Animal, Vegetable, Grow Already

          I am currently rereading one of my favorite books, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver. It’s a page-turner that never gets old for me because it is a wildly inspiring, if not completely magical, tale of one family’s commitment to change their lives, start a new kind of relationship with their food, and eat wonderful things that are guaranteed fresh, clean, and absolutely earned. I read it over and over again because it is filled with recipes, unique food and gardening facts, and some of the most entertaining and appealing narratives on cheese making, the not so subtle phallic appearance of the first asparagus stalks of the season, and turkey sex. Yes, turkey sex is, apparently, awesome. And although this book is inarguably the prime argument for buying local, going organic, and revolutionizing your food life in general, Kingsolver presents her story in a way that doesn’t say, you should do this, but rather, I love this with all of my heart, and I think you might too. Furthermore, this book shies away from nothing. The story recognizes that food often means meat, and if you are going to get to know your food, and remain an omnivore, that necessarily means that you might have to get up close and personal with some livestock, and should probably refrain from naming the baby animals. And I thoroughly enjoy that Kingsolver states her family’s initial goal, rather humbly, as “we only knew, somewhat abstractly, we were going to spend a year integrating our food choices with our family values, which include both ‘love your neighbor’ and ‘try not to wreck every blooming thing on the planet while you’re here’” (23). That is the spirit in which this post is written.

Last year we started our garden from scratch. Correction, my mother started the garden from scratch, I just ate most of the green beans. She ordered the seeds, bought the tiny peat pellets, started the seeds indoors, slowly acclimated them outdoors, planted them in the ground, and then watched all the animals and beetles within a three mile radius migrate to the garden and devour all the sprouts. I took the extra, runt sprouts and threw them in the dirt behind my summer apartment hoping at least one would take root. Instead, all the plants thrived in the neighbors' horse manure and I ended up with 16 of the exact same cherry tomato plants and enough bock choy to stuff a large sofa. Since I am not so much a fan of cherry tomatoes – I imagine that the explosion of flesh and seeds that occurs when you pop one in your mouth whole is remarkably similar to the bursting of an eyeball. I don’t know why, I just know I don’t care for it – I tried gathering up the tiny tomatoes and heading over to my parents’ house to trade them for bigger, “real” tomatoes, but they wanted no part of this arrangement. Having lost the battle with the local wild-life, and having thus had to repurchase plants in the middle of the season to produce any sort of garden for the summer, they were unwilling to share, even with their one and only offspring. My mother was generous enough to invite me over for bacon, lettuce, and heirloom tomato sandwiches once and those three juicy, indigo hued slices of fruit flesh were all that I got for a full year because our household has made a pact that tomatoes no longer come from the grocery store; they enter our home only at times when they should. On the virtues of our nation, Kingsolver comments, “we apply them selectively: browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example. Only if they wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value. ‘Blah blah blah,’ hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can’t even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now” (31).

               In any case, the summer is here, and the promise of tomatoes is again within reach, and since I shoveled over the garden plot alone, by hand, I’ve secured at least one, full, mammoth, heirloom all to myself. This year, with the same beetles and woodland creatures lurking about, we decided to buy some already started plants from a local farmer. We're supporting a wonderful, friendly, and organic local business, and should the animals return, perhaps this year's plants will be far enough along to resist such an attack. If you’ve never been, I highly recommend a field trip to Matt’s Organics, which is not your average nursery. The quality of plants is mythical, and each category of vegetable offers a choice of at least ten, but likely more, strains and hybrids to choose from, each clearly labeled with a hand-written sign that describes the taste, color, and smell of the vegetable, how it’s best prepared and eaten, and the cultural/emotional history of it. After planting our Matt’s Organics’ seedlings at the beginning of the month, our garden is now chugging along. We do have a noticeable beetle battle raging on the basil, but otherwise there are some strong candidates for plants that will actually reach maturity, the pepper and tomato plants already even showing the first signs of fruit. And the farmers' markets are now in full swing to keep us happy buying other gardeners’ deep green and magenta lettuces while we wait for our own. We did perhaps over-fertilize the flowerbeds though, and now it looks like they’ve exploded all over the front walkway, but at least something is thriving.

In the spirit of good gardening, we took a little trip down the road to visit our favorite neighbors whose garden is nearly indescribable in beauty and bounty. Their garden is medium sized but their gardening techniques make the space produce to nearly triple the actual land capacity. They replant – when the lettuces are done, the cucumbers will go in their spot, and by the time the beans have been harvested, the pumpkins will already be taking over their plot with runners. The zucchini doesn’t spread out across the ground where it might choke out other plants and prime gardening beds but rather is trellised and encouraged to reach for the sky on the “power tower.” All plants are started from seed, seeds are saved for following years, vegetables are eaten immediately or dried and saved for the winter, all vegetables are grown in the correct season and the correct period of that season, and the love and attention paid to this garden makes it one of the happiest places on earth. Pest control is wire fencing and an organic spray for desperate cases, but mostly it’s pure adrenaline and a flashlight and tweezers taken out to the garden at midnight when the bugs come out to munch and can be hand-plucked from the leaves. The environment they’ve crafted is so rich that should these neighbors ever move, they will need to take the soil with them. To send a little good garden karma back to our house, my mother and I were gifted two tomato plants from this, the garden of our dreams. I think the tomato karma is working, but my mother did reveal last week that she has been eating all the strawberries off the vine immediately as they appear. It seems that we've got the gardening thing figured out this year, now we just need to work a bit more on the concept of sharing. 

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*Although a few pictures in this post are of the garden at my parents' house, most of them are from the coveted neighbor garden. I am particularly jealous of that power tower of zucchini.