I do not intend to spoil the joy of the greengrocers; but what they have done, let them eat. Karel Capek writes about "greengrocers"

Surely there are people who read these instructive thoughts indignantly, saying, "As for every inedible rattlesnake, the man speaks here, but he doesn't say a word about carrots, cucumbers, kohlrabi, kale, cauliflowers and onions, leeks and radishes, or even celery." chives and parsley, they didn't say about a nice cabbage head! What kind of gardener is this when, partly out of pride, partly out of ignorance, he misses the most beautiful thing that can be grown, such as this bed of lettuce?

To this accusation, I reply that in one of the many paragraphs of my life, I also ruled over several beds of carrots and cabbage and lettuce and kohlrabi; I certainly did it out of some romanticism, wanting to indulge in the illusion of a farmer.

At the appropriate time, it turned out that I had to pick one hundred and twenty radishes a day, because no one else in the house wanted to eat them anymore; the next week I drowned in cabbage, after which came orgies in a kohlrabi, even woody. There were weeks when I was forced to chew a salad three times a day so it wouldn't have to be thrown away.

I do not intend to spoil the joy of the greengrocers; but what they have done, let them eat. If I were forced to eat my roses or nibble on the flowers of lilies of the valley, I think I would lose some respect for them. A goat may become a gardener, but a gardener can hardly become a goat to grind his garden.

Besides, we gardeners already have enough enemies: sparrows and scythes, children, snails, slugs, and aphids; asks, should we still have hostility with caterpillars? Should we have whites against each other?

Every citizen sometimes dreams of what he would do if he were a dictator one day. As far as I'm concerned, he ordered, founded and suppressed a lot of things that day; among other things, I would publish the so-called Edict of Malinová.

It would be an order that no gardener, under the penalty of cutting his right hand, may plant a raspberry fence. Please, how does a neighbor come to this, so that in the middle of rhododendrons, indestructible tendrils of raspberries come out of the neighbor's garden? T

what raspberry climbs underground to the ground; no fence, no wall, no trench, no barbed wire or a warning sign will stop it; then he will drive out a rod in the middle of your carnations or nightingales, and talk to her!

May every raspberry fruit bitter aphid! May the tiny shoots come out in the middle of your bed! May warts grow on ripe raspberries! However, if you are a virtuous and an orderly gardener, you will not plant raspberries or honeysuckle or sunflowers at your fences, nor other plants that, so to speak, tread on your neighbor's private property.

If you want to please your neighbor, plant melons by your fence. It happened to me that a watermelon so huge, so Canaanite, so recordable grew on my side of my neighbor's fence that aroused the amazement of a number of publicists, poets, and even university professors who could not understand how such a gigantic fruit could be pushed between the sticks. fence. After a while, the watermelon in question began to look a little awkward; and we cut him off and ate it as punishment.