Botanists Are Fun People Too

(and how growing food is better than growing plants for cats to pee on)

I'm noticing a trend in teaching methods at my Master Gardening classes. Many activities are prefaced with "This is an activity that we use to teach children...blah...blah...blah" or "This is an activity that has proved very successful with children..."

I look around the room and think to myself: now, I wonder if any one of these senior citizens finds it insulting that most of the activities in the Master Gardening course were designed for children? Then I realize that I'm probably the only real senior citizen in the room. The seventy year old crowd seems to love games.

So we were learning plant parts yesterday by building weird food creatures. I suppose this is to loosen us all up and make us realize that botanists are cool people too. Personally, I thought it was plenty exciting looking at the ova of an alstroemeria at a 10x magnification. I dislike silly activities that are designed to loosen curmudgeons up and help us all shake our social phobias and learn that doing group activities is invigorating.

I do not like group activities or games.

And no, I don't think that makes me cool. And no, I am not proud of it. If you knew how much it makes my innards rearrange themselves with anxiety you would realize that my happy brash way of announcing to everyone in the world how much I hate games is me trying to get it out in the open and out of the way in order to avoid the inevitable heckling and weird arm wrestling people often do to try to get me to "have (their version of) fun".

Did I mention we were supposed to name our food "creatures"? All I could think of was Melvin which was in my head because Elizabeth of The Late Bloomer has a new guinea pig named Melvin which I think is a great name.

Botany doesn't need games and "fun" group activities to keep me from napping in class. I feel like doing that little food activity wasted some valuable time in which I could have been using my pocket lens to look at other cool plant parts and be learning more about how plants do what they do, which, is pretty amazing.

In spite of the fact that almost shouting out loud "Damn, that is SO COOL!!!!!!!!!!" when looking at the alstroemerias sexual organs under magnification proves I am a plant geek of the first order, it will always rankle me when someone gets gushy over ornamental shrubs that don't, for all I can tell, actually do anything cool. Just because I could look at a cross section of that shrub's fleshy matter and get as excited as a kid before Christmas doesn't mean I want to see that shrub 365 days of the year doing nothing interesting in my landscape. When I hear someone say about Pieris "Oooh, that's a wonderful shrub!" I just want to ask "Why? What is so wonderful about this shrub that every cat in the neighborhood comes in my yard to pee on?"

I know that some people in my class (who will remain identity-less, though I have fond pet names for them here at home) have gardens full of almost exclusively ornamental shrubs. Gardens in which no food is being grown. Gardens in which flowers are not prized as highly as shrubs that are green. In my opinion, vegetable gardens are the most ornamental of them all. What riot of color and shape you can arrange with them! I feel that there is room in every garden for some interesting plants that neither feed people nor animals, but I also feel that what Americans really lack is an appreciation for the beauty of food producing plants.

Many Americans see food producing plants and trees as "work", or "messy", or "too much work" or say things like "The fruit falls on the side walk and then I spend all season trying to clean it up. It's too much work."

THAT'S BECAUSE YOU'RE NOT EATING THE FREE FOOD, YOU FOOL!!!!

Part of the problem is we haven't all tweaked our lives to accept free food. We haven't figured out where it fits into our busy world. Fruit producing trees and plants are an incredible gift to us where ever they grow. I would wager that in most countries, where a plant grows delicious fruits, people do not let it drop to the ground in a heap of waste.

I must admit that we let a lot of fruit molder on the ground around our very old and diseased pear tree. It has a terrible mite problem that we didn't address vigorously enough last winter and most of the fruit was spoiled before it matured. But this year we will attack the problem more intently.

If only I could show people the wonderful kitchen gardens all over the world, the front yards in Britain and France in which vegetables are allowed to be seen by the neighbors ("Good God! Is it true?!"). If only I could show them how even in winter, a potager* can shine because of it's planned structure. If only I could show how artfully herbs can be grown. When flowers for beneficials are integrated with your kitchen garden you have eden in miniature. But most of all? How beautiful the most chaotic vegetable garden is when you just think of the people who are being nourished by it's bounty.

I am left cold by ornamental shrubs. Or anything that can be described as "landscape plants".

I built my last garden into a semi-formal potager and it was really satisfying. I surrounded it with roses and herbs and we had fruit trees and all of it compact, fit into a smaller lot than I have now. I wish I could access my pictures of it but most of them are trapped on our old hard drive (another little bit of fun the universe threw our way after breaking our bones and all the other fun). I have a city lot. It isn't farm sized. It isn't even a quarter of an acre.

But it's bigger than what I had before and I have yet to make it shine like my last one. Something wonderful about this new garden of mine is that I can grow peonies here. I can grow berries here. I can grow rhubarb, which I will learn to love because I've got a gorgeous little patch of it that was already here. I see now that what I need to do is show McMinnville that vegetable gardens can be so much more magical than a yard filled with "low maintenance" plants.

Dare I hope that this year I will have time to dedicate to the cultivation of my own private heaven?






*A more formal kitchen garden in which a kind of symmetry is built into the plan and structures such as arches, pergolas, and boxwood give it a more formal backbone.

Confounding Strangers: the little joys of life

A lot of people ask me about my Vespa. I see a lot of looks of longing (because, HELLO!, it's totally flippin' fun to ride one and everyone can tell...) yet they often feel the need to explain to me how come they could never drive one. It almost always boils down to how many groceries they have to buy or the kinds of errands they have to run. I'm not going to argue that it would be challenging to shop for a large family and haul five kinds of mega-jumbo-supersized cereals along with five thousand juice boxes and all the other amazing things us people eat.

And yet...yet I always remember my good friend Sharon (who rode a scooter in Taiwan for several years) telling me about entire families piling onto one small scooter to get places in Taiwan. She would tell me that there really wasn't anything the Taiwanese weren't willing to strap artfully to their beat up scooters. Things like freezers and beds and five children all hanging on where ever they could. It makes me feel like we make a lot of excuses for ourselves and what we aren't capable of doing without Titanic sized vehicles.

This here picture is one example of the interesting things I can drag home from the garden center. I have practiced the art of strapping cargo to my scooter and know the joys of confounding strangers wherever I ride with the image of me surrounded by interesting bags and sticks, boxes of beer and the scooter trunk propped open by intriguing collections of bottles and loaves of bread. I remember people in the parking lot of the Santa Rosa Trader Joe's actually stopping to stare while I would pack my scooter full of five bulging bags of groceries.

I always kind of enjoyed giving them such a curious show.

These are Morello cherries, the classic "pie" cherry. (Some people might argue that Montmorency holds this title. They can argue, it's alright.) They look pretty normal sized in this picture but they aren't. They're tiny. Morellos are small anyway, these ones are almost all pit. They make a damn fine tart cherry sauce to pour over cocoa meringues. I'm not actually sure I'll have enough to do anything with them this year. These make me think of Pam Kitty Morning.*

That is the most lush lettuce I have ever grown. I'm thinning it like crazy but everywhere I have made space it is immediately filled by the growing heads. Oh my, it's so sweet and good.

Don't you kind of feel you could dive into that bed of greens and sleep like the dead? I can't stop looking at it. I'm hypnotized by it's green glow. As the weather warms I fear it's going to do a quick bolt for the sun. What an incredible waste that would be. Salad for lunch an dinner every day is called for.

Finally, look at this little Casserta Mexican zucchini. So tiny, so delicate and fuzzy. I haven't been able to spend much time in the garden this past week so the weeds are almost large enough to choke out a colony of people, yet everything is still thriving. I staked tomatoes, tomatillos, and watered everything. I'm not looking forward to the heat, but the dinners it grows are worth it.

I hope you're all having a great garden week so far!!

*I'm so relieved I'm going to be in a book, because even though Pam pretends to love all her peeps equally, I'm convinced that she has a thing for her published friends. It was all for you my friend!!

The Antidote

Sometimes, after walking through panic and stress you have to go with the flow that presents itself. It makes sense to clean the house if the mess of the house is contributing to your mental and physical discomfort, but what if something else calls out? What if there is some other string of thought that your spirit wants to follow, something light and soothing? I say you should always follow it.

After visiting my mom in the hospital Philip and I went out to breakfast together. We decided that we needed to do this and open the store late. We tried the new place in town called Crescent Cafe which opened up in the place where Luigi's daughter used to be. We had omelets with tomatillo sauce on them. Something woke up. A new direction. I have never gotten into tomatilloes but suddenly I realized I needed to grow some and experiment cooking with them. Having something new to explore in the kitchen and in the garden is like throwing shutters open to the sunlight.

Or in my case-the rain. It wasn't raining when I begged Philip to take me to Wilco to buy some more tomatoes, some eggplants, and some tomatilloes. It was cold and bright. But that's what I love about where I live. The constant variation in weather, in the clouds, and in the air. I came home and at first made a half hearted attempt to deal with one of my many piles. But I listened to the quietness around me. Later Max will come home and have needs. Everyone will have needs. But right now, no one needed me. So I went to play in the dirt.

I observed that one of my lettuce leaf basil sprouts had popped up and the potatoes are up and looking robust. While I planted the six eggplants I bought this morning it started to rain. It felt good and clean mixed with the scent of the partially warmed soil. I love rain. I love gardening in the rain.

Although, right after I positioned my bamboo trellises for my pole beans the rain started pelting down hard. So I came inside to find my bean seeds. It hailed briefly so I came in here to say that the laundry is as menacing as ever. The dishes still need doing. Since I last wrote, the floors have more toast crumbs and doggy foot prints across them.

As M. Sinclair Stevens wisely pointed out, a huge part of life is the struggle to tame the natural chaos inherent in living. It's a part of the process of living. The dishes will never really be done. The laundry will continue to pile up every single day. Some weeks the chaos may get the better of you and spread into your brain and out of every crevice in your house. But eventually we fight it back into some kind of livable balance.

I will get a little something done today but I'm happy I got outside and planted some vegetables in the rain. Already the trees are sparkling with some sun breaking through the clouds for a few minutes. After I pick Max up from school I will plant some bean seeds. Planting food is the most positive thing I know how to do.

Being laughed at by the Wilco lady for wanting Caspian Pink tomatoes specifically when there are fifty other varieties on their shelves was par for the coarse. She wasn't being unkind. She's going to try to get me some. Caspian Pinks were the very best tomato we grew last year. I'm hooked. Tracking down specific varieties of vegetable starts is about half the fun of growing them myself. It's a small corner of my life that I have control over and I relish it.

I hope some of you out there have also been finding an antidote to the stresses you are living with.

A chronicle of tastelessness

My cold is rapidly cycling itself through my system. I'm done with the sore throat. Yesterday was all about the non-stop runny nose, which isn't too bad because at least stuff is still moving around in my head. Today it's been getting a little tight in my chest and the head is slowing up which means I'm headed for the worst torture on earth:

Losing my sense of smell and taste.

OK. I admit that it would be much worse to have both my arms amputated. Or to get mauled by a pissed off grizzly bear, which they tell me are extinct, but which I suspect are still out there waiting for me to stumble into them. Still, I used to want to kill myself every time I couldn't smell or taste because it's not only disorienting, but it means you can't taste your food.

Food is something I take pretty seriously. Not being able to taste it makes me not want to eat. Food becomes nothing but texture. This may surprise people who have never lost their ability to taste, but texture all on it's own is not particularly pleasant. You become acutely aware of the whole mastication process. (Very romantic, by the way) You start off with something that should be pleasing, and normally you would be tasting it's goodness as you experience it's texture. Now you are just aware of chewing tasteless cud.

Philip used to fear my colds; the inevitable pounding of fists into the walls; the screaming obscenities "God, why the F%*& have you deserted me A-G-A-I-N?? GAAAAAWWWWWWWW!"; the eventual resignation to cruel fate. Sort of. More like a passive aggressive stab at resignation. "Fine. I'll eat. But I'm not happy about this. You should stop eating so I don't have to see you enjoy your food. That's just mean."

If I had to choose between losing my hearing, my eyesight, or my sense of smell and taste? I'd choose to lose my sight. I love the beauty of vision. I don't take it for granted at all. But I couldn't live without music. I can learn to live in a dangerous world without sight. If my world was suddenly deprived of scent and taste I would become a pale shadow of myself. My instinct is more strongly connected to my sense of smell and my hearing. I can usually tell if someone is trying to bullshit me with my eyes closed. But how would I know the snow was coming if I couldn't hear the hush that precedes it? How could my spirit know how close we are to spring without that softer greener smell in the air that announces sap rising?

We all close our eyes to sleep. To rest in the warm sun. We all must rest our vision. We must shut out stimulation in order to hear ourselves against the din of the world. No one ever shuts off their hearing. Not really. We can limit sound to our own choice by putting headphones on. But there is no point in our entire lives that our ears are not hearing. We live with an incessant stream of sound. Without it we can't hear how far our predators are. Our ears are hearing while we sleep. We don't notice it, but they never stop. It reminds me of how close we still are to our earlier feral selves.

Some of us hear deeper than sound. This may explain why I have had so much trouble sleeping in my life. Sometimes I think I hear the turning of the earth, like the background ticking of a pendulum clock. Quietly counting the minutes of our lives underneath the mayhem. Steady. Sometimes I think I hear the heat of the sun.

Other than my constant fear of being violently murdered or finding murdered bodies, which a part of me believes is premonition, the thing I fear the most is getting tinnitus. Maybe it sounds silly to you. But crazy people like me hang onto our sanity by thinner threads than everyone else. A little thing like a constant ringing in our ears for the rest of our lives sounds like a great way to send me over the edge. I spend so much time trying to tune out irritating noises. What if you had an unpleasant noise in your head that nothing on earth besides death could silence? It would be spiritually exhausting. It would be hard for me to concentrate on anything outside my head.

So last night I spent in dreamy contemplation of my spring garden. I whittled down my seed choices to only 50% of everything Seeds Of Change is selling. It's hard to pick just five lettuce varieties when there are about thirty of them, all with intriguing names like: Sandrina, Bronze Mingonette, Red Deer Tongue, Brune D'Hiver, and Forellenschluss. My pulse quickens when I imagine all that is possible for my little patch of acid clay.

If you can't imagine yourself poring over seed catalogs debating the relative merits of one hundred different varieties of tomatoes, then you need to hightail it over to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's website to find out what an idiot you've been for having missed out for so long.

Food becomes something magical and an extension of your own flesh when you grow and make it yourself. That sounds disgusting. Which is why you should let Hugh tell you why you should be growing vegetables. BECAUSE IT'S FUN. What the long range benefits are. THE BEST FOOD YOU'LL EVER EAT; BETTER THAN DRUGS. How easy it is. EASIER AND LESS STUPID THAN GOLF. And what it means for the environment. WHO CARES WHEN IT TASTES SO MUCH BETTER THAN THAT SWILL SAFEWAY IS SELLING YOU? Plus you won't feel as powerless in this big bad world. You'll feel capable and strong. You will have connected yourself to your heritage as a human. Because the only thing that separates us from most other animals is our ability to use tools, and to use tools to cultivate the earth. Without agriculture, you're just another monkey pissing in a tree.



Note: I just found out about Hugh's website from Jo from French Knots. I got all excited when I read his argument for growing vegetables because I'm a garden geek, but also because he says it so well I feel sure that anyone reading it will feel inspired.