No, I'm not cursing at you. I'm just telling you about what I ordered from Seeds of Change. Yeah, yeah, I know, I said I wasn't going to order from them again after my $75 worth of spring seeds never showed up and they kept telling me two more weeks until they finally told me they were just never coming, and I almost missed my planting window.

But hairy vetch! When you're putting in cover crops and you're browsing through the options--Rye? Oats? Winter triticale? Sweet Lorraine fava beans?--and then you get to Hairy Vetch, it's a bit of a showstopper.

"I must have hairy vetch!" I exclaimed.

"Don't say that too loud," my friend, Melanie, said to me (whom I met several years ago solely because our mutual friend insisted, "You have to meet Melanie. She has chickens!) "It sounds like you're calling me a name."

So I couldn't get Melanie's words out of my head when I called Seeds of Change, yet again, to inquire as to where my order was.

"My name is Pattie Baker and I'm checking on my order," I told the barely interested guy who answered the phone.

He tapped into his computer. "Hairy vetch?" he asked.

Hairy vetch! No, I'm not a hairy vetch! I wanted to shout back. I was very reasonable back in the spring. I'm not a hairy vetch!

"Your hairy vetch has been shipped," he answered, cavalierly, as if it weren't shocking that there was a hairy vetch in transit even as we spoke.

"When will it be delivered?" I asked.

"Please hold while I track the hairy vetch," he said, disappearing into the netherworld. "Okay, your hairy vetch will arrive tomorrow."

So I told my children, "The hairy vetch will be here when you get home from school!"

Big eyes looked back at me. My older daughter gasped a little. My younger one said, "Is that like a monster from Where the Wild Things Are?"

She doesn't really know about curse words yet.