A brief inventory

A fresh sunburn sits proudly on my shoulders, neck and chest. Tom and I take long after-dinner walks through the neighborhood, where kids play in the street until their mothers call them in only when the sun gives up its very last ounce of light. Gardens are watered by 6am to give plants the best chance of taking up water. The sometimes faint and sometimes overwhelming scent of burning charcoal wafts through SE Portland. Summer has arrived.

In the garden much has happened over the past month, and I have written very little about it. I’m finding it difficult to make myself sit down and write. I’m in the garden instead. I’ll try my best to jot down notes when I can as I know I’ll thank myself next year when I need to be reminded of what the 2009 season was like. Here is a quick recap of what’s been going on:

1. Tomatoes are producing beautiful green fruit. We now have about 11 plants, mostly because they kept being offered to me and I couldn’t resist.

2. We are now up to 10 pepper plants for the same reason. We’ve got several varieties including many italian types.

3. The red orach is getting very tall. I’m letting several plants go to seed so that I can see the plant’s entire life cycle (it is said to be very beautiful when it flowers) and to save seed.

4. Peas are growing like mad. I planted them too close to the tomatoes, which they now shade. A farmer friend suggested I release them from their trellises and place them on the ground—they are vines after all. I’ve done so, and the tomatoes appear much happier. But I’ve sacrificed my pathways for the peas, so now I must jump over them to access other plants. This has been a great learning experience in the importance of timing and placement.

5. Beets were slow to get going, but we are now enjoying perfectly formed deep red globes. Thanks to the floating row cover provided by my dad, we are also enjoying tender pest-free beet tops.

6. The garlic (both hard and soft neck) is now curing on the back porch under the shade of the ginkgo, with the frequent breezes of the last few days helping to dry them. The garlic got rust this year, which I’ve never experienced. The entire community garden seems to have contracted it. It has affected the leaves but not the bulbs, although I’m wondering if this may mean that they won’t store well. We may have to eat all 22 bulbs sooner rather than later.

7. I’m finding it  more and more difficult to  garden in the middle of a city park in the middle of summer. Half-naked dodgeball games with blasting music, back-to-back kickball sessions in the diamond adjacent to my plot, and bicycles locked up to the garden gate making it impossible to use the entrance, are all making me a little mad (both angry and crazy). Tom reminds me that this is a public park and that these kids are just having fun, and he is right. And I just want to be a gardener, having some peace. I understand that my expectations are askew for my particular situation. I’m idealistic. But until something else comes along, this is what I have to work with. In this park, I’m learning what is important to my gardening experience. And, I’m learning to go early in the day–dodgeball rarely starts before 2pm.

Gardens on the road

In 1871, the keepers of the wooden Yaquina Bay Lighthouse received their provisions by ship once a month. They cooked on a wood fired stove, enjoyed the luxury of running water in the kitchen (a rarity at the time), and grew produce in a small plot of land behind the lighthouse. Today, children of one of the local Newport elementary schools garden here. Giant globe artichokes, perennial herbs, tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce, celery, beets, greens and radishes abound nearly 140 years after the lighthouse was built.

 

Two blocks west of the Lincoln County jail, in the parking lot strip of a row of painfully ordinary county buildings, lies this garden. What at first looked like an average weed patch revealed itself to be a patch of food, complete with radishes, carrots, lettuce and corn.

Back home, my garden was well tended by Tom and my friend, Sarah. White currants, garlic, beets, blueberries, arugula, cilantro, strawberries, and peas welcomed me home.

Time out

I’m headed to the coast for a little over a week. I’m excited to go, but already missing my time in the garden. Thankfully, I’ve got a cooler full of garden greens and herbs to take along. Here are some shots of the garden this week. 

The long haul

I arrived at Joan’s shaded four square home just after 9:30am on Saturday. Joan had been ill and hadn’t been to the community garden for some time, but she had herbs she wanted to donate to the Colonel Summers Community Garden Herb Project, and I was there to pick them up. She gave me a tour of her backyard where I received useful advice about which herbs to plant directly into the earth and where, and which ones were so greedy that they’d need to spend their lives confined to pots.  After gathering the sage, oregano and parsley starts for the garden, I began to say thank you and good bye, when she grabbed her sun hat and a basket of tools. Only then did I notice the streaks of white sunscreen lining the edges of her silvery eyebrows. She wasn’t going to miss this. Joan was coming back to the garden. I later learned that the herb garden was her idea—one she’d been wanting to bring to fruition for years. 

Joan was the first to break ground, digging deeply and ruthlessly at the thickly rooted comfrey which had all but taken over the garden. She was also quick to point out the myriad invasive grasses with contorted roots that spread far and wide to the root zone of a beautiful pink peony and through the wire of the garden’s chain link fence. This all had to go. Not a speck of weed root could be left or our work would never be done—we’d be forever haunted by these garden bullies. And so, we, the somewhat lazy modern gardeners, persevered. We fought powerful and collective urges to hastily pull what we could of the weed tops, to leave much of the root unscathed, to cover up the evidence of our shortcuts with a bit of dirt so Joan wouldn’t notice. 

And for as much as we tried, our efforts still fell short of Joan’s. We really did give it our best, but there was no getting around the fact that we simply lacked a lifetime of experience. Joan has something many of us don’t. She grew up on the land, in rural Hillsboro, Oregon at a time when the town proper contained a mere 3,000 people. The landscape was rural and untainted by the countless strip malls and chain stores that now blemish its surface.  Joan was one of five children, and she wouldn’t have eaten were it not for the garden. 

Perhaps because of this, Joan gardens from a different time and perspective. From a time when a three-way soil blend couldn’t be bought by the yard and delivered. From a time when, for the average gardener, the path to good soil was longer than it is today. Soil was built over the span of years, not in an afternoon. It was built through steady work, cover crops, crop rotation and the addition of inputs from the family homestead, often in the form of manure from livestock, decomposing plant matter and kitchen scraps. Joan gardens with frugality and resourcefulness as her guides. But as frugal as she is with her external inputs, she is equally generous with her hard work, time, attention, and genuine love for growing food. 

Slow gardening won’t produce extraordinarily high yields right off the bat. It likely won’t make you the envy of your neighbors. It might not win you the giant tomato contest at the state fair. But it probably will help you develop an honest-to-goodness relationship with the land and an understanding of life—of a plant’s, the soil’s, an insect’s and perhaps best of all, your own. Kind of appealing, isn’t it?

Freezer wisdom

Yesterday, we picked the first fruits of the season from our garden; three plump strawberries. The arrival of even just a few of these early fruits means that it really is time to finish up the the frozen berries from last summer’s u-picks. 

Inspired by a rhubarb cream pie I made earlier this week, I made a raspberry blueberry cream pie with bags of fruit that were lingering in the bottom of the freezer. This pie contains the spirit of one particular Saturday last summer spent on Sauvie Island picking fruit with friends. It evokes memories of the angle and the heat of the sun on that day, and of our conversations about what we would make with the berries once we got them home. All of this just frozen in time until yesterday. 

In late fall, a full freezer imparts a wonderfully secure feeling to a home, providing a sense of bravado so strong that one might go so far as to secretly wish for a long, harsh winter. And although it is incredibly satisfying to eat from the freezer during the long, dark days of winter, I think perhaps the best freezer is a nearly empty one, for in its emptiness lies endless potential. 

Save two cuts of pork from Square Peg Farm, a couple of loaves of bread from the Grand Central Baking class madness, several quarts of peaches and a couple of bags of roasted tomatoes, the freezer is now nearly empty; the cycle is on the brink of renewal.

Unconditional gardens

About two weeks ago, I began (once again, and in earnest) pining away for a life spent in rural Oregon. Then, somewhere between touring a friend’s new blueberry farm in Lebanon and helping my dad build a dry creek bed on our family’s land in Gaston, I decided that I don’t have to choose between Portland and farm country. I don’t have to quit my job and leave Tom for a life in the country living with my parents and eating from Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery. But, I also don’t have to spend my days in the city tied to a desk and a computer screen wondering what is going on outside in the natural world. I’ve simply got to get a little better about making sure I’m having regular rural experiences and weaving them gracefully into my urban life. 

Whether on the farm or in the city, the garden is constant, grounding and nourishing. My community garden plot changes in tiny and huge ways each day.  Several spring crops have already come and gone, having been replaced by tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and beans. Others are still taking their sweet time to mature. Will I ever eat a beet or sugar snap pea? The garlic is finally making flower stalks, the arugula is making chipper white flowers, carrots have been sown again, the second and third plantings of radishes have been devoured, and chervil is in full swing. And, there is a tiny yellow flower on my tomatillo just waiting for a bee to pay it a visit. 

The woman I’d like to be

...Lives and farms on Marsh Road, a dead end on the edge of Verboort, Oregon.  She is in her 60s. Large oval tinted glasses rest low on her nose as she ambles along from the greenhouse to greet me in her aquamarine gardening apron, which gently cascades over her plump center. 

She asks what she can do for this young lady, and twenty minutes later, I’ve admired her twelve chickens, toured her herb nursery, and met the farm dog, Dutchess, whom her husband used to call Suzie but for some reason started calling Dutchess some time ago.  I say I’d like some eggs and she says, "12 for 2 or 18 for 3?" This is when I know I’m dealing with the type of rural person I grew up with, and love. She is practical and resourceful, and beats to her own drum. No $7-a-dozen-eggs-because-the-market-will-bear-it on this farm. Barbara simply sells the extra eggs she and her husband can’t eat. She’s washed them, she says, but can’t guarantee them against salmonella. I take my chances.  They are the most perfect eggs I’ve laid my eyes on in a while.

I ask about the tomato starts, which she propagates herself. One in particular caught my eye, 'Bonny Best'. I ask her about it and she tells me that when she first moved to this land in 1973 there was an old man in Verboort growing this one. She loved it and has grown it ever since. 

When all was said and done, I’d been set back $9 and had a truck full of diverse farm treasures— a fuzzy leaved peppermint scented geranium, eighteen beautiful multicolored eggs, 'Bonny Best', and a sprouting garlic bulb and three stalks of lovage that she threw in, because I liked them, and she is generous. But best of all, she gave me wise words. When I expressed my appreciation for her green thumb, she said: "When we are children, we start with just a tiny sprout in a window sill. And when we are old, we might have a small potted geranium on the table in the retirement home. And, in between, well, we get to do this."

This weekend, I lived up the in-between. Life is short and growing is long, and so I went a little crazy in my barely 400 square foot plot of land. Here is what I planted:

Big Leaf Cilantro, Carrots, Asparagus Bean (Dow Gauk-Yard Long Bean), Mideast Prolific Cucumber, Blue Lake and Treviso bush beans, Jalepeño Pepper, Sweet Marconi Pepper, Demon Hot Thai Pepper, that garlic bulb Barbara gave me, onion sets that I found on the community table at the garden, Italian shell beans given to me by a friend that are rumored to be the same ones that Ayers Creek grows, an insectory mix by Wild Garden Seed,  and of course, old man Verboort’s 'Bonny Best'. 

Pillowy bliss

Tonight, I was in a rush to get home. Some people have children or dogs that they rush home to care for. Others have important emails to send, papers to write or chores to do. Me, I rushed home to tend to four cups of day-old homemade ricotta. 

At the time of making the ricotta, I thought it would be easy to consume the delicious treat within the three day time frame advised by the recipe. This has turned out not to be the case. This is surely not a problem for those who practice menu planning, which is something I am always saying I should do. But the reality for me is that experimenting in the kitchen usually comes from a visceral, often impulsive, place. I feel pulled to made a specific item, but not necessarily to place it in the broader context of a menu. This spontaneity is fun for a moment. But, what starts as a leisurely and enjoyable pursuit quickly becomes a time bomb in the fridge. What was once a treasure to be savored, is suddenly a left over with a short shelf life, demanding attention.

So, in an attempt to address my ricotta onus, we made ricotta gnocchi. But first I had to run down the street to my friend’s house to gather eggs from her chickens for the recipe. In return, I left her a pound of fresh ricotta, with stern instructions to consume it right away, essentially passing along the onus. Some friend. Eggs in hand, I headed home to make the dough. 

As commanded by the Cooks Illustrated recipe, I let the ricotta drain until it was quite dry, toasted bread crumbs until they were a perfect golden brown, mixed up the dough, rolled it out with a delicate hand, cut perfect gnocchi pillows from it, and plopped them into a pot of simmering water. One by one, they gently floated to the water’s surface. After a couple of minutes simmering on the surface,  Tom removed them to a pan of warm pesto sauce he’d made from last year’s frozen pesto. Along with the gnocchi, we ate fresh asparagus and radishes from the garden. 

We just finished eating it about 45 minutes ago. Late, to be sure. But who cares? We are just grateful to have lives that allow us the luxury of being rushed by ricotta. 

Some things old and lost

You can only keep a farm girl inside, working on a computer, for so long. In fact, I’d argue, that you really shouldn’t keep any person inside doing such a thing for too long. My ability to remain engaged in an activity that involves little more than moving my fingers across a keyboard and eyes across a screen, is thankfully, quite limited. Eventually, I go mad. 

This week, when my madness surfaced, it did so in the form of four cups of homemade ricotta cheese, four loaves of homemade bread, three batches of homemade scones, a few hours puttering in the garden, and time spent admiring a bunch of afghan squares my great grandmother had knit a long time ago, but that never made it into a quilt. 

It perplexes me to no end that so many tangible, useful and beautiful activities are no longer a part of our common experience. We have so willingly given our time and attention over to cold, inhuman objects and made-up activities that give us little benefit in return.  And so, at my breaking point this weekend, I vowed to not lose sight of what feels real. The type of things people might have once done because they had to in order to survive. The type of things my cat and plants still do: get some sun, eat food, drink water, and play. 

I’m going to get these things back.

May Day harvest

Yesterday we ate our first meal from the garden. Placing a big bowl of radishes, young mustard, kale, arugula, turnip and radish greens, and raab sprouts (from that kitchen window planter box) at the table was like making room at the table for an old friend who’d been gone for too long. I couldn’t wait to dig in, but also found myself apprehensive. Would everything taste the way I’d remembered? Would the greens be different this year than last? Would I fall in love all over again with these vegetables, or decide it was all a waste of time?

With our salad we ate a substantial heap of pasta topped with pesto that I’d frozen in ice cube trays and popped into freezer bags last summer. And although I’m grateful to be able to enjoy pesto all winter and spring, fresh pesto is now in sight and I couldn’t be happier. 

Spring meals are complex experiences. First, they are full of anticipation for the flavors that have been absent during winter’s long reign. Then, with the first bite of radish, anticipation gives way to satisfying relief. Spring also presents a merging of flavors, young greens mingling with preserved foods that hark back to last summer’s warmer, drier days. Mostly though, spring reminds us to trust this natural system. Each plump pea pod reminds us that tomatoes will also soon fruit, that beans will overcome the harassment of slugs and grow tall, and that despite any doubt we might have, renewal is inevitable. The cycle persists.

Raab carpet

Earlier this week, the potting soil in the planter box outside our kitchen window began to bulge, relentlessly expanding upward in uneven swells, until one day, it erupted with the broccoli raab seeds I’d planted last Saturday. 

I’d seeded the planter thickly, to the point of ridiculousness. I wasn’t a novice gardener being overly cautious. I wasn’t sloppy with my hand. I wasn’t in a rush. Furthermore, I understand the concept of thinning. And, I understand that one is not to waste seed. But, when I planted this box, I didn’t have food production in mind. This planting was about artistic expression and about testing the laws of nature. I wanted to see if I could grow raab like one might grow grass. And if I could, what would it look like? I wanted to sip tea in the morning while gazing out our kitchen window (which has a terrible view) at a lush carpet of rich green raab. I imagined myself putting down my tea just long enough to take a couple of careful snips of the raab-shag, tossing the tender shoots onto a plate of warm breakfast potatoes. 

When I did this, I understood (theoretically) that there are laws governing natural systems. Who questions nature’s requirements of at least six hours of sunlight, good soil and adequate room for roots to grow? Last week, I did. Next week, I’ll very likely be posting a picture of a mass of pale, undernourished, dying raab—and those of you who are especially sympathetic to all living creatures, will curse me—but, for now, I’m enjoying my experiment, like any good third-grader would. 

All rise

Everyone is up now. A combination of rain, sun and warmth has brought all the seeds to the surface: Sugar snap peas, carrots, turnips, beets, arugula, radish and mustard. This week, I also planted 'tristar' everbearding strawberries and mizuna starts. Here at home, I planted chervil seeds which are now up, and yesterday, broccoli raab seeds (saved from last year’s plants), and red leaf lettuce variety 'rouge' (seeds from a friend which are several years old by now. We’ll see if they sprout). 

Today promises to be dry, sunny and in the mid 70s. And though it won’t be raining today, and  I’ve yet to see any slug damage (it could be all the filbert shells I paved the paths with—slugs don’t like sharp barriers.), I sprinkled Sluggo around all the starts and seedlings for good measure. Yesterday, in a gardening class taught at the garden by a fellow gardener, I learned that Sluggo takes a couple of weeks to take effect, so this should help when the rain starts up again.

The white currants and blueberries are flowering and from the looks of the number of currant flowers, we’ll be eating plenty of berries this summer, unless the birds get them first. The blueberries are making a few flowers, but I’m not counting on more than a handful to top a bowl of oats. 

Today, Tom is helping me attach a planter box to the railing of our back porch, which I’ll sew with cilantro for our much loved chip and guacamole dinners, which are just around the corner.

Sprouts in six days

Sunday night I dreamt that my seeds had sprouted. Monday I headed to the garden to find out, and there they were, forming tiny squiggly green lines across the deep brown beds. I can’t identify everything that is up because I, naturally, failed to label the rows. But I have recognized a few by their cotyledons and general placement. This might be really annoying to some gardeners, but I’m not very scientific about the process, and I know that as they mature, they will eventually reveal their identities to me. There is so little mystery left in life. This is one way to have some for a little while.

Here is what I think has surfaced:

Radish

Turnip

Beet

Mustard

Spring’s first drought

Drought isn’t the first word that comes to mind when I think of Portland in April, which is why it seemed perfectly acceptable to plant seeds last week. It was a regular plan. Plant seeds and then watch as the rain continues. One’s main concerns are that the seeds will wash away and pop up some place that was never intended and/or that they will be mowed down by slugs overnight. Not for a moment did it occur to me that a drought might be near. And if it had occurred to me, I wouldn’t have thought to check and see if the water had been turned on at the garden. Well, the drought came and the water doesn’t get turned on until April 15th. All of this is to say that on Sunday Tom and I found ourselves hauling five gallon buckets of water to the garden in an attempt to keep everything alive. 

I don’t want this to sound like I am ungrateful for the uncharacteristically dry and warm days. I’m not. In fact, it has been fun to be suddenly dropped into summertime life. Or maybe it is more accurate to say that I feel as if summertime life has dropped itself onto me. Colonel Summers park feels like I imagine New York City might have in the late 1970s. Or at least it looks like I imagine it would have. The place is awash with hipsters who have taken up sports. From American Apparel striped knee highs on the basketball court to dirty jeans, headbands and big beards in the baseball diamond (with a keg on second base), the park is one big party.

 

But, just over the fence, my little seeds are using all the energy they can muster to poke through a thick, hard ceiling of compost which has become dry and crusty in all this sun. No party for the seeds and little starts. No keg on second base. It is up to me to see them through this, one bucket of water (from home), at a time.

Here is what Tom and I planted this weekend:

Starts from the Urban Farm Store on 20th and Morrison:

Red Orach

Arugula

English Thyme

Hood Strawberries

*If you don’t know this place, check it out soon, before it is so packed that you have to elbow your way to the vegetables, herbs, small fruit trees, tea bushes, olives—and chicks! 

Starts from Wildcat Mountain Farm from People’s Coop: 

Red Kale

*People’s is a great place to pick up starts from Wildcat Mountain Farm, a local grower. Food Front also sells them. Later in the season, look to Wildcat for a good selection of tomatoes that are well suited to our climate.

Remembering how to live

A handful of goth teenagers spent the better part of the afternoon slowing drinking down pitchers of juice and alcohol concoctions while perched in a tree next to my garden. Annoyed with the breach of peace and beauty, I resigned myself to the fact that this was going to be part of the community in community gardening at Col. Summers Park. Part of the deal. At first I found their tedious, loud, and in every way, awkward announcements and flirtations with each other almost unbearable. But then I found myself obsessed with them. An hour later, their ambient chatter had taken me down memory lane, back to junior high and high school. Not that I spent high school drunk in an elm tree. It was something more universal than that. I remembered when my best friend, Jody, and I got ourselves kicked out of Mr. Gorchel’s chemistry class so that we could sit in the bleachers and watch football practice in the beautiful fall light. I remembered hanging out at the laundromat in downtown Gaston at 1AM with Erin Coffee. Doing nothing. Just kicking our heels against the driers. We were waiting and being at the same time. In that empty laundromat, we had our lives ahead of us. We had time to kill. Every moment was charged with anticipation of the next and at the same time, every moment was complete.

 

I’d stopped gardening. Who knows how much time had passed. I realized I’d been sitting on the edge of one of my raised beds, in the sun, just sipping tea and remembering. I decided to plant two rows of carrot seeds, and call it a day. Most of the goth kids took off about the same time. But one was pretty bad off and when I left he was tossing and turning in the muddy field, clenching his pitcher of juice, saying something about wanting a song for his birthday. His friend, a very large girl dressed in black with magenta hair, sat next to him as he rocked back and forth, and told him he’d be okay.

From sprouts to loaves

Tonight I took a pan bread making class at Grand Central. Because of a small error made by the teacher of the class, we ended up with mounds and mounds of extra dough. I mean mounds. A mound which filled an industrial size mixing bowl. Mounds that had to be transported not by hand, but via rolling carts. 

Tonight, we were showered not only with dough, but also with dinner. By the end of the evening I’d enjoyed two cups of wine (served in plastic juice cups), a heap of gooey baked mac and cheese (made from what Piper referred to as cheese butts—the ends of the blocks of cheese from the slicer) which filled 1/2 my dinner plate, a beautiful salad of spring's newest, crisp greens, a cup of white bean and tomato soup, a slice of coconut cake with fluffy white frosting, and a slice of pineapple upside down cake. I brought home four loaves of bread and enough dough to make four more. It was a night of learning, of generosity and of excess. And it also marked the completion of a cycle.

Just about one year ago, I took a trip to Walla Walla, Washington with the owners of Grand Central to visit some of the farmers who make up the Shepherds Grain Collective. GC was looking to find a way to source 100% of their flour from the cooperative. Tonight, Mel told me that about two weeks ago they made the switch, and that the flour we worked with tonight likely came from the grain which was only just sprouting up under our feet as we walked the Walla Walla wheat fields last spring. 

As my friend and I left class, the cab of my truck filled with the scent of freshly baked bread. Just imagine it. A tiny cab and eight loaves of bread. I nearly drove us off the road and onto the sidewalk, my head drunk on the sweet, yeasty perfume. Things feel right in the world.

Spring’s other wet side

It has been three days since I planted the season’s first seeds. Serving as my little helper, the rain has faithfully kept the beds evenly moist as recommended on the backside of the seed packets. 

I’m feeling evenly moist too, though perhaps a little more wet on my feet. I made the hopeful but ultimately unfortunate decision to wear my favorite boots today. The ones so favored that their soles have holes throughout. Walking in them from the truck to the office proved slightly better than doing so barefoot, but not much. Feeling like I had nothing to lose (I’d been sitting at work with puddles for feet for nine hours after all) I came home, pulled on my muddy rain boots and headed to the garden to see if the radish sprouts had poked up yet. No luck. Though it looks like birds have been poking around the plot. They left holes, where they were likely foraging for my newly planted seeds, and some poop. 

One of the best things about gardening in the rain is coming home and getting even wetter—in a hot bath. Baths should be followed up with time in a warm bed with wool blankets to keep your heat in. It is from here that you can best watch the rain and then, drift off, thinking about those tiny seeds nestled in the mud, getting plump and ready to shoot up.  Maybe tomorrow.

Seeds are buried

On Sunday morning the sun poked out here and there between puffy clouds, so I made the most of it and was at the garden at 7:30am with a few seed packs and a thermos of tea. Lately, the sun is making very brief appearances, and so it is best to move without haste. Here is what I planted: 

• Sparkler Radish (A block of it in a vacant spot in the NW corner of the garlic bed.)
  
• Sugar Snap Peas (To climb the pvc-pipe hoops over the square raised beds.)
  
• Purple Top White Globe Turnips (Under the snap peas.)
  
• Beets (From the community seed supply in the shed—a donation from Ed Hume himself. Planted in the bed next to the blueberries and white currants.)
  
• Mustard Greens (Again, from Ed. Planted next to the beets.)
  
• Arugula (Seed I saved from last year. Planted under the snap peas.)
  

I also weeded the garlic bed and pounded stakes into the ground to secure the raised beds (Instead of nails or screws. The lazy way.). I poached subtly fragrant apple blossoms, bi-colored daffodils, and three true-pink camellias. It was a great start to the day. Later, it hailed. 

The first steps of the season

Today I officially started cultivating my community garden plot at Colonel Summers Park. Earlier this week, when it was dry and somewhat sunny and warm, Sarah and I made plans to go to Mt. Scott Fuel for a load of compost to split between our plots. Today, we woke to a perfectly soggy Portland morning. The kind of morning that makes you question most of the day’s commitments and which often results in a day devoted to endless pots of tea and high carbohydrate snacks. Somehow, Sarah and I coaxed ourselves into the adventure. We fetched the Zip truck Sarah had reserved, picked up the compost and headed to the garden, where we were immediately covered from head to toe in muddy water and chunks of compost. The wheelbarrows in the community tool shed were a nice gesture, but in practice were as effective as moving a truck load of compost with a small bucket. In the pouring rain we moved load after load in these wheelbarrows and with each trip I considered the possible consequences of breaking a community garden wheelbarrow. Do they kick you out? We’d gotten a 1/2 yard of the three-way compost blend for $17, so we each spent a mere $8.50 to dress our beds with about three inches of nutrient rich food for our coming seedlings.

It is incredibly satisfying to see the garden in this bare-bones, tidy state. The lines of the raised beds are clear, walking paths are visible, the soil is dark, rich and waiting. Right now it is just a bunch of potential. I know that the coming season will be complete with harvests, disappointments, surprises and specific events. In just a few months this clean slate will be a beautiful mess of lush green growth in all directions. A mess that has an order to it that you can’t quite pin down. An order which prevails even within the most chaotic growth. An order which exists because of the smart infrastructure you’ve put in place at the get go, and because that is what nature does.

I came home muddy and chilled, but happier than in months, my spirit and body restored and excited about the process I am beginning.

A brief explanation

MFK Fisher, in How To Cook A Wolf, suggests that it is perfectly acceptable to eat a pile of toast for breakfast. This notion has stuck with me since I first read it. Food is one of the focal points of my life. Growing it, putting it up, eating it, studying it, talking about it, painting it. Sometimes my obsession gets tedious. When I find myself getting worked up about what the perfectly local, nutritionally appropriate, aesthetically pleasing meal might be, I remember MFK’s permission to eat a pile of toast.

Over the years, in my mind, the pile has become exactly 13 pieces of toast. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it is because I have a terrible memory, and I sometimes make things up to compensate. Perhaps I like imagining MFK Fisher at the table with exactly 13 pieces of toast, slathering them one by one with a generous layer of jam over a thick slab of butter.

This blog will serve as my garden and pantry journal for the coming year. I’ll record what I’ve grown, put up and eaten. It will help me next year when I can’t remember when I planted peas, what the weather was like in March or if I overdid it with zucchini again. And, hopefully it will help me remember that while food does matter, a lot, sometimes it is okay to just eat toast, if that is all you’ve got, all you can muster the energy for, or is simply just what pleases you.