Hilary MacGregor and Alice Waters and some rose colored glasses...

My funny, smart, beautiful friend Hilary MacGregor wrote this Los Angeles Magazine article about the experience of helping to start Alice Water's "Edible School-Yard" program into her sons' school.   It wasn't easy to make it work (and still isn't), but the journey there is a great yarn.

http://www.lamag.com/article.aspx?id=24614

Enjoy.

Springtime for me....

 Not this sunflower

Today I wrestled to the ground a 15 foot sunflower with probably about 20 flowers on it.  Not this one.  It was the last of one of four or five volunteers that grew over the winter and, because it wasn't an heirloom, surprised me with the abundance of blooms.  Its ancestor had only one.  But, it was leaning and the blooms were dying.  These volunteers had been - at one point - the only thing that seemed to flourish over the Fall and Winter.  I wasn't sure if they were mocking me about summers of love gone by or offering me hope for summers of love someday to come.

 Not these carrots

And I picked some carrots.  Not these.  A few straggles that managed to grow over the winter.  Random seeds that took root wherever they were washed to or dropped by birds to...  There were less than this bounty from last year, but in fact they are sweeter.  Much, much sweeter.  They weren't grown in rows like these, they took root where they decided to take root,  but rewarded me for their stubborness and defiance with the sweetest carrots I've grown yet.  

I'm sorry these photographs are from last year.  I haven't taken my camera much with me to the garden.  Through the Fall and Winter I had such mixed feelings about the garden and didn't feel like documenting anything.  And this Spring has been filled with travel (Boston, Arizona, and soon Portland) and company (if you haven't come, do) and events (I got a pretty medal today for riding 31 miles for the Miller Children's Hospital) and dinner parties (the 45 year old wine had turned for anyone following along) and photo shoots (look for some cool pictures of my friend Adriana in VegNews Magazine soon) and zombies (just plain long story).  So, lately I always seem to need to GO there rather than just BE there.  I'm always behind on watering or planting....  The Summer, I hope, will be just for me, the Garden, my camera, and my adrenals to simply chill. 

In the meantime, today I stood back and realized that maybe my failures of the Fall and Winter are giving way to some successes this Spring.  Stay tuned.....

Look at me, Ma. I'm on TV

Ovation TV has a new travel show.   I'm on it.  Well, mostly I'm digging holes in the background and making sure that people with actual gardening websites to promote, promoted:  (www.anarchyinthegarden.com)  But, I am one of the "citizen vigilantes" so mentioned below.  So tune in and see what the SoCal Guerilla Gardening Organization is all about.  It sure was a fun day and you can read my experiences here and read about the show below:

http://www.ovationtv.com/programs/851-scenic-route

Travel and design writer David Keeps hosts as he delves into America's nooks and crannies to find the oft-overlooked wonders that lie far away from our busy freeways and out on the open road. David Keeps meets with Kerry Clasby, a 'food forager', who's been sought after by California's most renowned chefs. Kerry knows which farms have the freshest, most beautiful produce, and ensures their delivery to California's hottest eateries. Then, we follow citizen vigilantes who garden at night with the simple purpose of beautifying the city with landscape art.

Monday, April 12, 2010

10:00PM

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

02:00AM

Thursday, April 15, 2010

08:00PM

Friday, April 16, 2010

12:00AM

Sunday, April 18, 2010

01:00AM

05:00PM

09:00PM

Born Free.... Or at least set free pretty soon thereafter.

Milkweed in the 1st and Elm Garden

Resilience is a funny thing....  You learn that lesson in gardening and it shows up in the strangest of places.  Sometimes I feel that much of my adult life has been lived in survival mode - that I have had to be (exhaustively so...) resilient.  And, I don't really think of it as a pretty thing.  It feels from the inside just a brutal, dark, and lonely thing.  

Of course, most of your garden is set up for survival mode.  Even the way seeds are designed enables them to grow in the harshest of conditions.  But, in our garden it isn't just the plants that have a singular goal and the potential to have it tough....  We are a "Monarch Way-Station".  What that means is that we are officially a garden which contains what is needed for Monarch butterflies to set down, eat, and reproduce.  The biggest element of that is milkweed, which, as I understand it, is the ONLY thing Monarch butterflies eat.  Boring, but at least pretty!  So, at certain times a year, we gardeners are delighted to see a gorgeous little chysalis hanging from one of our plants or attached randomly to some garden decoration.  We always hope that means eventually we'll encounter a butterfly crawling across the garden stretching its bent wings before it can fly.  And one always hopes they make it to that place before the cats find them - the Monarch's version of survival mode.  Occasionally, however, we harvest the plant first and then see the chrysalis.  So, with fingers crossed, we hang the chrysalis in a safe place and hope...

   

It can be brutal business for these butterflies:  there are cats and heat and the aforementioned gardeners.  Including me. 

Last week I cut some celery from the garden and brought it home for lunch.  It wasn't until later that I realized on the underside of one of the huge celery leaves, there was a beautiful green chrysalis.  Like all of them, it had what appeared to be a gold thread woven through it - like some kind of delicate ancient talisman.  I felt terrible.  I placed it on the windowsill and committed to taking it to the garden the next day.  But, I've been sick the past few weeks and day after day I would forget to bring it with me or not have the energy to visit the garden.  After a week, I gave it up for dead and thought I'd spend some time just photographing it with the macro lense.  Maybe its little Monarch life would have been sacrificed, at least, for some art piece...

 

On Thursday, the most amazing thing happened.  My business associate was here for what was the first meeting of a new venture for me.  It was a little nerve wracking and a little exciting.  As we prepared for the meeting, I suddenly heard her exclaim, "You've got a butterfly on your floor!"  My little chrysalis had hatched!  I mean, right there on my windowsill.  She must have been in our world for a little bit of time because she had already pumped enough blood to her wings that they were flat and free of wrinkles.  I knew she wouldn't be ready to just fly out of our seventh floor window and I wasn't sure, but I thought she was probably hungry and needed some milkweed!  We looked at the clock and decided to make a run for it to the garden.  Held gently in a paper towel, we walk-ran with the Monarch hoping we could give her a chance at survival.  When we got to the garden, we placed her directly on some milkweed and wished her well in her life.  I hoped that her determination to survive would give her a life of delicious milkweed, sweet breezes, and her own chrysalis entombed offspring.  I hoped she was one of the ones that got to migrate and fly free.

A monarch from my garden in the past.  This one a male, notice the spot on his wings...

It made me think about where in my life my reward has happened for the survival mode I've been in... the people that have picked me up and placed me on my own version of milkweed...who fed me and nourished me with their love and companionship and made it just a little easier to face the challenges.  I thought of the cool breezes that have connected me to a higher power, the tasty food I've eaten and the beauty, health, and wealth (all kinds) which I am lucky enough to have around me.  I reflected on my own thought process about my life...  I don't know that I can change my fears around the lonely and challenging parts of my life.  I had worked hard over the past few years to be more accepting of where I am and to try to be satisfied with each day.  I had come to love a good portion of my life.  - the home portion.  That didn't mean my mind and soul didn't stray to what I had wished my life had been or could be, but I did love who I was with and where I was.  I found joy in it.   But, I admit that I have a tendency to let the survival mode get me down.  So, maybe I need to take a lesson from my butterfly friend...  Maybe I must savor the milkweed a little more intensely and be grateful that it is possible for a beautiful ending to the survival story.  That on the other side of it, you can be born free.

Organic Food is for Snobs

 

Yak Cheese and Yak Drink - Bhutan

Lately I've been reading a lot of articles and op-eds written by some folks who are actually and incredulously saying that organic vegetable and the slow food movement are the domain of the "politically correct" or rich snobs.  They mock Michelle Obama's organic garden as a political ploy. They call Chez Panisse owner, Alice Waters, a crackpot and accuse her of wasting money and time in the schools teaching children how to garden and call it "socialist" to make the children help prepare the fresh food they have grown and will eat family style with their peers for lunch.  

One man wrote, unbelievably, that the East Coast storms prove that the slow food movement, which for the non-initiated means eating only foods that are in season and locally grown as to get the most nutrition, flavor, and to avoid the calories/environmental impact of shipping strawberries from Chile in January, will starve a nation.  What? Our ancestors got along just fine as short as 50 years ago eating only what they could produce from their gardens or at least a local farmer's garden.  During the winter months, they ate what could grow in the cold temperatures and they spent some time in the summer and fall "putting up" what they'd need otherwise.  And 30 years ago after the invention of Spam and Jello, this same man was probably the one writing op-eds about how eating organic foods is for hippies.  So, first it was ridiculous and hippy-like and now it's only for rich snobs?  Help me, I'm confused.

Around this same time, I was going through negatives to scan for my photo website.  I noticed that even during my adventure trips, I take shots of food. And I marveled at the versions of farmer's markets I had photographed.  Only these aren't just one day a week events which also sell tamales and cut flowers.  This is how they eat.  This is how the average person in Bhutan or Tibet or Egypt shops and eats - locally grown food that is bought and prepared fresh. 

Market in Bhutan. Chiles and more chiles, the national food!

I've learned from growing just a little bit of my own food, that it makes you happy.  The doing makes you happy, the taste makes you happy, the satisfaction of knowing where you food was grown, how it was picked, and that it was prepared with nutrition intact simply makes you happy.  I mean look at this sweet girl from the market in Bhutan...

 

 Happy Bhutanese Market Girl

I know shopping at farmer's markets and preparing fresh food isn't always possible.  I know the world is busy and everything is more complicated than 50 years ago or maybe in Bhutan. I get it.  But, to mock the people who are striving to get EVERYONE  access to fresh, non-pesticide laden, reasonably priced food or to encourage the growing of our own seems, well, small. Small minded, small visioned, just small.  To not desire that inner city kids get to taste a freshly picked apple that could lead them to not ever want to settle for something that was picked four months earlier is just downright cruel.  SOME organic food IS expensive, but not all of it and not at every store.  You know which one I'm talking about (Yes, Whole Paycheck, I mean you).  And there are fixes for that, too, once you start working on a political and socio-economic scale.  

  

Various barks used for cooking - Bhutan  

So, while the gentleman who wrote the op-ed piece munches on his twinkies during the storm, I know that if the same storm hits out here, he need not worry about me:  I've been taking the fruits of the season:  citrus and pears and I have been canning.  If the big one hits (and my glass jars don't break), I can feast on blood orange marmalade and pear/ginger preserves.  I'll just need to find a spoon.

Definition

 

Seed

Heart

Love

seed: (n) - such parts collectively

heart: (n) -  the center of the total personality, especially. with reference to intuition, feeling, or emotion and the vital or essential part; core

love: (n) - a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person

Jamie Oliver's TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food | Video on TED.com

Jamie Oliver's TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food | Video on TED.com

Johnny Appleseed Doesn't Live Here Anymore

 

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about fruit trees.  The untangling of belongings in the loft has left some gaping holes around the place.  I began to think how wonderful to take advantage of so much sunlight and what it might be like to have a fruit tree to fill out the odd little corner in front of one of the 12 foot windows.  I imagined sweet smelling blossoms and pungent zest for cooking.  I'm not quite sure how this idea came into my head, but there it stuck.  I googled miniature fruit trees and the best fruit trees to grow in pots.  I began to dream of marmalade and fruit salads....   

 

We aren't allowed to plant trees in our tiny plots at the garden, but there are plenty of them in the common areas and come Spring and Summer there is an abundance of fruit to share: peaches, apples, pomegranates, plums etc  But, still, something about waking up to the smell of, say, orange blossoms filling the loft moved me.  Just about then, Fern over at Life on the Balcony posted about fruit trees.  It was a really instructive post about how, really, you can't grow fruit trees from seed.  It's complicated and, well, you should be reading Fern's blog anyway, so head over there and learn.  Like a good gardening student, I asked her about container fruit trees.  And she wrote back the most obvious of obvious answers:  you can't grow a fruit tree indoors and still get fruit.  You need pollination to get fruit.  You need bees to get fruit. 

In other words:  You can't bear fruit alone.   

And by fruit I mean just about anything you want to accomplish.  Ideas, support, incentives, praise, constructive criticism - these are all things that go into pollinating our own versions of fruit.  We require to be sparked and supported by those around us.  They pollinate us.  Even the most solitary of artists must eventually have an audience.  And if I'd thought for just one second about this instead of having sugar plums dancing in my head, I would have realized that. 

You can't bear fruit in a vacuum.   

You can't bear fruit without pollination.  (Too much, too painful to consider)

You can't bear fruit without other fruit trees.  

So... with the facts in front of me,  I must consider that isolating myself with my little unpollinated tree would not be, well, fruitful for me - as safe as it might feel in the wake of the recent storm.

Long Beach Is My Garden

This morning, in order to follow through on "believing the impossible" of yesterday's post and to earn the silver medallion my friends Anne and Kirk gave me as a result of said post, I got up early and rode my bike along the LA River to a SoCal Guerrilla Gardening spot under the Anaheim Bridge.  Scott Bunnell who IS SoCal Guerrilla Gardening arranges legal and illegal plantings ala Raves in abandoned bits of dirt all over Long Beach.   So, along with 15 or so folks and a film crew (figures he would be getting filmed for a travel show this particular day), we took his lovingly propagated natives and turned this into that:

As one of the volunteers, George, said:  "I live in an apartment and don't have a garden, so why not do this.  Then Long Beach is my garden".  I just loved that!  The volunteers were old and young, gardeners and not, apartment dwellers and house dwellers and veterans to SoCal Guerrilla along with total newbies like me.

I think one of the unexpected gifts of my garden has been the circle of fellowship around gardening and greening.  I've got a web of cyber-blog people I rely on for advice and encouragement and some have even become friends in the flesh like Adriana of Anarchy In The Garden.  I did what I do best and had pimped her to the film crew before she even got there... She gives good interview. 

Today's guerrilla planting was another step in my adventures in gardening.  It reaffirmed for me that I can and will find community because of my garden.  Scott gave aloe vera to anyone who wanted some.  And as I set out for the bicycle path again, I passed this scooter and smiled at the adventure this particular plant was about to go on:

What if a peach tree could grow bananas?

Today I checked on the garden after a week straight of rain, wind, and flooding.  It was like falling down the Rabbit Hole.   Everything was larger, stranger, upside down.  But, it felt sort of good.   Today, maybe, I should dream the impossible.

Rain, Rain Go Away....

The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain...  

                                   Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It's been pouring rain for days in Long Beach.  There has been flooding, destruction, a tornado and, most strangely of all, surfing on our shores.  You can't actually surf in the still waters of Long Beach, so that should tell you something.

The rain has fit my mood.  It started raining when my Squeeze moved out and it hasn't stopped since.  At least I think its rain on the windows and not just the view from my own eyes.  

At first I was grateful for it.   My garden had been neglected by me lately and I couldn't really remember the last time I'd watered it.  I've been busy rearranging a life, but still...  Maybe I'd neglected it in part because of frustration that nothing seemed to be growing except three broad bean plants, some lettuce varieties, and a few volunteer sunflowers or maybe because I'm just not sure what will become of me, the garden, and Long Beach.  Maybe I was pulling away from it so it won't hurt so much.

Nonetheless, as this wave of relentless rain and wind continued to batter us, I began to worry about what I did have growing there...  Would it hold up against the storm?  Would I lose the small stronghold I had in the garden?  Would it drown and destroy whatever seeds remained dormant underground?

During a brief moment of strange and hopeful sunlight, I ran over to the garden to see what the damage was....  Sure enough, my broad beans were a tangled mess on the ground and my sunflowers were flattened over.   I related.  It's much how I'm feeling in this storm of my own.

I cut some lettuce, pulled the broad beans tall against the string guides quietly wishing them to stay, and then I thanked the sunflowers for their service - truthfully, they have no business growing this time of year.     

And now I'm left wondering, as the news tells me that this storm will only get stronger and fiercer:  Will the garden be able to pick itself up again?  Will my plants be strong enough to ever stand tall again?  Or will this particular storm have simply been too much for me and the garden to weather? 

Why Garden?

I am wondering tonight as cats and man sleep about the WHY?

I've been reading various books on gardening lately.  They range from literary memoir to "how to" non-fiction.  Some of the writers write about their gardens as a way to create a healthy connection to food and the world for their children, some tell of making a connection to their ancestors with memories of the garden of a beloved grandmother or father.  Some are political:  growing your own food is some small attack on the big food growing corporations.  Some are environmental:  by committing to slow food, you can cut down the environmental impact of the petroleum it takes to get out of season food to your table.  I know people who garden out of financial necessity and people who garden for the meditative nature of it.

I'm not sure why I started gardening.  I had to write a letter to get that 5x12 piece of dirt I now call my garden.  And I wrote my heart out to get it.  I let flow lots of flowery things about the environment, organic food, being a country girl etc.  I knew that it rivaled the best of my English major BS of years gone by....

But, I left out one thing  - too personal to share - although, I'm not sure I still feel the same now which is:  Nature is where I find God.  I haven't had a lot of luck in churches or religious organizations.  I don't really hold the bible up to be much more than a literary recipe about how one, in general, might live ones life.  Yet, I believe in God.  And sometimes when the breeze is just the right temperature and blowing in just the right direction along the skin of your arm, it feels like an embrace from some Higher Power.   So, secretly, this was the reason I wanted that garden plot. 

And in those first few weeks, as I sat in the garden by myself watching the miracles of it in front of me, I thought it was all that I needed.

But, as I planted and harvested, failed and succeeded, battled insects both good and bad, I reported each event to my Squeeze.  He urged me to take pictures, he tried foods he didn't really like just to please me, exclaimed "wow" when I would bring home a haul no matter how big or small - always with that pitch of his voice that makes me weak.  And he didn't laugh at my potatoes the size of a penny which we ate with shrimp forks.  Or at least he laughed with me rather than at me.  Generally, he made me feel proud that each day I cared for and nurtured this little garden plot.

For me, the garden had become about SHARING.  It was my garden for sure, but love had led me to it, to Long Beach.  The Squeeze would visit occasionally to give his bike a hose down or to take an evening walk with me hand-in-hand, to picnic, or just to answer the question for himself, "how does your garden grow?"

What gave me the pleasure, as it turned out, was to share the garden with him; or rather the fruits of my labor.  It had gone from a solitary endeavor between me and God, to one that was about me and him.  I grew things I knew he liked.  I felt proud to share with him the bounty whether in a pie, a stir fry, or included in a Sunday dinner while we watched football in the winter.  I grew vegetables to make him his childhood favorite:  stuffed cabbage.   I tracked down his sister-in-law to pass along his Mom's recipe.  I was feeding my family with the things I had grown.  

But, somewhere a crack has formed and my Squeeze no longer wants to be my Squeeze.  The heartache is beyond words.  In the wake of this announcement, I found myself staring at my garden wondering "why bother".  The joy of sharing the play-by-play had suddenly been stolen from me.  I looked at what was already growing there and felt a loneliness at the thought of harvesting and eating these things by myself. 

And at this very moment I have 8 very, very small cabbages that I have grown from seed begging for life on my windowsill.  I water them, for it would be cruel not to, but they have stunted on me.  They have stopped growing.  I fear they know my hesitation of what I will feel when they are fully grown and ready to be harvested.

Now, in the middle of a heartache, in the middle of the loss of love that I followed to this garden, I don't feel God.  I feel lost.  

There are many decisions to make and the garden will be, no doubt, a piece of it.  What piece, I don't know.  For the moment I am trying to find the lesson in this:

Is it that the garden has taught me that I want to nourish a family?  My family, in whatever form that takes: one man, two cats. 

Or maybe what this is illustrating is that I am so pathetic that I need others to validate me: that I must still learn that growing a cabbage just to grow a cabbage for myself should be satisfying enough.   Can it be both? 

Perhaps it is neither.   But, my beet seeds are soaking tonight so the garden still tugs at me either way.