A poem....

During the Christmas break, I was catching up on some magazine reading to reduce some piles around here.  Today, I read a really beautiful interview with Kim Rosen about the role of poetry in our lives called "Written on the Bones" by Alison Luterman.  The title comes from a Tibetan saying for how our songs, stories, and poetry are passed down without being written down - like how a musician might know how to play a song he's heard without ever having read the sheet music.  The interview was in The Sun, which is a magazine that has kindly bought a few photos from me over the years.

I'm not a big fan of poetry per se, but after reading this interview, I think maybe in the New Year I will try to read a poem each.... wait for it... week.  Let's not get carried away with anything daily!  Now, if only I hadn't given away all those English Major books just this year!

Anyway, at the end of the article was this poem.  It spoke to me about my garden failures and successes, the lovely cast of international friends I have in my life and most of all about letting go of perfection.  I find that especially when it comes to anything ranging from cooking to photo making to writing, I am often paralyzed for fear it will be amateurish or foolish.  I surround myself with so many talented friends and colleagues in those areas, I fear I simply won't be good enough.  And I'll be a disappointment to them and to my own dreams.

So, maybe along with some poetry reading, I'll let go and just let my words and photos stretch into sentences and stories, no matter how weedy...  Oh, and I'll plant that quinoa and not be too disappointed if it doesn't flower and bloom as beautifully as it does in my mind or on the package.  

WITHOUT TENDING

by Christine Poreba

Just down the road a row of basil stands tight

in plastic bags, a line of buoys in a frigid sea,

while our yard lies open in the bitter cold.

I confess I didn't know which plants

to cover, so I left them all to freeze.

And back in the summer I never

thinned the lettuce or tried to stop 

the birds from carrying off

our spinach, corn, and sunflowers.

Even my students, adults from various

continents, speak an English I don't

always correct:

"poultry" for poetry

"bookkeeper" instead of librarian,

"cole" without the "slaw" to mean cabbage.

Yet we plow along, the odd bunch of us,

in rows like my garden, from whose dry

soil springs a surprising pepper crop,

a generous mass of rosemary.  And

my students' words, small as seeds, stretch somehow

into sentences:  weedy, bright.

My Garden Is Like A Duck

Here in "Sunny California", we've had nothing but gray skies.  For weeks.  It's made getting around hard, getting things done hard, meeting emotional challenges hard, and for me it means a lot of leaky windows and ceiling....  It didn't really feel too much like "The Holidays". 

But, finally, yesterday the sun came out.  So even though I'm fighting a bad cold, I gathered up my best Laura Ingalls "the crops can't wait" attitude and abandoned the ark to run over to the garden.   On the short walk over, with a few seeds in hand and some fingers crossed that the torrential rain hadn't drowned what little I had growing,  it seemed as if I was seeing the world for the first time.  Sun, light!  What a concept.  Everything seemed brighter and shinier after so much rain.

Until I got to the garden.  The garden, on the other hand,  looked barren and empty and just generally gray.  The raised beds were gray, the straw was gray, the skies by the time I reached the garden had even turned gray again....

But, like most things having to do with my garden, there was a lesson in it for me.  This time, one of appearances.  Because when I pushed away the wet and wasted straw, underneath was my own version of black gold and an entire eco system that seemed quite happy going about its busy work.  While the top was resting, the underneath was busy at work making a new life.  Or like the old duck metaphor;  no movement on top, but paddling like hell underneath.  Despite all the gray, that garden is anything but dead.  "It's Aliiiive, It's Aliiiiiiive" (imagine the mad scientist voice from some movie there....).

And I'm thanking the "green manure" for this Christmas Miracle.  This is my first season amending the soil using only the green manure method.  Whoa.  When I turned over that straw, I felt a bit of a marauding invader that had interrupted what was clearly a lively little community at work under it.   Best, of all, in turning over that first pitchfork full of dark, wet, lovely soil I unearthed more earthworms than I'd ever seen.  Can I get an AMEN?!!??  If there is a correlation between number of worms and healthy dirt, I'm going to be eating like Henry the VIII at a turkey farm!

Along with the worms, the monarchs have been busy at work despite the rain.  I found chrysalis' everywhere; hanging on eye hooks, off wrought iron planter stands, plants - you name it.  And proof positive that they are on track for their journey home I found this little monarch caterpillar working his way towards some milkweed.  I apologize all these were shot with my iphone...wasn't expecting so much excitement and didn't bring my big girl camera:

Once I saw that beautiful, healthy dirt, I found my inner Mary Ingalls, too, and set about actually doing some gardening.  

Fava Beans and Garlic:  I took them both out of their prisons and mulched between rows.  I need to order another packet of fava seeds to fill in the row and a half that did not sprout.

Carrots:  planted Botanical Interests' "Carnival Blend".

Beets:  planted Territorial Seed's "Touchstone Gold" and Botanical Interests' "Gourmet Blend".  First I put them between wax paper and broke the hard shells with a rolling pin.  I had lunch with a famous seed saver two weeks ago and this was his advice.  But, more on that another day.

Flowers:  planted some bulbs so that come spring I can attract some bees. 

Peas:  Made like a druid (see photo below) and inoculated and planted Territorial Seed's "Canoe" Shelling Peas around my tall wrought iron structure. 

I built more booby traps to keep the cats and racoons out and hoped the incoming rain wouldn't wash my tiny little seeds away.  

Then, as the rain began to drizzle down again, I headed home....  So, it's been a strange "holiday season", which for me also means I turned another year older.  I was alone, but I wasn't...  There were big highs and big lows.  And there was a LOT of rain.

But, maybe, like "the dark night of the soul", you can't see the light if there hasn't been some dark.    You can't swim smoothly unless you paddle.  You can't feel the joy if there wasn't some sorrow.  You can't build a new life until you've rested a bit from the old one.  

You can't grow an eco system below if there isn't some gray on the surface....

A New Toy

I treated myself to a little birthday present (on sale, plus coupons!).  I haven't decided if the "bloggie" or "the flip" is for me - this is my first go at the Sony "Bloggie" (such a stupid name!!).  I have two weeks to return it.  I also haven't figured out how to get the video into my imovie in order to edit.  But, I thought this could potentially be a nice addition to the garden blogging, keeping in touch with my nieces and nephew, and forcing people to see how cute my cat Ozzie is...

For the first trial entry, I went in between downpours to see if the garden was holding up against the torrential rains.  As witnessed here, the fava and the onions seem to be doing just fine, thank you very much.  Notice how I have to keep my seeds in prison until they grow big enough to keep the birds, racoons, and cats from eating and destroying them....  Once the rain lets up, I'll take the bars away and just mulch to keep the cats out.

I think the video has potential, although I'm not crazy about the quality of this today...  I may have to play with the settings (one thing the flip doesn't have, but maybe that's for the best).  Eventually, I'd love to interview my fellow gardeners and have them share their trials and tribulations, as well as their successes.  Maybe each of them would be willing to share their own special tips and secrets to a successful harvest.

Now if it would stop raining so I could go plant all the rest of it...

Book Review: My Empire of Dirt by Manny Howard

Somewhere in or around 2007 I read an article in New York Magazine about a guy investigating the "Locavore" movement (only eating food grown within a few miles of your home) and the magazine challenged him to write about only eating food grown within a few feet of his home.  In other words, his backyard in Brooklyn.  I had lived in Brooklyn in the late 80s/early 90s and by 2007, living in Los Angeles, I was feeling the pull of my upbringing and dying for my own piece of dirt (I was still a year and a half away from getting my little 12x5 plot in Long Beach).  I recall liking the article.  I'd never forgotten it, actually.

When I was shopping around for something to use my two year old Amazon gift card on a few months ago, I stumbled on this title which stopped me in my tracks.  It could have been about backhoes and I might have been tempted to read it.  Those that know me well know that, along with my love of my garden, my cats and U2, I love Nine Inch Nails.  In the early "aughts", I spent a summer on the road following the band with a bunch of people I'd met on the internet.  It was one of the nuttiest things I've ever done and one of the most fun.  Every night, Trent Reznor closed the show out with a song called "Hurt"; a gut wrenching tale of failure and loneliness that Johnny Cash would go on to cover.   One of the lines is, "you can have it all, my empire of dirt'.  So, yeah, I hit "buy" on Manny Howard's book.  How bad could a book be that combined gardening and NIN lyrics???  

Um, BAD.

This book is brutal.  He's generally an unlikeable lout.  Granted, he seems like a good Dad, I guess.   He lets his kids bargain for the life of the ducks he'd planned to use for food and cooking fat.  But, he paints his wife as a shrew.  It's understandable that maybe his obsession becomes more about how to change the clay in his NY Borough backyard to mineral rich dirt, but once the "building of the farm" is done, he rarely seems to engage in the miracle of what is happening around him. 

His challenge is to eat for a month just from the farm.  And somewhere in there he decides that absolutely means animals for protein.  The problem is that he's woefully unprepared for anything that comes with that be it shelter, food, or upkeep.  He's always reading the "how to" book AFTER he's gotten the animals.  And what that results in is some pretty distasteful, dare I say, cruelty.  It isn't until the chickens he plans on killing start laying eggs that it occurs to him that maybe subsisting on a month of eggs to add protein to his diet might have been sufficient and he mail orders laying chickens.  As with the ducks, rabbits, and eating chickens, he doesn't have the proper laying set up or housing set up for them until he's had them awhile.  To add insult to injury, that move on the board (or farm as it may be) doesn't seem to stop the mishandling of the rest of his food animals.  But, every time an animal dies from said mishandling, he chalks it up to tough life on a farm and the book spirals down further into ugliness.

Look, I grew up a country girl, where the first day of any hunting season be it fishing, pheasant, or deer was an unofficial school holiday - farmer's kids had allowable absences.  And while I honestly understand and respect my friends who choose not to eat animal flesh, I am not a vegetarian (although I do my very best to eat humanely raised meat and eggs).  I never had the interest or desire to be the one shooting,  but I've walked the fields with my father quail hunting.  I learned how to clean and dress game birds at the feet of my grandfather and great uncle.  There is a photo somewhere of a 3 year old Squidly smiling happily over a pile of colorfully plumed pheasants.  Every winter,  I knew one day I would come home from school to find a dead deer hanging upside down bleeding out in the garage.  Once, the entire house shook as we were getting ready for school which, we discovered as we all ran out of our rooms, was caused by my Dad standing in the kitchen door in his underwear shooting a turkey that had been walking a few feet from our pool.  But, all the dying came with a code of honor.  You never shot anything you weren't going to eat and as the meat was being cleaned and then cooked and then eaten, it was done with thankfulness and ritual.  I spent plenty of time on the farms of my friends and I know these can be brutal places for both man and animal, but this book turned my stomach more than once.

Beyond the issues I have with him and his approach to "farming",  it's not a well written book.  I'm not sure if he needed to flesh out what really should have remained an interesting and well written article, but there are tangents that we are forced to explore that are utterly, utterly either straight up boring or require great strain to see the connection.... 

Probably the worst of the worst of all the death, destruction and marital ugliness (TMI), is that at the end of this wretched experiment he has no opinion.  He hasn't decided that there is any purpose or lack thereof to the locavore movement, the organic movement, or any other of the issues associated with what he just did beyond that he likes that he no longer has to buy eggs, and oh, yeah, they sort of taste better.  I mean COME ON, you built a farm, ran a farm, ate from the farm, put your marriage in second place to the farm, almost lost a finger to the farm and you don't come down on any side of the issues???!!!!   

I love Brooklyn, I love the idea of growing ones own food no matter where you live, and I love the lyrics to the Nine Inch Nails song, but I really did NOT like this book....  Save yourself the money, time and feeling sick to your stomach and just read the New York Magazine article by clicking here.