h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Gardens I Have Known - A87801131
Author: Dmitri Gheorgheni - U1590784

MVP inspired me.

I love it!

I can even hear the accents


lil x

Thanks, Lil.

This is much more realistic and down-to-earth than mine!

Here in Sussex, you don't plant courgettes/zucchinis out until May, after the frosts have finished and, even then you have to protect them against slugs.

Is okry the same as okra? I don't know what 'copperhead' is - my weeds are dandelions and ivy. But the weeds in France grow bigger and faster!

Okry is, indeed, okra.

A copperhead, alas, is not a weed.

It is a poisonous snake, often quite large. Unlike the somewhat less awful rattlesnake, it makes no noise. This makes it even more dangerous.

In summer, the good old weekly newspaper, the Sparta Expositor, used to feature pictures of the 'catch of the week' - usually brought to town, dead of course, in a coffee can.

I am pleased to see that the interweb continues the tradition of frightening outsiders with copperhead stories:

http://www.city-data.com/forum/cookeville/164710-cookeville-child-bitten-copperhead-burgess-falls.html

Note this post, in reply to the horrified Michigander:

'We also have ferocious marauding dogs, some cheetahs that got loose and a few rogue elephants but those have mostly been rounded up.

And midsized crocodiles that crawl into the sewer system and come up through our commodes. But only the downstairs ones.'

(They made that up, but there ARE panthers in the vicinity.)

Poisonous snakes!

Though I like the rumours of cheetahs and rogue elephants.

I can't match that, though there are persistent reports of big cats loose somewhere in the English countryside. I'm a bit doubtful about that. Though there was apparently a colony of scorpions living on Ongar station.

Now, I don't think I want scorpions in my neighbourhood.

The big cats are bad enough.

My grandfather's neighbour back in the 1940s moved out. He said there was a family of cougars living there, and they kept staring at the house. He couldn't leave his family alone to go into the fields.