3. I Can Dig It

3 I Can Dig It The next day, Miss Nichol arrived on her tractor again. This time, she was wearing a T-shirt that said GIVE PEAS A CHANCE on it. And this time, there was a man with her. You'll never believe in a million hundred years who she got to help us work on the garden.

I'm not gonna tell you. Okay, okay, I'll tell you. It was Mr. Tony, who runs our after-school program! He's a cool guy. One time he helped us try to get into Guinness World Records by making the biggest pizza in the world.* The first thing Miss Nichol and Mr. Tony did was take some long wooden boards and nail them together to make the borders of our garden. Then they gave each of us a shovel and told us to start digging. We had to loosen up the dirt before we could plant anything. "Y'all ready? Set? DIG!" shouted Miss Nichol. We all started digging. We dug. And we dug. And we dug. Hey, digging in the dirt with a shovel is hard work! "Isn't this what they make prisoners do on a chain gang?" Michael asked as he stopped to wipe the sweat off his face. "Maybe we'll find buried treasure under here," said Alexia. "Yeah," said Neil, "buried treasure from an ancient civilization."

"Maybe we'll find a dead body," I said. "That's not appropriate, Arlo!" said Andrea. "This is a children's book." Ha! Andrea thinks she's in a book. Can you believe that? What a dumbhead. We dug in the dirt for a million hundred hours. It was long, hard, boring work. We were all sweating. In the end, do you know what we found?

Nothing. Just more dirt. "I reckon I'm gonna to pass out..." said Miss Nichol. "She's gonna pass out!" shouted Ryan. "Give her some air!" shouted Alexia. "Call an ambulance!" shouted Michael. "I'm gonna pass out water and snacks," said Miss Nichol. Oh. We sat in the shade eating apple slices. Miss Nichol explained that our next step would be to plant seeds in the garden to grow stuff. So if we want to grow corn, we would plant corn seeds. If we want to grow apples, we would plant apple seeds. And so on. Duh! Everybody knows that. "What kind of seeds are we going to plant?" asked Andrea. "That's for you young 'uns to decide," replied Miss Nichol. "It's your garden. You should plant what you love to eat." "I love hot dogs," I said. "Can we plant hot dog seeds?" Andrea rolled her eyes.

"You can't plant hot dogs, dumbhead," she said. "Oh, snap!" said Ryan. Why can't a truck full of hot dogs fall on Andrea's head? I was going to say something mean to her, but I didn't have the chance because everybody started yelling out the stuff they wanted to plant. "I love doughnuts," said Neil. "Hey, if we plant Cheerios, maybe they'll grow up to be doughnuts." Great idea. Neil should really be in the gifted and talented program. "If we plant straws," said Alexia, "we can grow strawberries." "Can we plant peppermints?" asked Emily. "Then we can grow candy canes."

"I'd like to plant jellybeans," said Ryan. "They probably will grow into lollipops." "I bet that if we planted eggs we'd grow eggplants," said Michael. "That would make sense." "And we could plant birdseed to grow birds," said Neil.