Aubergine

In the garden

Recently, when I was talking about working in my garden, a friend said to me, "I sense that you are someone who gets a lot of healing from gardening."  And yes, that is true.  It calms me, slows me, to have my hands in the dirt.  I find a great deal of joy from communing with the plants while I water, while I groom, or just check in on them.  Notice which have new leaves, new flowers, which are struggling and which are flourishing.

My garden was feeling a bit overwhelming for a while there.  Gardening was something Lisa and I would do together.  But she's lost interest, or doesn't want to work with me in this way, and tending to a large yard solo is a pretty daunting task.  But my mom has been helping, and having a helper caused my manager side to kick in.  I broke it all down into tasks, made lists, prioritized.  Made a repeating reminder on my calendar to water, to fertilize.  The lists are still only half done, but I can see such a difference in the yard already, and I so much enjoy going out there in the mornings and checking in with the plants. 

The basil that I thought wasn't going to make it is putting out lots of new leaves, getting lush and bushy, though still only about 3 inches tall.  The sweet peas that are probably too much in the shade are reaching tall for the hairy twine wound around the trellis they are to grow up.  The tomato plants are all strong and green-smelling and starting to show signs of setting fruit.  The oregano and sage that had grown wild and lanky over the winter and which I cut back hard a few weeks ago are putting out new and healthy branches, smelling sweet and strong, and making me imagine the meals I can make with them.  It is hard for me to cut back plants that have gone lanky, as I'm often afraid that I'm going to kill them.  But more often than not, they come back stronger, healthier, more lush.

There were a few plants in my back yard container garden that survived the winter, though they never really did well last summer.  As a gardener, I'm not a good editor.  I have too much empathy for plants that are struggling but still showing signs of life.  I felt especially protective of these particular plants.  I have struggled through winters.  I have struggled to thrive in an environment that wasn't quite right.  These two or three that were valiantly a hanging on were rewarded with fresh soil, new pots, fertilizer.  I rearranged them so they got more sun.  And each of them is now thriving.  One has put out the burgundy blossoms that were the reason I purchased it in the first place, a fact that I had forgotten because it never flowered last summer.

It is hard not to draw parallels between my life and these plants.  And so I love on them, and in so doing, love myself.

orange

20 things to do with tomatoes: #1

Eat them right off the vine. Preferably from a sun-warmed garden.

While you might accuse me of padding my list with this one, I have a point:  If you start any tomato recipe with tomatoes good enough to eat plain, whatever the rest of the dish is will taste better than if you started with a watery tomato.

Join me in boycotting watery, unripe tomatoes.  I have 19 more ways to eat good tomatoes to come.

I also have photos and a journal of my Amsterdam trip, now posted and backdated.  If you didn't catch them, those entries are dated 9/11 and 9/17, or just scroll down to find them.

bounty

Bounty from the garden.  Four kinds of tomatoes and two peppers of a variety I can no longer remember.

Bounty from the market.  Lilies, artichokes, sweet onion, chard, late season pluots and peaches, persimmons, figs (in the bag), olive oil, cheeses and pate, bread and pastries, coffee (already drunk), concord grapes, wheat grass (fo the cats) and heirloom tomatoes.  Can you believe I bought more tomatoes?

And yet more from the farm earlier this week:  pears and radishes and carrots and eggplants and more peppers and dry-farmed tomatoes and green beans and cauliflower and more concord grapes.

I'm grateful that I live in a place where there is such a variety of small-scale agriculture, and that I have the desire and income to support it.

Now, who's coming over so I can feed them?

July 17: how we mark our territory

Lisa's been reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle recently and a few nights ago we had a conversation about asparagus, and how Barbara Kingsolver talks about planting an asparagus bed at each house she lives in, even though it takes a few years for asparagus to start producing - hardly a fast-growing, rental-property kind of crop.  But she plants them because she doesn't feel like her house is home until she has some asparagus in the garden.

That conversation got me thinking about the kinds of plants I've carried with me from house to house, and what plants different people put in their garden to make a house feel like their home.  For Kingsolver, asparagus.  For my mom, daffodils.  For me, home must have roses, and a lemon tree.  I don't really know when the lemon tree thing originated.  My mom had a lovely lemon tree in the condo she moved to after I left home, but I can't remember if we had one at the house before that or not.  I don't recall one, though I fondly remember the cherry trees and the Fuji apple that lived in that back yard.  The first lemon tree that made a big impression on me was the huge tree that grew just outside the front door of the first house I lived in in Santa Cruz.  It was a big, crumbling, sprawling house filled with students, and I lived there for several years.  My room was a converted dining room - converted by means of an old mattress propped up in the archway between the living room and my room and covered with fabric hangings.  It was in the back corner of the house, with old sliding-sash windows that opened into the calla lilly-strewn side yard and the back patio and garden. I entered  by way of the kitchen, and there was a single french door that opened to the back yard.  It was never entirely quiet, between the kitchen and the dining room common areas, and once in a while the mattress would fall over and have to be re-assembled into a wall.  But I loved that room, that house. 

The rent was laughably cheap, which was good, because I was extremely poor.  There was a period of a year and a half or so when I didn't even have a car, although I was both working and going to school in downtown San Jose.  There was an express bus over the hill that stopped about a mile from my house, and I walked to the stop at about 6:30 in the morning each weekday, worked a half day shift at my office, then attended classes at the university in the afternoon and into the night  The bus ride took about a hour and a half each way, and I often didn't get home until almost 11pm, then stayed up longer to do homework or visit with my housemates.  I cat-napped wherever I could just to get barely enough rest into each day.  I was single, often achingly lonely, poor, exhausted, but also painting a huge amount and I felt so very alive.  Although that was nearly 15 years ago now, my memories from that time are vivid and richly colored.

I remember sitting on the front porch of that house on sunny weekend afternoons, in the shade of that huge lemon tree.  The sweet scent could be dizzying, and there were lemons all across the arc from green to yellow all the time.  We could never keep up with all the lemons it produced, although all 7 of us housemates used them for cooking, tea, and lemonade on a regular basis.

When we decided that we were going to buy this house and stay here, I got Lisa to go with me to buy a lemon tree.  We got a 1 gallon dwarf Meyer, which will never reach the size of that Spark St. tree, but will produce lemons that I prefer to use in my cooking and baking and drink-mixing.  And then we waited.  The first season it put out lots of leaves, produced flowers that set into miniature fruit that then dried up and fell off.  And then again, same cycle.  We watered it, we weeded around it, we fertilized it, we scraped a scale infestation off of the branches.  I worried over it.  Too much fertilizer?  Not enough water?  I gazed longingly at the 10-year old tree across the street that practically groans with fruit two or three times a year.  Finally, this year, the third year, it has set fruit.  It only set two lemons that made it past the infant fruit stage, but they are going strong and just starting to show some yellow.  The tree went through another bloom cycle about a month ago, and this morning I noticed a bunch of new baby fruits, already swelling past the stage where they used to drop off. And more new leaf growth, which will be followed by another bloom of flowers.

In our landscaping class last semester, our instructor mentioned in passing one day that 1-gallon lemons always take three years to start produceing - better to buy a 5-gallon plant, which will produce the first season.  Huh.  Wish I'd known that three years ago.

June 30: Ripe

This June-long project of observation and introspection has had its intended effect.  Now, what to do about what I have learned?

I have enjoyed this habit of photographing and writing, and I like that sometimes the words follow the image, but other times I create the image to support the words.  I think I will continue this style of blogging, though not necessarily daily.

June 28: so sweet

I'm fickle about my favorite flower.  In March, magnolias. In April, daffodils.  In May, tulips.  In June, I think it must be jasmine.  They make that whole end of the yard smell sweet.

June 22: so much sun

So far, this summer has been oddly fog-less.  Our young tomatos are loving it (we may actually have ripe tomatos in July this year), but it is kind of tripping me out.  I'm used to foggy coastal summers.  This is like living inland.  And I don't know how to take pictures in bright, strong sun.

I think I'll call her Flower

We have a little skunk living in our garden.  I saw her first this weekend, making her way across the back yard, under the side gate and along the edge of the house, rooting around for good things to eat (I hear skunks eat snails - yay!).  Our next-door neighbor's cat was following along behind her at a distance, curious, but respectful.  She was ignoring him.  He climbed up on the gate and sat there watching her for a while.

This morning I was sitting out in the back garden in the sun, reading a book, and she appeared again (I say she because she's small and cute, not because I have any emperical evidence of her gender...).  She poked around under the fleabane in the raised bed, then climbed down the trellis below it until her little nose appeared below the leaves.  She started walking across the yard toward me.  I quietly let myself back inside and sat with the cats inside the sliding glass door, watching her.  She checked out my potted plants just across the sidewalk from us, then headed again for the side gate.  She's very cute, about the size of a teen-aged kitten, with a brushy tail and dark pads on her paws.  She has a waddling sort of walk, and seems unconcerned by either the cats or me, and focused on the task at hand.  When she disappeared down the side yard I figured I was safe, so I went back outside to finish my chapter.  A few minutes later she appeared again, and this time I stayed put, curious what she would do.  She still didn't appear to notice me, but chose a path along the fence line, behind the rose pots, under the bench, under the nasturtiums.  I went back to my book, with one ear tuned in the direction of her rustling. 

But then it got quiet.  I looked around for moving leaves, evidence of her presence, but nothing.  Maybe she'd squeezed under the fence to the neighbor's yard.  Maybe she'd made her way back along the fence to wherever she'd come from, and I missed it while absorbed in my book.  I finished the chapter and got up to come inside, and then I saw her - stretched out for a nap in the dappled shade under some big nasturtium leaves.  If I was the size of a teenage kitten, that's exactly what I'd do, too.  Enjoy your nap, little one.  Our garden is safe for you.

postcards from the weekend

• Sweet yellow peaches, two rainbow handfuls of heirloom tomatoes, chartreuse and burgundy glads, and fresh wild Monterey Bay salmon from the farmer's market at the end of our street (wish you were here!)

• The best kind of houseguest, who fits seamlessly into our life and makes our home her base to come and go.

• An afternoon of errands, punctuated with lunch at a favorite restaurant, and an hour or so cuddling the bunnies and kittens up for adoption at the pet store.  I think Lisa will be a volunteer there soon.  (She's such a softie)

•  A paper and a new cookbook to read, companionable sharing of inspiring bits read aloud from one couch to the other.

• Several hours in the studio with photos and paper and glue.  The quiet joy of working through a block.

• Sunday morning breakfast at Cafe Brazil (Lisa's favorite thing to do on the weekend)

• A trip to Costco, brief enough to keep my hairs from standing on end, but long enough to score new lighting fixtures for the bathrooms and to pick up photo prints.

• A handful of paint swatches from the hardware store and a roll of scotch tape.  I'm auditioning brick red and terra cotta in the living room, eggplant and inky purple in the hall bath, honey yellow in the well of the kitchen skylight. (We are loving making a home)

• Puttering in the garden, pampering and repotting house plants.  Feeding the vegetables and herbs, assembling and reconfiguring containers full of color, turning and admiring the roses I thought were dead but which have made a stunning comeback this year.  We brought the houseplants back into their spots in the house, and told them how much we'd missed them.

• An unexpected gift of a fresh abalone from our neighbor, who went diving in Mendocino on Saturday.  Impromptu dinner with the friend we called for advice on how to cook it.  We were abalone virgins, but are  now fans.  Served with lightly steamed organic green beans and a salad of those heirloom tomatoes and pearl mozzarella drizzled with fig balsamic and oil.  Confetti of basil on top.  For dessert, a bit of the goat milk ice cream I splurged on earlier this weekend and have enjoyed experimenting with the most decadant ways to serve it.  This time, with strawberries and raspberries and a few drops of that fig balsamic vinegar. (Our friends don't believe us that we eat like this all the time, but we do.)

• Curling up to sleep next to my wife, the house still and dark, a small black cat at our feet.  The sound of tumbling water from our neighbor's pond.
"I had a really nice weekend, sweetie." 
"Me, too." 
*smooches*
"Good night."