Fecundity

I trust that the majority of my readers are not offended by the title of today's blog.  Consider this my attempt to arrest the shrinking word count that we employ in our vocabulary.  Shakespeare used around 33,000 words in his writing.  My research indicates that the average speaker of English uses less than 5,000.  I believe that to be extremely optimistic.  I suspect it's more like 500 words with a word that sounds a bit like fecund sprinkled in regularly as a noun, verb, adverb and adjective.

It's generally acknowledged that Shakespeare was a clever man who produced material that makes for pretty good reading.  For sooth, gentle reader, may you have a fecund intellect.

Sorry about that.  It has nothing whatsoever to do with my intended topic, fecundity.

My small piece of Calgary is not particularly fecund.  I've attempted to grow tomatoes;  bringing them in at night, covering them up so they don't get frost-bite, moving them against the house so they can warm their leafy parts and not get upset.  Quack grass seems to grow pretty well without my assistance.  Ditto dandelions, thistle, clover and chickweed.  Most everything else requires constant babying.

Storm clouds gather on a hot summer day.  A beautiful dark sky full of thunderheads.  It's a wonderful sight but comes with a price.  Grab every potted plant you can get your hands on now!  Move them to safety and cover anything else you'd like to save with sheets and blankets, careful not to crush the delicate little babies.  Every last plant you so carefully planted and nurtured can be wiped out in 30 seconds as golf ball sized hail stones demonstrate how pathetic our efforts to nurture our little swathe of glacial till are.  It's better just to stick with some desiccated prairie grasses in a nice rock garden.

It's a bit different here in Costa Rica.  Are you getting sick of this yet?  There are a lot of coconut palms along the beach here.  Walking along yesterday I spotted an unusual coconut in the sand.  I was astonished by the obvious.  Coco nuts turn into coconut trees!  It falls from the tree, it hits the sand, no one eats it, it becomes a tree.

With a small amount of encouragement, the same sort of thing happens with pineapples.  I asked Donna what to do with the tops of pineapples (see my previous post on composting).  She looked at me with the look she often gives me.  The "this guy is pretty dim but I'll try to be polite" look.  "You stick them leafy side up on the ground and they'll grow you a new pineapple."  She pointed out a few of the children of previously eaten pineapples in our compost field.

Hoping to kill two birds with one stone, I've "planted" our last pineapple leafy bit in one of the subterranean entrances.  What's the worst that can happen?