We Build.

I have heard it said—well, to be honest, I have seen it float by on a Facebook meme—that to garden is to have hope. 

 

The early days

I have a garden.  I have black eyed peas, and cantaloupe, and carrots and beets, and of course eggplant.  I have a whole plot of squash and pumpkins that are overrun with squash beetles because I didn’t know what I was happening, I didn’t understand the problem, so I didn’t do anything about it.  They are going to die because nothing was done in time. 

They are going to die because nothing was done in time.

Everything else is doing great. 

I have a garden.  They say that is hope.

It is hard, sometimes these days, to have hope.  I have been taking it easy on social media recently, so I missed El Paso and Dayton until after the fact.  Not far after, but I caught them both at once, not as they happened.  Same thing had happened with the Garlic Festival, a few days before.  And while these things were happening, I was just…living.  Being a friend, having friends.  Being a spouse, having a spouse.  Being a worker and going to work.  Having nice days.  Trying to have nice days.

It is hard to look at the world right now and understand what is happening, and what the correct response is.  It is hard for me to look at all the things screaming out, and know what the correct thing to do is.  I mean, outrage and disapproval are clear correct responses.  To more mass shootings, to race baiting from on high, to children in cages and internment camps made in my name as a US citizen.  Yes.  Outrage, and disapproval. 

But that’s not an action. 

That’s a feeling, a vast and righteous but also completely overwhelming feeling that doesn’t come with an instruction manual.  I’m going to vote, yes, but that sure doesn’t feel like a meaningful-thing-to-do-today action.  I give money where I can, but I can’t much.  I call when I can, but to be honest, I do it less than it demands.  I forget sometimes. I get busy, plusalso I don’t like it, and that’s shameful but it’s also true.  In the meantime, I try and live a life full of love, and to love radically.  But like…that’s not exactly putting your body up as the hurdle that injustice must climb over. 

And I don’t know what else to do.

So I go to the garden, and I ask myself, what am I building?

I try to build a marriage.  I try to build a village of love, support, acceptance.  I try to build hope.  I try to tend my garden. 

I am a fighter, but no one really wants to have to be the vanguard of justice.  I will, people will occupy that dangerous space.    But (and here it is) I’d so much rather not have to.  Not because it shouldn't be me, but because it shouldn't be.  Don’t they remember the ideals they taught me: freedom and justice for all?  Why don’t they remember?  Why isn’t it everywhere?  And then you pay attention to our history—why has it never been everywhere? 

I’m so tired.

So easy for me to say.  I am a white woman, middle aged now, with a good education and a salary job.  I understand that them being after any body is them coming after my own body.  I mean, they do

 come after my own body.  But these days, honestly, my body is safe.  I’m ok.  I can be tired after my work week and take the outrage off like a dress to spend my night or my weekend recharging in the safety of my life, my skin, my income, my social status.  I can shake my head, and be sad of it, and put it aside to have a game night with friends or be sure that I get enough sleep at night. 

While other people are being stopped by the police, are sleeping in cages apart from their kids, are in a hospital tonight riddled with bullets.  It’s not fair.  I know.  It haunts me, and it should.  That haunting is my burden to address, just like the old picture my papa once showed me of a picnic at my grandmother’s dad’s farm, with all the black people in the background.  “Who are they?” I asked.  “Oh, they lived there,” he said.  “At his house?” I asked.  “Back behind it," he said.  "They never left, you see."

“They were happy there,” he said.  

That is also my burden to address. 

Cheat code: If you just don’t address it? But you feel reeeeally sad about it tho?  You get to feel like you engaged while actually never doing anything that affected your life, or changed anyone else’s.  This is uncomfortably, factually true.  Even if you would do something if you knew what to do.  Even if your heartbreak is real.  Even if you cry out to do more if you only knew what in God’s name you could do.  Even if you are dying to be really, actively on the right side of this.  Even if you pray to use your body, mind, soul to build the dam that holds back the evil, the inhumanity, the hate.  Even if you thirst for it like eyes for beauty and souls for poetry and crops for rain.

So what do we build?  What do I do with my life, my privilege, my burden?  What is fair, when nothing is fair?  What is the next right step?

Where is my hope?  Well I guess it’s in my black-eyed peas, and my compost pile.  That’s a real but deeply saddening answer. 

Where is your hope?  Will you share it with me?

Where is our hope, for this country built on a dream I believe in?  Because you can’t believe but do nothing.  But what do you do?

I try to, as my mother always said, keep my side of the fence clean.  Do your part. The things that are definitely yours to do—do them.  I love my neighbor. I try to be a person who sees people as people, meets them in dignity and offers them respect.  But that doesn’t feel like activism, not on the scale that is required by our country.  

The situation demands so much more. 

What do we build?  When we are lied to, when we are betrayed by those in power, what do we build?  When the world is boiling, emotionally, spiritually, and physically?  When my little home in my little house is mostly ok but scared, and we are not even the people who need to be really afraid, and we know that?  What do we DO, when we are ready and willing but also constrained by the normal things of everyday life—work schedules, tight budgets, limited emotional capacity, my niece’s birthday party coming up, the cat’s vet appointment?  What do we DO, when we are willing but not always able?

I go to my garden.  They said it was hope.  I am trying to grow it.  I try and make the soil a little bit better, do something productive with what I have.  I love doing productive things.  I want to do something productive SO. HARD.

 

So I harvest my peas while kids still sleep in cages, people are in hospitals riddled with bullets, and a whole huge part of this country acts like everything is roses.  I drove by a billboard last week that said Trump Keeps His Promises, and someone paid for that billboard—is paying for it.  People have decided to hate other people and harm their bodies for it, and I’m not there.  I’m here, and safe, and sad. I can’t be there, El Paso, but I can bear witness. I am very aware that bearing witness is not enough. 

Bearing witness feels like the only tool in my toolbox these days. 

I go to my garden.  I will share my harvest with you.  I will humbly ask you to share fellowship with me. This is not the world we were tasked to build; I will be active in rebuilding it.  I will work.  I am a good worker.  

I will build.  I will try.  I will do what it takes.

I don’t know what to do.

     

Spite Cooking

A few days ago, I took leftovers to work.  I ate them early because I was particularly hungry, having had a small dinner the night before (AND WHO’S FAULT IS THAT, READER?  CERTAINLY NOT MINE.).  It would have been better heated up, but I did not heat it up (NOR WOULD I, NOR SHOULD I, NOR SHOULD ANYONE).  I looked at it through slitted eyes and shoveled it cold into my mouth, punish-chewing it even though it is quite tasty (YOU’RE GD RIGHT IT IS).  I was angry.  I was spite eating, a natural progression and the inevitable outcome of spite cooking.

Let me walk you through the night before.

Look at those lil' dumplins!

I have, as previously discussed, too much eggplant.  I grew these adorable tiny eggplants called Baby Patios, and they are precious and cute and yummy, but I am prepared to admit maybe not the most convenient for all cooking.  I’m not spiteful about them, Reader, they’re not at fault here.  They’re just less efficient than a Japanese eggplant or a regular old schlong-emoji eggplant when it comes to most ways of preparation. They’re perfect for the Korean banchan recipe I have, but I have made that dish three times now and was looking for some variety in my life.

Recently I took a load of eggplants over to my sister’s house

when I was dogsitting, and pulled ground beef out of her freezer to thaw, thinking there's gotta be something I can do with those ingredients.  Instead, I was lazy and just left them all there for her to come home to (Sorry, Sis! But I vacuumed tho!).  Anyway, when looking up recipes to send her to use her unasked for but now needing to be used ingredients, I found moussaka.

Today's geography lesson

Moussaka is a traditional dish from the Levant/ Middle East/ Balkans part of the world and it was like the only thing that came up when I googled eggplant and ground beef recipes, so it has been tickling around in the back of my head as I have been trying to consider what to do with all these eggplants that, btw, are still producing.  So when I was at Aldi the other day and I saw a pound of ground lamb for a reasonable price, my brain went “ding ding ding!!” and I thought, oh yeah, I can make moussaka!

(When I was on Forever Farm we raised sheep, which means in the spring we had lambs.  They are sooo cute, playful like a dog, making little leaps and headbutting their moms in the teats like fluffy, tiny jerks, and I loved them.  Then around their 7 month birthday we rounded them up and sent them off to slaughter, and I ate them.  I’m not saying I’m a nice person, I am saying lamb is delicious and I love it.)

So I actually look at the recipe, at a bunch of recipes in fact, and find one that, after you get through what appears to be every picture from their Greek vacation, seems to be a good fit.  We have either all of the ingredients or at least acceptable substitutes and it says it takes 40 minutes of prep time and then and hour and a half to cook, so I’m like, cool, let’s do this!

This, it turns out, is a lie.  Now, Reader, if you are a moussaka fan and have yourself climbed this mountain in the past, the lie might be obvious.  I, full of spite still, do not need your “Oh, yeah, that’s actually really complicated to prepare” feedback. I know.  I definitely now know.

Look, I’ve made my cavalier nature towards recipes clear, but I am a literate, intelligent human being and an experienced cook, so I expect things like “do this and set it aside for 30 minutes while you get started doing that.”  I understand that 40 minutes of prep means 40 minutes total, busy the whole time doing things.  That’s fine, I expected that, and I am good at multi-tasking (for example: while writing this on our back patio, I am simultaneously singing the National Anthem up through the window at “Andy,” who is in his office singing the National Anthem).

What I did not expect was for the actual recipe instructions to be organized in not-my-favorite-manner and also by someone who either has timelord powers or just lies.  I love a good project, but that is not what I was signing up for.  The project I wanted to spend my night doing was binging tv and inspecting my bellybutton.  I think I’m not alone when I say unexpectedly complicated activities are way, way more exhausting than fun-because-I-feel-like-it complicated activities.  This ish came at me on a work night, people.

Let me give you some examples.  First you

Note related to this gods cursed recipe.  In the process of
preparing this blog post I have gone back to the
original recipe.  There is an option, Reader,
to "jump to the recipe" at the top, which I'm sure you know
because you have definitely clicked through to see if
there was some user error on my part that made
what was otherwise a perfectly lovely recipe
into such a nightmarish hellscape for me. 
I, upon originally finding the recipe, scrolled through
the first bits about their stupid vacay and pictures of urns,
then went back to the top and jumped to the recipe.

Upon closer reading, it is clear that the intro,
which def includes pictures of the effing Parthenon or some crap,
 (don't come at me, Historical Readers,  my spite still lives
and is not prepared to deal with your corrections)
also includes instructions like "start with the meat sauce
so you can use your time more economically, and do
blanching and salting while it is simmering."



This is not included, or even referenced, in the actual recipe.



It is still unclear how this different ordering of events
would make the prep time fit into 40 minutes. 

But I bet it would help.




I have...so many...feelings about this.

 peel potatoes and eggplants, and slice them.  Then you blanch potatoes while laying out and salting your eggplants. This draws the water out or something, and then things aren’t soggy in the final product, which came up like 150 million times in this recipe so is apparently a Very Big Deal.  So, fine, the eggplants sit for 30 minutes (of the total 40 minutes?  When you had to peel and slice them and their potato brethren first and also afterwards have to fry and layer them?  ANYONE ELSE SEE THE MATH FLAWS HERE???), in the meantime move on to the meat stuff.  And you go on in that vein, doing all these multi-step things to the meat, but at some point you realize the eggplant step, which is like 100 years ago and is never referenced again in the recipe, also told you to fry these (hundreds of tiny medallions because I grow the worlds tiniest) eggplant on each side.  But you’re in the middle of meat stuff when the 30 minute eggplant-salting timer goes off, so I hope they’re cool with extra salting time cuz they just have to wait.  You get the meat and tomatoes and spices and stuff to simmering and you sigh, and begin to recognize the spite in your heart.  Then you swallow your frustration and fry those suckers because by this time you’re in it so you might as well do it for real.  Plus you bought lamb for this.  Then the meat sauce is simmered enough and you turn the heat up because again, excess moisture seems to be the enemy in this long slog of a campaign.  Then you look at the clock and realize how effing late it has become, and you haven’t even made the bechamel sauce yet.  Your eyes tear up, you are hungry and tired and yet strapped into this rollercoaster of a recipe.  This is the moment where you realize for sure you are spite cooking.  

Then you start the bechamel sauce.

Bechamel sauce is so yummy it should be illegal, but also it is not something you can walk away from.  All whisking, all the time, for about 15 minutes, followed by a 15 min cooling period, followed by more steps. 

The title of this work is
Death, and the inevitable
passage of time.

It is now like 8:00 and I’m just beginning to layer all my (stupid, dumb, no good) potatoes and eggplants etc, after carefully sprinkling breadcrumbs in the bottom of the dish to absorb evil, sinful moisture.  I started at like 6, expecting a 40 minute prep time, and here we are just past 8 looking at an hour and a half of cooking time.

Except, we’re not, because you only actually cook it for an hour, despite the recipe saying 1 hour and 30 minutes cook time.  Leaving me wondering who the eff wrote this god forsaken recipe and why all the reviews are like Oh my goooooood I love it so muuuuuch but none are like CAN I SUGGEST SOME SIMPLE EDITS THAT MAKE THIS RECIPE NOT A TRICK AND A LIE.  I mean, YES, other things cooked for WAY WAY OVER 30 ADDITIONAL MINUTES.  If we’re talking about total time that something was over a fire and being cooked, the total cook time is like an hour before anything went in the oven.  So we’re NOT talking about other cooking time.  But the actual time you can (walk away, take a deep breath, have a well-earned whiskey sour and) relax is one hour.

We ate at 9:15, and it was too late and I was too full of spite (and maybe a spoonful or two of bechamel sauce) to eat much.  It was delicious.  It’s in the fridge.  I hope it hates the cold.  I hope it sits and thinks about its life and its choices.  I hope it regrets.

I know it does not regret.

Merwil and Maangchi

I was laying on the floor in the room “Andy” uses as an office the other day like a perfectly normal person who has just come home from work, to have a totally adult conversation while petting the beige shag carpet that has def been there since the house was built.  We (I) lay there, discussing life, the universe, and everything, when low and behold my eyes caught upon a book I hadn’t seen in a while.  A cookbook.  A very specific cookbook called Maangchi's Real Korean Cooking, about making authentic Korean food at home. 

Maangchi means "hammer" and I think that means she will eff you up.

But like, really, I have no idea.

I bought this cookbook after two things happened: one, a friend of ours came to visit who is Korean and loves to cook, and he made us the twice fried chicken recipe.  It was a raucous night of middle-aged nerd fun: a reasonable but sufficient number of craft beers followed by board games, but the most memorable thing was the cooking and the food.  This may be because the craft beers fuzzed the rest of the night up, but also because the food was super good.  

There was a whole thing where we had to find a certain cooking tool.  This all happened after a whiskey and barbecue festival, so we were definitely in the best mindset to have this adventure.  We wandered the aisles of some urban ethnic grocery, tipsy and uncomfortably full, and I bought (and ate) an entire carton of strawberries and now we own this.

I know who I am, Reader.

The second thing happened when I went to another night of high nerditry, a table top Dungeons and Dragons role playing game that I’ve been in for a few years now.  It’s way over on the other side of town, and so I took advantage of the opportunity to hit up the Highway of Asian Culinary Delight that the game is near for dinner.  It’s a huge thriving immigrant community and filled with the most delicious restaurants, and since it’s not near me and I had time, I decided to make a dinner plan.  

The prize at the center of the labyrinth!

I found a little Korean restaurant online, added an additional 20 minutes to my drive time because it’s not in the shopping center, it is around and behind the shopping center through a maze of labyrinthine interconnecting parking lots, and sat down to eat.

I don’t know what I was thinking, but what I got was a menu entirely in, presumably, Korean, sprinkled with some enticing pictures.  Maybe now is the time to mention I haven’t eaten much Korean food, or experienced much Korean culture, besides the everything-in-a-bowl place by the college campus near work and watching a show on Korean street food during the Olympics where I learned that everything is cut with scissors.

Why doesn't everyone do this? 
Everyone should do this.

I looked at the bibimbap but I wanted to try something new so I basically pointed at a picture.  The process was intimidating, because I am sitting there being an awkward white girl pointing at a picture on a menu I obviously don’t know what to do with and I am thinking I look like the cultural tourist I am.  LOW AND BEHOLD I looked like way, way more of a white-girl cultural-tourist than I had yet realized, but we’ll get to that.  My intimidation only grew when my bowl of yummy came accompanied by a bowl of broth and like nine other little tiny bowls with veggies and saucy stuff in them, only some of which I could identify.  Exhibit A, when I cleaned out one tiny side bowl of deliciousness, the waitress came to ask if I wanted more pickled celery and I had no idea what she was talking about til she pointed at the empty bowl.  Looking at the whole spread, I was painfully aware that there is a way to do this and I do not know what that way is.  Worth mentioning, this is how literally every Korean meal works, but I didn't know, so I just sat there having no idea what to do with my hands.  So now I am being a rude cultural tourist, and that makes me a jerk.  But a jerk with a happy belly—it was delicious.

Like this.  They all (I think?  Again, I really don't know.) look like this.

But wait!  How much of a jerk am I? Well, adding to my too-little-too-late self awareness was the fact that, since I was eating alone, I had brought a book.  What book?  Just the book I happened to be reading, which happened to be Tai-Pan by James Clavel.  It is, IMO, a great read, I would say as good as Shogun before it if you’re into that sort of thing (That sort of thing being a well written, well researched, epic tome that is definitely written by a British dude about life in an Asian country hundreds of years ago that is definitely centered on British Heroes and their respective Asian Love Interests.  I mean, it’s well done for what it is, but it is what it is.) 

Also, because I heart Red Pants and I don’t usually dress to be in public so I take the chance where I can get it, I had on his t shirt to go to my nerd game. 

He is still perfect.

This is how I felt about it.

So there I sit in my Shinsuke Nakamura shirt (he is Japanese, if you’re keeping score at home), reading Tai-Pan (a tale of the origins of Hong Kong by a white, British man about a white, British man), eating something I can’t say out loud at a Korean restaurant, and eating it wrong.  Behold the white girl in her natural environment: oblivious and a little douche-y.

So the experience stayed with me and I was like, that was super delicious but also what was it and how do you do it like not-a-jerk? Maybe, I thought, I should learn something about this food I want to eat so I can at least come correct, act like I’ve been there before.  Of course I remembered the book our friend brought over, and I decided to bury my embarrassment in further research (common habitat of the North American White Girl).  

This decision, once the cookbook arrived, lasted like 20 min—I was quickly intimidated by the book, which is not intimidating at all btw, but does absolutely involve lots of ingredients that are not exactly hard to come by but I certainly didn’t have.  Also I am not that person who wants to sit and read a cookbook like a novel.  I Amazon-Primed some sweet potato noodles I never used, “Andy” made the twice-fried chicken again, it was delicious, and the book went on the shelf.  (I did eventually use the noodles but not for any Korean recipe, just because I always buy dry goods that seem interesting or useful and then they sit in the pantry forever and eventually I put them on the dry erase board in the kitchen to remind myself to use them and anyway, we’ve been eating a lot of Israeli couscous recently.)  So I put the book on a shelf, it got moved at some point, and I never really thought about it again.

Until, on my carpet tour of the upstairs, I picked it back up. 

Look at this.  Don't you want to eat this??

This is a good book.  It is approachable, it is written for people who are not familiar with Korean culture or fancy cooking, and it’s appealingly full of great pictures and a readable font.  Again, if you want to do it right, there are some specific ingredients you need to find but they’re all findable in this modern era of the internet and Asian farmers markets.  Also she lists usable substitutes. She even has a list, in the introduction, of the 5ish ingredients she takes with her whenever she travels because they are enough, and it’s all findable stuff, most of which we already have.  

Looook atttt thiiiiiiissss how good does
this look??!?!?!!

Had I done more than skim and be intimidated when the book arrived, I might have noticed this.  

Most meals do involve a number of dishes and a number of tiny side dishes such as I encountered at my foray into the restaurant of my happy-bellied shame.  There is also, if you actually read the book, a description of how to eat a Korean meal when you think you ordered one thing but like a hundred bowls show up at your table. 

To do a full ornate dinner once-off can be a lot, if you want to do it all and do it right.  BUT if you are doing it regularly, the author says, you can batch-make a bunch of this stuff (like your pickled side dishes, your kimchi, your broth) and she is happy to show you how and answer sweet questions from dummies like me on her blog.  And all the pictures make you drool, and all those projects are right up my alley. 

LoOk At iTtT##$))DD@!!!

So now, I tell myself, I am going to cook my way through this cookbook.  

Some relevant facts about me and cooking: I don’t really like it, and I don’t have a lot of…what’s the word…concern?...for recipes.  I mean it says shallots but we have onions so it’s fine.  It says 3 minutes, but I know how to saute so we're going to work it out.  This is sometimes a point of

contention between “Andy” and me, “Andy” being a person who uses phrases like flavor profile and me being a person willing to eat cheese on cucumbers if that’s what we have and it will make me not hungry anymore.  

I will look at what ingredients exist in the house and make a meal out of them; “Andy” will look up a recipe and go get the missing ingredient.  Ingredient, Reader!  Singular!  He will go to the store for **A** ingredient! I will glance at a recipe and then measure nothing and assume I understand the basics enough to get there, or at least to some approximation of “there”, whereas “Andy” has a digital version of all of his favorite recipes which he has tweaked and perfected over time and he will print out whichever he is using on a given night and stick it to the fridge where he can see it from over the stove.  He calls my food fusion and I laugh at the idea that there was that much intentionality behind it.

So I don’t love cooking.  

But I LOVE projects. 

This feels like my kind of project.  I mean, it requires homemade broth and fermentation—I’m into it.  So I think to myself, ima Julie and Julia this ish.  (Don’t worry, I will not be blogging each recipe—this is a personal journey and I assume you, Reader, do not care about my childhood memories related to every ingredient or the day I was having when I decided to cook.) [Editorial note: link to any cooking blog.] (Worth mentioning, I do somehow assume you care about the rest of these meandering stories so...maybe I shouldn't be throwing shade.)

(Also, like…am I really going to cook my way through a cookbook?  Or am I just going to make a few meals then fill our house with the smells of fermenting kimchi?)

"Andy" does not love those smells but that sucker said yes
and now he's locked in here with me.

So far I have made a few attempts.  But like…with caveats.  First, I hate going to the grocery store, esp if I’m already home and not mentally prepared to go back out.  Because it takes mental preparation.  (WHO GOES ALL THE WAY TO THE STORE FOR ONE INGREDIENT???? A good teammate, that’s who.)  Second, we just got all married and stuff.  Funds are tight and going on a “let’s stock the kitchen for Korean Cuisine!” adventure is not happening.  So we’re making it work from found objects already in the kitchen.

All of that is to say, this is not the meal I made.  Neither, precisely, is this or this.  They were similar in broad strokes and when you squint.  But everything has been easy and delicious!  And I got to use eggplant out of my garden (which is important because I am growing too much eggplant)!  And I used some of those frozen tilapia things I always buy but, like dried goods that come to our pantry to die, never use!  So these are wins!

Making your own fermented soy paste blocks takes…like…a year.  So that’s a longer term project, but as soon as I figure out where I can hang those suckers up to dry, it is on.

Happy eating, Reader!

How Does Your Garden Grow?

HERRRRR MEHR GERRRDDDD

 

Hi there!

READERS, HELLO!!  Hello, Readers, if you even still exist!  If you have not given up on me in the MONTHS is has taken to sit down and try and type out a single thing!  A love letter to you, from me, if you have not turned your back on me and my negligence!  Hello, a heartfelt if slightly manic HELLO from me to you!

It's fine!!
*gigglesnort*

Sooo many things.  I planned a wedding (fun!), got married (Fun!), we went on a honeymoon (FUN!!), and then went back to Family Camp (FfUuNNnNN!!!!), and are finally, FINALLY home!  Like, literally two hours ago.  The past month (ok, six months…) have been a little surreal and potentially disconcerting and some might say too much but it’s FINE, it’s all FINE, because now we are DONE and HOME and MORE WORDS IN ALL CAPS because this is in fact all REALLY, REALLY TOO MUCH. 

(Exhibit A: on the family vacation, my dad (we’ll call him “Dad”) asked me if I was coming to see them for Thanksgiving.  This is a perfectly reasonable question: every other year we do Thanksgiving with him and my step mom and my sis and all the step sisters and it’s been that way for like 15 years. 

This is our year to do that and he was just checking in and Thanksgiving is far away in November and when he asked me I almost burst into tears and was like, I CANNOT HANDLE YOUR OBSESSIVE NEED TO PLAN and that was not the most emotionally mature or fair reaction but also don’t talk to me about November right now, I am not in the best place for making plans.  It has all been a lot.)

It is all been good things, very good things, but also back to back and non-stop.  I have been on a lot of airplanes.  I haven't done laundry in like 45 days.  I just had to clean messy cat poops off the upstairs landing because we’ve been gone for yet another week and the monsters were apparently also feeling the stress.  

All I want to do is take a week off and be at home and do relaxing projects and be covered in cats.  Unfortunately, that is now WAY off the list because I’ve been gone so much from work that my next vacation day is never.   The last 35 days in particular have been a real flash-bang whirligig and I’m sure you don’t care that I’ve been so exhausted by doing so many wonderful and fancy things like a wedding and international travel and a ridiculous family vacation but HOLY JESUS I need it all to stop and I just want to make some pickles, bake some bread, and plant a garden.

And really, speaking of gardens, who brings a textbook about small scale commercial organic vegetable farming to read on a family vacation anyway?  Here’s a hint: it’s me.  Of course it is.

I have Cadillac garden-dreams on a
Datsun energy-to-water-and-weed budget.

And I read almost all of it!  I got through it til it got to things like advertising and building your own mobile farmer’s market stand and I decided we’re not there yet and I can pump the breaks.  Theoretically at least.  All of the paragraphs above sort of indicate that “break pumping” is out of character, but still.  We’re not starting a business here, it’s just…I have a lot of community garden plots to play with, and I want to see what I can do.  Which leads us to today’s topic: garden fraud, and too much produce.

So there’s a community garden two miles from my house that my little borough runs through the little city government.  A bunch of raised beds at the end of a dead-end road, some fruit trees around it, and an imposing fenced-in area that says WARNING: BEES on the side of it.  

I am VERY EXCITED about the bees,
and even harassed the beekeeper when
I finally ran into her.  Was she covered in bees
 at the time?


Maybe.

There’s even a high tunnel for winter crops, and water hoses, and little bleachers for classes or something.  I discovered this gem in the spring, and looked into how to get a plot.  There is another one around the corner, in the next little city, and it is a thriving garden that really pulls the community together, and plots cost like $35 for the year. 

Ours is not that garden.  It is newer, and almost unused—there’s like 35 4x8 foot raised beds, but when I went by it  mayyyyybe six had evidence that once, someone tried to grow something there.  Everything else was overgrown by weeds and I could find no signs that they had recently been in use—no volunteer garlic making a go of it after last year’s crop, no scrawny collards or doing-their-best carrots.  Just grass weeds and neglect.  Plots were free—well, technically the fees were “waived” for 2019, which I take as further evidence that no one is signing up for them.

Great! I thought.  I will transform this space, I thought. I will revitalize this community resource, I thought.   I will commit garden fraud, and get six plots when I’m only supposed to have two, and grow all my wedding flowers, I thought. 

 

I felt like this about it.

I was right about the garden fraud—technically, I have my two plots, and so does “Andy”, and also his son, bringing the household total to six—but wrong about successfully cultivating all my own wedding flowers.  There was a whole adventure around carefully planning my approach, selecting the flower seeds I wanted, starting them inside before the last frost date, planting them out, watering them, etc.  I did the thing, but the thing (as literally everyone predicted all along the way) did not work out.   Now—like, right now—I have three plots of lovely flowers thriving and being beautiful (in a garden two miles from where I can see them), but the wedding was in May and me and a friend instead raided an abandoned lot next to a church and we got wedding flowers out of the ditch and they were fine.  It was lovely; no one walks away from a wedding being like, “Well it was a good party, but did you see those boutonnieres?  They must be mortified.”

Wedding flower theft: a story in pictures

Et Voila! Wedding time!

Now I have all these garden plots and like….if you dig into the annals of this blog, you know it all started on Forever Farm.  I worked on a big organic farm for a year and I. Loved. It.  Farming is deeply satisfying to me, it checks all my boxes: projects, tangible results, physical exertion, making things, being able to look back on your day and your week and your season and your year and being like, look what I DID, what I MADE, and it’s hard to overstate the satisfaction for me of creating such a useful thing as FOOD.  And now I have alllll these garden plots….

I really do highly recommend this book.

So, I read a textbook.  I recommend it.  But here are a couple of things I am now painfully aware of.  The trick to good plants is good soil.  We are not smarter than the soil.  It has been working its system out since the actual dawn of life on Earth, and we only sort of understand it.  Our best bet is giving the soil what it needs, then letting it soil well, and getting out of the way.  (Yes, there are things we know help, and things that make it better—like add compost!—but mostly you do that so that it can do what it does best.  It’s like throwing ingredients into a kitchen with a millennia-old chef, and then later, there’s delicious food.)

My soil isn’t great.  In some plots it seems better than others, but in the worst plots it’s just super-compacted red clay that exhausted me digging six regular holes to plant some eggplants I got at Home Depot.  I googled “hardpan” and it seems right.  No topsoil, bad drainage.  It’s bad soil.  

I will also be planting too much squash,
which never stops producing,
even when everything else has given up in the heat
and you have decided you hate squash,
things that rhyme with squash,
and bananas because they look like squash.

I AM VERY GOOD AT THIS.

Also, what am I going to do with six plants worth of eggplant? I don’t want that much eggplant.  We grew one eggplant plant at the house last season and ate none of it.  We don’t really eat eggplant, and it doesn’t freeze.  I know, Reader.  But man, I want to GROW that much eggplant. I want to grow SO MUCH eggplant.

In another plot I have now put in like 20 seeds for black eyed peas.  Assuming they germinate and I actually build a trellis, I will have one million black eyed peas.  Also, and this is particularly fun, they all get ripe at the same time and then they're done.  So I will have one million peas (and pea pods to shuck) all at the same time.  I am very good at this.

On the better plots it was more diggable but like…I did no testing to know how good or bad the actual dirt is.  For the record you can get free soil testing done by digging up a
bit of dirt and sending it to your local extension agent.  I did not do this.  I assumed it was probably mostly fine, or at least fixable, and that is a sentiment I still have even knowing some of my soil is garbage and having recently read a textbook on how fixing specific, different soil problems is helped tremendously by specific, different approaches.  It’s going to be fine. 

Look…I’m going to do things to make it better (like plant deep rooting cover crops that break up the hard pan and fix nitrogen!  See, I was paying attention to the book!).  Any better is better than no better.  And I don’t know if you, my sweet still-hanging-on Reader, has been paying attention, but good enough is good enough for me.  As my friend “Jen” said recently: anything worth doing is worth doing half assed.  

Good enough is good enough for me!

Sounds like not what your high school counselor told you, right?  But here’s the thing: if it matters at all, then any small step you take towards it matters.  It is okay if you don’t have it in you to do it all.  You can do some, even crappy-some, and it is better than none, because it matters.  

(My dentist once got me to admit I didn’t floss, and she was like: look, it’s best to floss three times a day.  But if you do it once a week, that’s still 52 more times a year than you are doing.  And if you had done that, you wouldn’t be looking at a root canal.  So like…maybe, once a week or so, give it a try.  It’s not best but it’s still better.  She changed my flossing life.)  

It is fair to say I am comfortable with—even inspired by—this worldview. 

So I sat down with my organic gardening textbook, and started to make plans around all the veggies I want to grow on my crappy soil in a garden plot I barely have rights to, and now I am so excited to go set up cover crops and green manure and a crop rotation and there is a horse farm nearby, can I get some of that nitrogen-rich horse manure? I bet I can.  

This is kind of a multi-year plan, and I struggled to even go water the flowers for my wedding, and I know this.  So we'll see if it works out.  If not, the worst I did was try, and improved some soil a little bit for the next people who care more than me.  I got six plots to fill, a plan, and an activity that requires me to be close to home.  I think it’s a win.

Ima get that horse poop.