Reed Miller brought his radishes to church Sunday as proof that he wasn't going to let Mother Nature, and her colder-than-normal spring get the better of his gardening activities.

I was impressed, since just the day before, I had planted the first parts of this year's garden. It's late, I know, but I want to leave as little to chance as possible.

My wife had already put some peas into the ground. She likes to plant peas, and then eat them raw, so every year she goes through the ritual of planting the seeds in late March or early April.

Then she leaves it up to me to see that they are watered and cared for. My wife is about 10 times smarter than I am. So why this otherwise intelligent woman would entrust me with the delicate task of nurturing her vegetables is beyond me. It is a lapse in judgment of epic proportions.

The fact is, I've been able to grow very few crops in my lifetime. I'm the son of a merchant, and as such I learned how to sell lettuce and carrots, not grow them.

I learned my gardening skills from the currant bushes in the yard of my childhood home. They seemed to require little care and no effort, and yet each year they yielded a crop of currants sufficient to keep us in delicious jelly year-round.

I'd like all my plants to behave like that, but they don't. Mostly, when they are entrusted to my care, they wilt and die.

A few years ago, we attempted an experiment in square foot gardening. We picked a spot in the middle of our yard that had trouble growing grass, built a box around it and filled it with the special mixture recommended by Mel Bartholomew, who developed the system and who was displaying it at Thanksgiving Point at the time.

I talked to Mel to do a story, and he inspired the experiment. Anyone, he said, could garden if they followed his example. I went on to plant, germinate and then kill several plants that summer. I wrote about our failure in the newspaper, and got a call from Mel, who wanted to know why I thought a square foot garden would be a good place to grow a pumpkin.

I really had no answer to that except we had the seeds, and wanted to make jack-o'-lanterns in October. He was unimpressed.

We've since replaced that initial garden with a very nice sandbox, which is valued by the grandkids. Then I built a garden along our back fence, again following the principles of square foot gardening. No pumpkins were planted this time.

But we did plant carrot seeds which produced some tiny, spindly orange things that had a woody texture, and onions, which never did take off, and radishes, which grew just fine, but I was the only person in the house inclined to eat them.

The peas didn't grow, but the tomatoes did. I planted some flowers, too, bringing home about $40 worth of blooms that shriveled and died over the course of the next few months.

I've continued the effort for years, watching as my efforts to get close to the earth have resulted in acts of herbicide, or vegicide, or whatever this crime against nature might be called.

This year, I have high hopes. Sharon insisted on planting peas, and about half of them are thriving. The other half, I'm sorry to say, didn't make it.

I planted tomatoes. Lots of tomatoes. It's the only plant that I've been able to grow, so I'm going to grow a lot of them. As a rule, they won't grow large. They never do. But we will make up in quantity what we lack in quality.

And one zucchini plant. I understand you have to work hard to kill one of those.

So far everything is doing well, except the zucchini. It's looking a little peaked. But I have high hopes.

If all else fails, we can probably get some of those from the neighbor.