How I Learned To Respect the Habanero

Because it's July.

A few years ago my family had a garden. It seemed appropriate at the time. Our children were young. We had a desire to teach them how to garden; how to grow, harvest, prepare and eat their own food. My thought was they would need to know this should an apocalypse come, zombie or otherwise.

(Our ideals have since got the best of us, and where a garden once stood is now a fire pit that gets used slightly more than the garden got weeded, which is to say, not much.)

From my perspective, any garden that doesn't contain the basic ingredients for hot sauce or salsa isn't a garden at all, but a communist collective containing plants forced upon the gardener by a rigid, unimaginative…