The Legend of the Horse's Head

According to Heber Valley legend, and our notoriously eccentric backyard neighbor, you know it's time to plant your garden when you see a snowfield in the shape of a horse's head on the back side of Mt. Timpanogos. When I first heard this bit of lore, I was almost giddy to be living in a town where those traditions still exist, and at the first sign of Spring Joey and I started watching night and day, waiting for the famed figure to appear under Timp's northern-most peak. You must excuse the history nerd in me, but while Joey actually anticipated the signal to start planting, I was anxious to see western folklore unfold. And then one day, after a warm and delightfully sunny week, Joey pointed it out to me. The horse head really exists! And it's not an entirely obscure figure that you can hardly make out, like the silly man on the moon.

Time to plant the garden then, right? Well according to our notoriously eccentric backyard neighbor (the one with the 40 goats) it's not quite time to start planting. Apparently the last spring frost usually occurs mid-June. But wait a second, what's the point of the Heber Valley legend if it isn't even accurate? Some might be tempted to attribute the legend's inaccuracy to global warming or climate change, but I attribute it to- I'm gonna plant my dern garden anyway. If we wait until mid-June, and then harvest time arrives mid-July (okay, I'm exaggerating.... I hope) all we'll have to show for it is two pea pods the size of my pinky and a green tomato.

So we planted our garden. Yesterday, in fact. Our notoriously eccentric backyard neighbor (the one with the 6 behemoth Great Pyrenees dog-monsters) warned us not to, but we city slickers don't have time for 50 years of farming wisdom. We want our juicy red tomatoes in time for our Labor Day BBQ! At least we waited for a week when the temperature wouldn't drop below freezing so that our transplanted vegetable starters would have time to establish their roots in the new soil. But I tell you, as soon as we proudly finished burying the roots of the last fragile strawberry plant, the 5-day weather forecast dropped 10 degrees on us! We city slickers aren't quite sure yet what we're going to do about it, but it may involve 60 feet of PVC pipes and 6 mil. non-UV stabilized clear plastic sheeting if Joey has anything to do with it. For now, though, we've got a mud-brown tarp over one garden box and a tent fly over the other. Real farmers improvise, right?

  

........Five hours later.......

I suppose you could say that an important lesson has been learned today. We got home in the dark of the night after 12 hours in "the Valley" (aka Utah County) to find our tarp blown and twisted over itself, the tent fly ripped and flooded, and our tomato cages strewn across the garden box. After the day's downpour half of our little plants are either snapped or wilted. We just can't let our notoriously eccentric backyard neighbor (the one who takes his goats around as a traveling petting zoo) know what happened or we'll probably hear about it for the next 10 years.

The goats that escaped from our notoriously eccentric backyard neighbor's backyard