Anew

As I sit here alone, eating the eggs I received from my backyard chickens yesterday, I am tempted to deluge you with words like the downpour of rain that hit hard this early morning. I am tempted to tell you all the turbulence of my life these past six months. I wish I could update you on my many adventures, losses, stresses and day-to-day pleasures, but I realize that these past events are too much to tackle for one single read and that they are what they are and they are, quite simply, in the past. Because, for better or for worse, I tend to not dwell on the past, I will be true to myself and withhold this information from you. I will, however, let you know that in the past six months I have grown as a mother, a daughter, a sister, a wife, and, of course, as a gardeness. I have experienced stress, loss, loneliness, laughter, absolute pure love, and the success of some tasty tomatoes.

 Like my life, my garden has had its ups and downs as well. The podded peas from I picked from the vine in the early summer reminded me that there is still the simple pleasure of sweetness when your world is filled with worry.  As the summer progressed and my heart was tormented by grief, my garden buzzed with life and the promise of sustenance for my starved and empty soul.  As my lovely layer chickens started producing eggs, I was witness to a new love’s beginning.  By late summer, I was celebrating a successful harvest the same time my family, friends and I celebrated my daughters two year old birthday. Lastly, this fall, I shared my first rhubarb crisp from my prolific perennial plant as my community of new friends grew around me.  

Today, I look at my rain drenched yard and know that like the seedlings now swimming in puddles of promise, I should be thankful for the shower of love and support I have had these past six months and I will hopefully continue to sprinkle you with my words and thoughts of land, love and learning. With this cleansing winter rain, I feel that a new beginning is here.

Now, what should I write about?

Finding a Community

Her easy going demeanor washed over the room hushing the twenty or so other attendees as she walked to the front of the room. We all waited with the same reverence for the woman who shared our same passion for gardening in the city to speak and enlighten us with her knowledge. Novella Carpenter started to speak quickly, yet with the confidence of a woman who was used to public speaking. The tan wrap tied snuggly against her left breast began to move as she introduced herself. She quickly pulled back the wrap to expose a small head of baby blond hair.

“Sorry,” she explained, “this appendage here is my new daughter. She just needs to eat because that’s all she really does now, so I might have to do this once in a while.” With this she adjusted the baby to suckle her breast and returned to her PowerPoint presentation. I smiled, remembering the days of constant breast feeding I endured only months before.

Now, here is a woman who has herself together, I thought to myself, knowing that I would never be able to be as easy going and nonchalant about giving a presentation, much less breast feeding while doing it. I immediately became even more in awe of this inspirational author.

As she began to introduce the other author of her new book, The Essential Urban Farmer, something she said made my heart beat a little faster.

“Eight years ago I moved to the Bay Area and was trying to find a community that I fit into. That’s when I met Willow.”

Find a community? Yes, that’s what she said, I thought to myself. I looked around the room at the other attendees listening to her speak. Was there anyone else here looking for a community, I wondered. I certainly was.

Although the rest of the presentation was very informative, with Novella speaking of the positive aspects of raising livestock in the city and Willow Rosenthal briefing us in her knowledge of urban vegetable propagation, I couldn’t stop thinking about Novella’s flippant comment about finding a community. Without being fully aware, I have been urgently looking for a ‘community’ these past few weeks. This book signing presentation was only one event of a relatively long list of events that I have attended in search of what my heart desires most.

Like Novella, much of my seeking has led me to the land. I have attended several classes at a local demonstration garden in the Sunset District run by an organization called Garden for the Environment. This, in turn, led me to attend a fundraiser for the organization as well as Novella and Willow’s book signing presentation. All of these events I have attended alone.

Like many others in this city, I do not fair well as a solitary creature. When I enter a room full of people I don’t know, I often find myself against a bar (or a bush) watching the exchange of pleasantries around me as if I were a bird watcher examining the bright plumage dance of the cockatoo. I quietly observe the social bobbing and weaving rather than dancing along.

As I write this, I realize that my daughter reflects this same initial social behavior. When we get to a playground full of children playing and screaming, she often ends up frozen and mesmerized by all the activity around her rather than joining in. I wonder now if she has learned this from me or if her reaction is innate.

There is one difference between me and my daughter in these social situations though. After her first initial shock of being around so many other children her same age wears off, she happily wonders around the playground by herself. She blindly amuses herself by moving sand from one location to another as a group of toddlers behind her fill a large orange bucket with sand together. Her ability to be so independent amazes because, quite honestly, I am anything but.

As many of my close friends can attest, I am quite the exhibitionist when I am around them, so why is it that I can’t break out of my shell when I am put in the social situation of making new friends in a group setting? I have many excuses as to why this is the case, but the one I usually tell myself is that I simply just don’t fit in. I often look at the other attendees of my garden classes and realize that like them, I don’t own anything made out of hemp or hand-crocheted or tie-dyed. When I talk to other moms at the playground, they seem much more into their own social groups or phones to include me. And when the rare occasion arises and I get to go out with my hubby to an art gathering, I find myself lost as to what I could say that might interest such a crowd.

This self realization of my social tendencies is very difficult to admit. Even more difficult, is to admit that I have to stop making excuses as to why I can’t make friends and in turn find my community. I need to be open to every person who enters my life, because if I don’t, I will end up as I have been, feeling lost and alone.

I know that my community is out there, and I now know that it’s up to me to find it. With this realization, I will try to be more approachable in every social situation. I will move away from my wall of observation and try to start a conversation, however awkward it may be. I must also remember that however different I may think I am, everyone has felt that they don’t fit in at one point in their life. With this I open my arms to the sweet embrace of being a part of something bigger than myself and hope that my community is out there waiting.

The Power of Patience

This past week was rough. It started out fine enough with a wonderful Valentine dinner with my man and delightful day with my daughter, but the next day, all the hearts and warm fuzzies were clouded over with the dark dread of debt depression. My car got towed.

If you drive in San Francisco and you haven’t had your car towed, consider yourself lucky. There really is nothing worse than getting ready to leave the house for an anticipated destination, then walking to where you parked the car two days before, only to find that your car is no longer there. Add a fussy baby to this equation and you can very easily imagine what hell must be like. Of course, my day of purgatory did not end there.

To try and save you from too many horrid details, I will offer you a brief summary. First, I had to break the bad news to the bread winner of the house knowing that we were already low on financial funds. He did not take it well. Feeling beyond guilty, I offered to go and find the car. I tried to not seem too distraught on account that my daughter would be joining me for the bus ride to the tow lot in the Tenderloin. I told her with tears in my eyes that we were going on a ‘fun adventure’. The bus ride was an adventure, all right. Fun, no. The bus we were on ended up getting in an accident and although my daughter and I were fine physically, I was mentally aghast when I was told to leave the bus and wait twenty minutes for the next one to arrive. Twenty minutes with an irritable toddler in the Tenderloin is something I don’t even want you to imagine. After getting on the expectant second bus, I’m embarrassed to admit that I missed the stop I was supposed to get off at. Although I was only three blocks away from my final destination, toting a toddler that distance without a stroller is a true test of tenacity. We finally got to the towing facility and I faced the fact that my fate of the day was not going to get any easier. I’m not sure how long I waited for my exuberant transaction to transpire, but I will tell you that I was glad I spent the extensive time in a sequestered cell of a room because my little one couldn’t escape easily. Although our car was finally freed from the facility and both my daughter and I made it home before bedtime, the rest of the week has been dampened by this dreadful predicament of debt.

The reason I am letting you in on the details of my dramatic day/week is not because I want your sympathy, but because I find it funny that I was planning on writing about patience for a while now and it has been patience that has kept me sane during the past week. It’s quite curious how coincidental the world works, isn’t it? Because my patience has paid off and I ended my week on a positive note by planting the perennial vegetables I purchased before my week of woe, I guess I can let you know that the original title for this post was going to be: The Patience of Planting Perennial Vegetables.

Although I have been gardening, quite honestly, for as long as I can remember, I have never planted a perennial vegetable before. What makes a vegetable perennial is that unlike its more common brother, the annual vegetable, the perennial vegetable does not die after harvesting the fruit. The perennial vegetable, you could say, is a year-round responsibility. Although this permanent garden fixture sounds great at first, there is one big downside to the perennial vegetable: It usually takes two to three years before you can harvest any fruit! So, like my terrible towing experience, patience is the key when it comes to growing this slow-to-mature plant.  

For years now, I have been dreaming of planting one particular perennial vegetable: asparagus. But every time I thought of the timely investment I had to put into this plant, I quickly changed my mind about starting my own bed of these springtime shoots. I guess it didn’t seem possible to wait two or three years before I enjoyed my first harvest. To put it simply, I just didn’t have the patience.

Obviously, something changed this past year because I was finally ready to put my time in for my aspiring asparagus. I can’t really put my finger on why I now have more tolerance for time, but I’m sure it has much to do with becoming a parent. As this last week can attest, being a mom requires an infinite amount of patience.

So as a patient mother, I took the time to prepare my asparagus bed by first weeding, then turning the soil, and lastly amending the soil with some compost. I carefully set my crowns of asparagus in a well tended trench and covered my crop with what was left of my compost. I will continue to cultivate my crop until the time comes for me to cut each long awaited sweet chartreuse shoot which emerges from the earth.

It is with this patience that I plant my other permanent perennials as well. In two years time, I will not only be parenting a preschool age child, but preparing to harvest my flavorful flowers of artichoke, my tangy twigs of rhubarb, and of course, my long awaited asparagus. And I must remember this bounty I will bear the next time my day dips downward because with patience, something positive will always prevail.

My asparagus trench, artichoke transplant (bottom) and my Poppy 'seedling' (my daughter).

Legends of the Wall

When I was in graduate school, I explored the option of writing a thesis. The subject I was interested in was loosely based on the idea of enclosure and more specifically, the landscape features which often enclose a garden: walls and fences. Because I was unable to concentrate such a vast and complicated subject, I did not write the thesis, but I did become quite knowledgeable on the historical context of walls in the landscape.

                

For instance, did you know that the ‘Great Wall of China’ was not always the revered manmade marvel it is today? In fact, for many years the wall was seen as a defensive disgrace or a last resort tactic to keep the invading Mongols from gaining more ground. If it weren’t for some Western wahoos wandering upon the wall, and their ideals of historical perseveration, the ‘great’ wall might be nothing but rubble today. Can you imagine what that pile of rubble would look like from outer space? I guess not much different than the wall itself. Hmmm.

A satellite image of the 'Great Wall of China'

Also, the first historical walled garden, which I’m aware of, is the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Although there is no physical evidence of this famed structure, artists, poets and musicians have been rendering its illustrious tale for thousands of years. My favorite rendition is a love story. It is said that the King during these ancient times planted a ‘pensile paradise’ because his wife was homesick for the mountainous landscape of her youth. I, of course, imagine this lovely lady wandering through her fabulous fake forest, picking fruit from trees which resemble something almost forgotten. A tear rolls down her cheek as she bites into its fleshy and fragrant skin. Oh, what a fantastic fairy tale.

Artistic rendering of the 'Hanging Gardens of Babylon'

 I can also educate you on the walled gardens popular in medieval Europe. It is often argued that these ‘secret’ like gardens represent the battle between man and nature during that time. The controlled, man-made environment within the walls is a safe haven, while what lies outside the walls is the unknowable wildness of nature. It is interesting to imagine a wall which represents the line between what was considered good and evil. It also kind of makes me want to read “The Secret Garden” again, so that I can dissect what the wall in that book really symbolized.

Medieval walled garden

Similarly, the picturesque gardens designed by followers of romantic writers like Thoreau and Emerson and their reverence of nature, contain walls whose purpose is to contain livestock without obstructing the view of the landscape. I’m not joking when I tell you that these walls, called ha-has, are very similar to the retaining walls many of us know today. The only difference is that the ha-ha, usually had a ditch on one side, rather than level ground. So, this wall represents quite the opposite of the wall of the medieval garden. Is it wrong that I giggle a little when I think of a wall which puts nature above man?

View of the Chirk Castle ha-ha found in Denbighshire, North Wales.

  

 As you can probably conclude by all this talk of walls, I have been busy with my own wall. I started building a three foot high retaining wall out of recycled concrete chunks, otherwise known as ‘urbanite’, in my back yard. Like many landscape designers and architects, who draw up plans and details as to how to construct a retaining wall, I have never actually built one before. I didn’t draw up plans or use any specifications for this wall either. I just started stacking my concrete chunks, hoping that the final result would somewhat resemble a wall that could hold back the dirt behind it. Although the process was somewhat slow at first, I soon felt like I was a true mason.

I forgot to take a 'before' photo again, but this is another part of the yard where a wall needs to be replaced.

As my wall began to take shape, the theorist in me began to wonder if this wall was more than just a pile of concrete holding back the dirt behind it. Like the Great Wall of China and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, did my wall have a story to tell? Or did it make a statement about my relation to nature as the walled gardens of our past have? As I began to ponder these questions, I instinctively tried to analyze what the word ‘retaining’ actually meant.

To retain, has many definitions. The one which usually accompanies the wall is ‘to hold in place’. But as I stood back stretching my aching arms to admire my emerging retaining wall, I realized that this wall was doing more than just holding dirt in place. It was ‘retaining’ in another sense. I was ‘obtaining possession’ of the land with each heavy slab of urbanite I placed on the wall. This, of course, doesn’t mean that I actually own the land because I am only renting one unit in a six unit apartment complex. But maybe what I am saying is that this land, my ‘shared’ yard, wasn’t really mine to garden until I decided to permanently mark it with the construction of my wall. For some reason, the physical action of placing more than plants on the land, gave me validity to turn this fallow land into my garden.

So I guess you can say that the story of my wall is still being written, but so far, it is not mournful, enchanting or very symbolic. Up to this point, building my wall has been an enlightening experience. I have learned that ‘growing’ a garden is not just about putting plants in the ground, but claiming that ground to belong to you as well.

My wall