How to get your garden red and ripe

Every year, I make sure I spend some quality time at the Orange

County Fair. This year was no different, so I’m taking a week off my

typical musing on newsroom issues to have a little chat about this

year’s annual summer shindig.

I decided to pay my visit Friday.

For the most part, going to the fair for me means a few bites of

fair food, things like Chuckwagon barbecue sandwiches, teriyaki

sticks, barbecued corn and lemonade, and just taking in the sights

and sounds.

But this year I decided to try a different approach.

The fair always has these great arts and crafts or home and garden

or livestock exhibits and demonstrations that I normally miss.

So I perused the schedule for something that look interesting

during my visit.

What to do, what to do? The glassblowing demonstration? Nah.

Cooking with chef Jan Mongell. My idea of good cooking is grilled

cheese sandwiches.

Ceramics? Now there was a class I flunked in high school.

Traveling game show? I don’t even have enough patience to watch

non-traveling game shows.

Here’s one. How to be a better backyard gardener, with Wade

Roberts.

Now my wife is always getting on me about keeping the backyard

clean and taking care of the plants. Well, at least she used to when

we had a backyard. But I’m sure when we find our new house, she’ll be

after me again.

So this sounded like a good useful thing to take away from the

fair and a lot better for me than a big plate of Australian battered

potatoes with ranch dressing.

Turned out Wade Roberts was from the Sherman Library and Gardens

in Corona del Mar. I knew there was plenty of great plants there, so

how could this not be a good move and a good way to impress the wife?

Roberts tells the crowd gathered to watch him in the Floral

Building that the No. 1 rule to good gardening is soil.

Yeah that sounds pretty simple.

And No. 2 is light.

And he tells us to remember three things: consistent watering;

consistent feeding; consistent grooming.

Huh? That explains a lot. Thinking back to a few of the plants I

tried to grow, I think I got the watering part, but the rest I was a

bit negligent on.

“They like water, but nobody likes to get their feet wet,” said

Roberts about plants getting too much of the wet stuff. “You gotta

give provide nourishment.”

Who knew? I must have starved those poor guys and I’m sure their

grooming left a lot to be desired.

And Roberts advised to avoid plants that have already taken root

in a pot. Get the young ones with the young roots, he said.

“It’s going to be a much happier plant,” he said.

I guess plants are a lot more like humans than I thought.

So I listened to Roberts a bit and confident that I could now grow

azaleas, I decided to take a stroll.

Everyone knows things at this year’s fair are a bit different than

last year. For one, the ride operators have had a run of bad luck.

Sure enough, as I walked around the fair, there sitting idle in

the middle of the fairgrounds was the Adrenaline Drop. That’s the

ride where a young woman dropped and kept going all the way to the

ground. She wasn’t seriously injured, but the ride’s been shuttered

ever since.

The other thing different is the entertainment. Most of the

complaints I’ve heard is that it’s way too costly now. Used to be

that you could see a band with the price of your $7 fair ticket.

Now, with the fair bringing in big names to the tune of $5

million, it costs $65 for a ticket to a show.

The other thing that is changed is the length of the fair, which

in the newsroom at least has caused some dismay because it forces us

to come up with more things to write about.

But along with extending the fair, officials cut out Mondays, so

that helps.

But strolling around the grounds it was obvious that some things

never change. Families still flock here for a good time and somehow

the fair just puts people in a good mood.

And I was no different.

*

Final fair thought. Fair officials said last week that while they

have an obligation to tell state officials about accidents at the

fair, they don’t have an obligation to tell the press.

But here’s the irony in this folks. The fair goes out of its way

each year to provide the press with all sorts of gadgets and gizmos

and press packets, heralding all the good things happening at the

fair.

What if the press decided it had no obligation to print all of the

fair news?

What if we just let the fair happen and not provide it with one

iota of ink?

Of course fair officials would cry foul. But turnabout is fair

play, to use a bad pun.

Fair officials should acknowledge that we give them thousands of

dollars of free publicity in the form of daily coverage. The least

they could do is provide us with timely information on issues of

public importance, like accidents or crimes.

We really expect and deserve nothing less.