Are you ready for some… gardening? How about fantasy gardening?
I read an article in the Indianapolis Star about how 37 million people will spend time each week during the football season managing their fantasy football teams. These millions of people form fantasy leagues, hold mock drafts to pick their players from the rosters of real NFL teams, and then each week use the real players’ statistics to figure out how their “teams” did.
So, if they can play fantasy sports team manager, how about gardeners playing fantasy gardener?
Gardeners could band together in fantasy garden clubs and pick their vegetable and flower seeds from a list of seeds provided by a fantasy garden program yet to be written. Then the gardeners can fantasy plant, fertilize, prune, harvest, basically “do” all the things they do in real gardening, but do it ‘virtually’ online, without getting dirty.
The fantasy gardening program would cause good or bad random events to occur and then figure out the impact (good or bad) and help tally up the harvest to see who manages to get the most out of their garden.
Random events could be hailstorms, insect infestations, droughts, rain, heat, frost, etc. As in the real world where we look at weather forecasts to try to figure out what is going to happen, in fantasy gardening some fantasy (and horror) weather forecasts would be provided in advance to give the gardeners a chance to decide if they need to virtually cover plants, provide supplemental watering, fertilize, harvest early, etc.
I did find a gardening video game, Plantasia, but that looks like a solitary, one person game. I’m talking about forming fantasy garden clubs to do fantasy gardening through a whole off season (November – February), competing with other gardeners for biggest pumpkin, earliest tomato, and all of that. And to make it really interesting, no one gets to fantasy garden in the hardiness zone in which they currently live. The program would assign you to another zone, so we can all learn to be a bit more sympathetic to the “zonal plights” of other gardeners.
Yes, there would be some aspects of fantasy gardening that we can’t overcome with any amount of programming. We won’t have any real vegetables to eat or flowers to smell. We won’t really get dirt under our fingernails, or enjoy the sun on our backs or gain the benefits of exercise from gardening. But, the fact that people who have fantasy football teams don’t really actually win games doesn’t stop them!
Who’s in? Sign up for your fantasy garden club today!
(After I wrote all of this, I decided to make sure I hadn’t thought up someone else’s idea, so I did a quick online search for “fantasy gardening”. Sure enough, I got a hit, check it out here. It’s not quite as elaborate as a full season of fantasy gardening, but it might be a start. )
(The picture above is slices from the tomato I featured yesterday. No fantasy tomato there. That’s a dinner plate full from one real tomato! Yum, it was very good on my BLT.)
Yum Yum, do you enjoy only the natural flavors or do you use salt and pepper or do you sprinkle your tomato with sugar. The family is divided on this.
Generally, I just eat the tomatoes plain, occasionally I’ll salt them, but I never put sugar on them!
Fantasy gardening – that’s dreaming right?! Plenty of time to do that with winter around the corner
Random events could be hailstorms, insect infestations, droughts, rain, heat, frost, etc…..Don’t forget the RABBITS!
Carol, we in Austin can’t play fantasy gardening with you from October to February – that’s when the ground cools off enough so that we can do our real gardening!
Annie
Annie — What? The rest of the world isn’t resting all winter like we do in zone 5?? :-0
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Funny idea.Be great during the long winters here in th UK.That fantasy garden site you mention is not as cool as your idea.They do it with soccer, baseball, and american football.why not gardening?
Do you accept gardening morans in your league? I could use the same approach I use in real life – plant the seeds, turn them over to God, and watch the results (no fertilizers, pesticides, minimal weeding)! That’s how you get those giant pumpkins you are lusting after – neglect! (You can have the pumpkin that has become one with the fence – it will be a gardener’s challenge to figure out how to harvest it!)
LOL!
Sis with the homestead… Yes, you can play, too! No membership restrictions to the virtual garden clubs.