Back Yard

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My Beautiful Back Yard

The Natural Bridges landscaping crew put the finishing touches in place on Friday. In a few weeks we will re-plant the area under the living room window and in the corner by the steps. Otherwise, its done!

The weather is glorious so we’re outdoors enjoying our new space. I’m still pining for some seasonal rain, while at the same time enjoying what nature is offering.

Intersecting Circles and Paths

 

Long view of the raised beds and the patio

 

"Cat's Eye" shape, one of my favorite elements of the design

 

This area will be re-planted in a few weeks

A small bare patch for future annuals

 

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Pumpkins Go Viral!

Well…not exactly. But when you say “viral” these days, people notice. In bygone days, it meant you had “the clap.” Now we’re usually referring to our email account, Facebook or Twitter.

I digress…

We have a bumper crop of pumpkins this year. It’s been pretty exciting. Even with the disappointing weather which has been ten degrees below the seasonal norm, the plants continue to send out shoot after shoot. We have five or six varietals, some with leaves the size of dinner plates. We mourned a few losses this afternoon (squirrels!) but the plants are so prolific, that we felt we could afford to be cavalier about our losses.

Bumper Crop

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Waiting for Asparagus

(The following was written as part of a Facebook project based on Barbara Kingsolver’s book “ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MIRACLE A Year of Food Life.” Additional entries can be found at ThinkBob.

Baby Carrots Fresh from the Earth

Each week a project member wrote a response based on one chapter of the book. Together we read and talk our way through a year in the life of Kingsolver and her family. This was my response prompted by Chapter Two, “Waiting for Asparagus.”)

Waiting for Alys: Confessions of a Procrastinator

Fascinated by the concept and in love with the writing style and author’s turn of phrase, I was delighted with my assignment of “Waiting for Asparagus.” My earliest years and meals were in Ontario, Canada with the requisite long cold winters and the culinary influences of a British father and Nova Scotia-raised Mom.

Asparagus?

Never heard of it. I was a young adult before it first crossed my plate, and I wasn’t the least bit impressed. Luckily for me I gave it a second chance.

I love the discovery in this book: both mine and the Kingsolver Clan. Learning the cultivation ritual of a vegetable I’ve come to enjoy seems a mini-miracle in the making. I’ve embarked on my own personal food journey this year, so this book is synchronistic with my own health-improving goals. Changing our long-held behaviors around food is among the more challenging because they are so deeply seated in our youth.

The line that Lily would “already be lobbying the loopholes” resonated to my core. I know what I should do, but the inner give-it-to-me-now frequently won sway. Hershey’s with almonds are a good source of protein, right?

My earliest food foundation was a solid one. Our father was a horticulturist. He worked on a tea plantation in Darjeeling India before the war, later moving to Canada where my parents owned a pair of flower shops. He lovingly cultivated an amazing garden in our own back yard, short growing season and all, and filled it with cherry tomatoes that moved from garden to dinner plate in short order. What a delight it was to be sent out back by our mom to gather food for our meal. I inherited my own green thumb and love of gardening from those early days.

So how, you may wonder, did I drop and roll so far from the tree? Our family moved to the US in 1966, and by 1969 my father was dead, victim to the cancerous crop known as tobacco. My mother went to work full time, with three young girls at home to fend for themselves. It was around the same time when “TV dinners” had come into fashion. Mom was impressed with the idea that her daughters could have a hot meal in her absence, but with limited cooking or use of the hot stove and her fear of one of us getting burned; convenience food at its finest. Strapped for funds she scraped together the cash for our Friday night treat: a can of coke from Safeway and a bag of chips or nuts shared among the four of us. Both rituals were loving ones: gathering fresh garden tomatoes from our vast garden and slurping high fructose corn syrup from a can in our ratty little two bedroom apartment.

“Waiting for Asparagus” is a bit of a metaphor in my own personal journey. I wonder what all gentle readers of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle are discovering along the way?

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Tomato Surprise

I’m not much of a cook.  This comes as no surprise to those who know and love me.  The irony is that I love to feed people. My inner “earth mother” is at odds with my culinary skills.

No matter.  I wisely married an excellent cook and no one in my house goes hungry. Liberated from the food prep portion of kitchen duty, I’m free to put some energy into the growing and cultivating of our tiny back-yard plot.  Growing things you can eat is enormously satisfying, though not without challenges.

We have more failures than successes, and no two years are alike.  Somehow we cobble together some semblance of an edible garden and we are all happier for it.  We delight in our salad, even if we only used three small cherry tomatoes from out back.  The basil was delicious early in the season and made for some beautiful Caprese salads.

Cherry Tomatoes

Garden Treasures

On the other hand, our incredibly promising beef-steak tomatoes introduced us to horn worms, emerald green creatures with voracious appetites.  Squirrels, rats and mice made quick work of most of our pumpkin plants, prompting us to create a mini Fort Knox to keep the four-legged creatures at bay.  Constructed of heavy-duty chicken wire and garbage twist ties it worked.  Access denied!

We aren’t heartless gardeners so we offered peanuts as a sort of peace offering.  What irony: we purchase food for the wildlife so the wildlife leaves our garden untouched.

Part of me wishes I had a hidden camera documenting the late-night food-fest going on beneath my bedroom window.  My more reasoned self convinces me that oblivious slumber is the better way to go.  We’ll see the destruction tomorrow anyway on our daily trip through the garden.

Miraculously a small, yellow, fully formed tomato presents itself on the vine and we cradle it in our palms letting it fall naturally into our grasp.  Is there anything more delicious than a fresh-from-the-vine, warm tomato bursting with delicate sweetness in your mouth at the end of a summer day?