I left a packet of seeds in my pocket and my coat turned into a Chia pet.

Now I’ll have more to mow.

It takes more equipment to maintain a lawn than it did for my grandfather to work a 160-acre farm.

Spring is when my fancy turns to tomatoes. Grass is just a garden in waiting.

Seed catalogs cause me, who some have called nearly normal, to forget past failures and imagine future successes in the garden.

There’s something about digging in the soil with my hands. That something is dirty fingernails.

When I was a boy on the Mule Lake farm, we had a garden. We learned by trowel and error. I poked around in ground that ants thought was their anthill. They crawled around on me and caused me to shake like a hula dancer with fleas. We grew Hubbard squash — giant vegetables the size of Buicks. It wasn’t a bad squash, but I prayed for a Hubbard squash failure. A boy can eat only so much squash that isn’t in a pie. The squash was tough-skinned enough to consider using a chainsaw on it.

I love potatoes. I believe that if you can’t make both ends meat, you should make one potatoes. I’ve raised and eaten blue potatoes. They taste just like blue potatoes. I love Brandywine tomatoes. They make superb BLT sandwiches. They’d make great T sandwiches. Kentucky Wonder pole beans, yellow pear tomatoes, radishes, cucumbers and sugar snap peas delight my palate. I routinely plant more zucchini than needed. I do so in fear of a zucchini crop failure. I end up with enough summer squash to feed the entire school district for a week.

I know that a weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except learning how to grow in rows. The difference between weeds and flowers is that weeds are harder to pull. I did square foot gardening for a few years. A permanent mulch garden, too. I had so many gardens that it tired me out. I put in raised beds to battle my desire to be in a real bed. Cabbageworms, mosquitoes, deer, rabbits and groundhogs became parts of the gardens. Frost threatened, brought worries and then relief.

I have a neighbor, Still Bill, who is in no danger of drowning in his own sweat. Still Bill believes that the best way to garden is to don a straw hat and old clothes, and with a hoe in one hand and a cold drink in the other, tell somebody else what to do. If only he could grow as much green stuff in his garden as he does in his refrigerator. My neighbor said that he gets neuralgic whenever he thinks about gardening. I asked him if he meant “nostalgic.” He meant “neuralgic” — intermittent pains.

I thought of Still Bill while I attended a seminar called “Straw Bale Gardening” presented by Joel Karsten. The title hooked me. Planting a garden in straw bales instead of soil is an intriguing notion. Karsten was four years old when he started pulling weeds for his grandmother who taught him everything a vegetable gardener needed to know. His father is the owner of Karsten’s Nursery in Worthington. Karsten believes that minimal maintenance that results in maximum production is the perfect gardening situation. He considers straw bale gardening perfect for those like Still Bill who aren’t inclined to do the hard work required by traditional gardening — tilling the soil, constant weeding, battling insects and endless efforts at disease prevention. Karsten added that straw bales are ideal for those with physical limitations that make crawling around on hands and knees difficult. I wait until I have a few things to do on the ground before I get down on my hands and knees. Straw decays into a conditioned compost that forms an exceptional rooting environment for a garden. The height of a straw bale eliminates much of the bending required to plant and harvest a conventional garden. The straw that wouldn’t break the camel’s back. Straw bale gardening is a good choice for gardens with poor soil or limited space. Karsten has written a book, “Guide to Growing a Straw Bale Garden,” which presents the complete process step-by-step.

I’d better get busy. I think I hear Monty Python singing, “I’m a gardener, and I’m OK. I sleep all night, and I weed all day. I dress in tattered clothing and hang around with slugs.”

This year I’m putting in an herb garden.

It will be a great place to kill thyme.

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.