At least once a week (and more like once a day) an idealistic urge overtakes me and I turn dramatically to my internal audience and swear to the gods that I will bake a tatin, and I will buy a bundt pan and I will stretch my own mozzarella. The chances are fifty-fifty that I will actually follow through with my oath (those odds are pretty good if you ask me), but if I were to make and buy on every whim, I'd be a beefy, bankrupt catastrophe.
However, I have vowed for months that I would grow my own food having been on the urban agriculture bandwagon for a year now. In Miami I attempted tomatoes and peppers, which suffered terribly through the tropical storms and blistering heat, not to mention their pots were probably one foot too shallow. Whoops. Though inedible, I once had a lily that bloomed all through the winter, and thinking I was a totally competent badass, took it home for Christmas vacation to nurture the wonder flower. I left in the car and, in the deep freeze of Ohio winter, it withered and never made a comeback.
I admit, I'm terrified that I might not have a green thumb. My fall back plan to go off-grid if globalization fails will be totally screwed. At the very least, my vacant lot turned lush urban garden will remain a figment. So I'm starting now. If I can't figure it out by the time I can afford my own lot, I'll just hire someone to do it for me.
Thus far the sage seems pretty saggy, like someone dumped a bucket of water on it (it wasn't me). The French thyme is fragrant, brushy and chipper, but the thyme in my fridge from a month ago looks pretty much the same way. The Italian basil is a bit yellow, but I'm hoping he'll pull the group together and give them a pep talk or something. Thinking they might need a little morale boost, I got a bunch of sexy lemon verbena and exotic lavender at the market to keep them company. Hopefully it'll perk 'em up because my morale is becoming low and my thumb ain't gettin' any greener.
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1 comments:
Hi Leslie,
Persistence seems to be the answer to that green tinge that will soon permanently stain both thumbs. Three years of tomato blight—beautiful juicy bright red globes pocked with brown fungus or bullet-like green mini Romas stained dark black and inedible due to their sheer immature density almost totally killed any notion of continuing the summer struggle.
Then I hit pay dirt this year. It IS all in the dirt. Seven or eight varieties, including a wonderful sweet heirloom, are still yielding luscious fruit as late summer turns with the damp chill of our Pacific Northwest fall. Tomorrow evening’s Canadian Thanksgiving supper will be heavy with the plenty of the harvest.
The bright light that led to this success was the realization that my “imported” growing medium in my raised bed planters probably carried more germs than the good old native soils of my front yard flower beds. I striped all of the useless perennials this year, resisted the local sale of annuals that provide the same range of colour in everyone’s front yard beds and instead chose a few hardy tomato plants, some wooden stakes and a bag or two of manure. SUCCESS!
Keep at it! Find that vacant lot on the lower eastside and you’ll be feeding an army.
I love your blog and check in regularly. Good luck in your new adventures in the Big Apple. By the way, we’re still hard at it planning for the eventual approval of the Southlands project. The prospects are so exciting. You’ll have to come up here and write the definitive story—“I was there at the beginning”.
All the best,
Bob Ransford
Steveston, British Columbia
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