Image from www.flowershell.com |
As further evidence of my theory, I learned today that an Indiegogo campaign has formed to convince willing fools such as myself to part with money for the promise that a prairie garden can be created by haphazardly firing shotgun shells packed with flower seed into a field. Several hours ago, if you asked me what I thought "shotgun gardening" was, I'd have envisioned a haphazard assemblage of shrubs, flowers, grasses and plants stuffed hither and yon into the landscape without a specific plan. I certainly wouldn't have expected that it meant that I could step out on my back porch and, true to VP Joe Biden's recent suggestion, "fire off a couple of rounds" and create a garden.
Indiegogo, for those unenlightened gardeners who actually spend time in their gardens instead of reading about gardening online, is a site that lets anyone use its "powerful social media tools" to create "campaigns" for "raising money" (the latter a nice euphemism used in lieu of admitting that it helps you find suckers to fleece). The Shotgun Garden Indiegogo campaign is run from www.flowershell.com, where you can purchase twelve-gauge shotgun shells loaded with twelve different kinds of seeds including peony, poppy, cornflower, daisy and sunflower seeds.
I have a plethora of experience strewing tons and tons of variously marketed "meadows-in-a-can" around my environment without altering the forb/grass ratio of the native prairie to any appreciable degree, so I'm somewhat skeptical that a few shotgun shells full of flower seed will improve the outcome. And these are live shells, dangerous in their own right. What if I mistook Flowershells for rock salt while chasing off the pack of teenage boys who constantly circle my daughter? "You're no daisy" might not work anymore as a 19th Century throwback insult for those boys. I certainly can't risk the chance of contributing to their delinquency if their backsides each sprouted a personal poppy field.
No, Indiegogo's efforts are wasted on me because I'm certainly not going to waste my hard-won cash on Flowershells, despite how interesting and tempting they might seem to a bored gardener in winter. My gardening money is going to have to be wasted the old-fashioned way, attempting to grow meadows from a can.