in the show" then he'll usually just tell me to go back to sleep until Lowe's opens at 9:00.

This past summer, I had one of those brilliant ideas.

A garden.

I told him to imagine our weekly grocery bill falling down to into the hundreds when I didn’t have to buy the mint for my Mojitos. We'd have so many fresh fruits and vegetables, the kids' scurvy would clear up and he could have that healthy immune system he's always wanted. But I think what pushed him over to the green side was when I promised I'd stop counting Crest as one of our daily servings of vegetables.

If he would just build me a raised bed the size of a football field and lug 412 bags of soil over the fence, I would defy millions of years of weather patterns, native soil types, natural pests, the Farmer's Almanac, and all common sense and plant a vegetable garden in our suburban Florida backyard.

Nothing in my horticulture history had ever suggested that I would be successful in this gardening pursuit, but I was determined to have purchased my last $27 chive.

Never mind that I planted a Nebraska homestead worth of corn in our little box. In June. Never mind that June in Florida means that the garden bed would be like plowing the surface of the sun one minute, and wringing out the Gulf of Mexico from the daily thunderstorms the next. Never mind that combining those two meteorological wonders would produce a weather system all its own defined by a giant bubble of humidity and a plague of locusts that Al Roker would then designate with a big frowny-face with frizzy hair over the southeast portion of his weather map. Every day.

It's been a little discouraging.

But not everything was lost. True, I did not get the harvest of corn, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, radishes, peppers and spearmint that I originally planted, but a few things grew well.

Pumpkin vines, for instance. Not actual pumpkins--they burned like meteors hitting the earth's atmosphere as soon as they flowered. But the weeds did well, and some unnamed horticultural mysteries that I think may very well be aphrodisiacs for mice and armadillos. My own personal Spanish Cry. Ratnip.

And basil. Which is fine, because I love basil. Basil Scampi, Fried Basil, Grilled Basil, Basil and Grits, Bubble-Gump Basil...

To his credit, my husband did not say anything derogatory about my "great idea while he dined on his Pesto Wellington.

Because while it wasn't exactly the ideal execution, I still think I deserve an A for effort.

Especially since chances are we aren't going to see B, C, D, B6 or B12 for a while longer.

©2009 Tracey Henry

Divamail me! Divamail@Suburbandiva.com.