Last week we were talking about Emergency Preparedness Week, but sometimes we still get caught unprepared.
This time it was for World Naked Gardening Day on Saturday, May 2. It just goes to prove, you can’t prepare for everything.
Did you miss it? It was the 10th annual.
Not widely promoted, but for some reason, it came across my desk just a few days before. And then, typically, I forgot about it until Meghan Winslow reminded me at the Cache Creek Market last Saturday. Meghan’s really up on all things related to gardening.
Lamely, I replied that my tomato plants were naked.
And that was all that was getting naked that day. It wasn’t cold-on-the-verge-of-snowing like it was this time last year, but it wasn’t hot either. The clouds, combined with the frequent gusts of wind, kept the temperature down to the point where many people were wearing jackets.
I commented to the vendor next to me that we’d be doing lots of hopping and flopping about to stay warm if we were nekkid, and that would just be painful for everyone involved.
I knew a family of naturists in Fort St. John - they often travelled to a southern destination before taking their clothes off, and if you’ve ever experienced the chill in that northern city, you’d know why.
And my oldest brother once lived in a very small southern Ontario town where his next door neighbours liked to lounge around their backyard in the buff. After the first accidental sighting, he avoided looking in the direction of their house.
To each his and her own. People have told me there’s nothing like skinny dipping.Maybe some day. My backyard is a little bit too exposed at the present, so until further notice, I will be doing my gardening in my usual comfortable, loosely-fitting clothes
The promoters of World Naked Gardening Day (look it up on Google) say that Adam and Eve were the first naked gardeners. But I’ll bet they never had to contend with our mosquitos, black flies, hornets and UV - sunburn on the face is bad enough!
Wendy Coomber is editor of the Ashcroft-Cache Creek Journal and does not garden naked. Yet.