Back to the garden

Confession time: I almost didn't renew my community garden membership this year.

Because let's be real - it's a lot of work. Gardening right in the ground, instead of in planter boxes or pots or containers, means breaking up soil that has turned into grasslands over the winter, digging trenches for drainage, spreading compost, and putting down woodchips and straw. And that's to say nothing about the part where you actually plant things. It is a process, to say the least, and I am getting a late start this summer, so I was dragging my feet about jumping back in.

But I had very mixed feelings about quitting too. In the two years that I've been gardening, it's become a big part of my identity, right up there with feminist and little-d democrat and world traveler. My friends (who are awesome about humoring me) ask me all summer long how the garden is going. So quitting the garden would have felt like losing a piece of my identity.

But then again, it's unrealistic to think that I am going to keep gardening forever in this particular community plot. After all, I can't just keep picking up hobbies and activities and never quitting anything and eventually driving myself crazy. And I am becoming more and more conscious that saying "yes!" to some things means saying no to others - there just aren't enough hours for everything I'm interested in.

But how do you know when to quit? There's no longer a graduation date beyond which it would be weird to keep showing up to Model UN. And I am not, apparently, a quitter. After all, I've known my best friend for 18 years and my boyfriend for seven. 

Those are some big questions, but the framework to answer them is simple enough. I just need to make sure to check in with myself about whether I'm still genuinely interested in something, or whether I'm doing it because I've enjoyed it in the past and invested some of my identity in it and am too stubborn to admit it's no longer working for me.

So after some soul-searching and with some hesitation, I sent my check in the mail and showed up in the garden in early June after getting back from Central America. And when I got out there and stuck the garden fork in the soil and got the dirt under my fingernails, there was this tremendous feeling of "ahhhh, yes." It is my happy place. It will always be closely bound up in my experience of living in DC.

A couple weeks ago, the homily at Unitarian church was about joy. Specifically - how we should be chasing joy instead of chasing pleasure. The garden is always going to be more work, and less immediate pleasure, than Netflix. But it reminds me again and again that the things that require at least a little bit of effort end up bringing me the most joy.

Way to Plant, Part Two

Posting my summer 2013 gardening minibook has got me in a gardening mood and getting excited for spring. I promised a while back that I would do a plant-by-plant recap of last summer's garden, but never got around to posting before I left for Tunisia for the fall. With the 2015 season fast approaching, this is standing in as my garden journal so I can remember what worked and what didn't.

Winners:

Green beans. Seriously, I now think that grocery store green beans are the biggest scam of our time. You pretty much just have to throw seeds on the ground and you will have armfuls of food. They did come with an associated flop, though: I accidentally bought bush beans instead of climbing beans, so my brilliant plan of having green beans climb up my okra didn't pan out. Which brings me to...

Okra. This was mostly for the novelty, since other people in the gardening class last year planted it and it seemed to grow well. And yep, my okra grew tall and produced a ton. The thing is, I don't really eat okra. So I procrastinated picking it, and I ended up with two freezer bags of huge and woody okra in my fridge. Lesson learned that, as fun as it is to try new things, you should probably plant vegetables that you actually eat. (Austin might put this one in the "loser" category for that factor alone.)

Peppers. Bell peppers are the #1 staple of my diet along with Annie's and Chipotle, so they are always what I'm most excited about it. They did okay last year, but great this year. Though I did fail to pick a couple almost-ripe ones (like half-red, half-green) and then they were gone when I came back. I also planted a bunch of different varieties of hot peppers - the jalapenos were definitely the winners there. 

Zucchini. All my squash plants died last year before I got any squash. Community gardens are like daycares or public transit - everyone shares diseases - and this moldy disease felled a lot of our collective squash plants. I finally got to eat some home-grown squash this year, though I never did get the armfuls of zucchini that everyone warns you about - maybe just one or two per plant - and then some of the plants did get sick and die. I did have lots of squash flowers that didn't turn into fruit. If I had had more time or ambition, I would have liked to try pollinating the squash flowers by hand - maybe next year. 

Kale. This was an experiment because I planted pretty late, after kale season ended. But I planted the seeds in the shadow of the strawberry plants, and they grew, and once it got cooler they grew a lot bigger. Hurray for hardy plants!

Eggplant. I had both traditional (?) and Japanese eggplant. Not much to say other than it's pretty awesome to see a big fat eggplant hanging around in the leaves, and the Japanese eggplants grew super-fast.

Cucumbers. I let a couple cucumbers get overripe (to the point that they turned yellow) last year because I was shy about picking them. When fruit gets overripe, it signals to the plant that its job is done and it can die. I got tons of cucumbers this year, even though they never really figured out how to climb the stakes I built for them. I also had some moderate success companion planting carrots and radishes with the cucumbers.

Instagram. Sometimes I think I like photographing my vegetables more than I like growing them or eating them. I don't know if my Instagram followers share my fondness though.

Plants I was kind of "eh" about: 

Tomatoes. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE tomatoes. They are the #1 reason to grow a garden in my book. But I found it pretty challenging to grow good ones. Their color would look underripe but then they would start cracking like they were overripe. They were mostly heirloom varieties from the farmer's market, so maybe they weren't supposed to be a vibrant red. After I initially staked them, I didn't do a great job maintaining them and culling dead leaves, so that may have been the problem. My cherry tomatoes were awesome, though. 

Losers:

Sage. So cute and pretty for a couple weeks, then went dead as a doornail. I think my parsley ate it (or at least its sunshine).

Melon. See my previous post re "I need more space next year." I didn't really leave my melons enough room. A honeydew rotted during a wet spell, but I did get a tasty palm-sized watermelon. 

Sweet potatoes. I was excited to harvest these later in the fall before leaving for Tunisia, but other than a couple good ones they were pretty "meh." They never really got big and so I ended up picking mostly thick roots. I was running out of steam when I prepped this part of the garden, so I think maybe I didn't break up the soil enough, or maybe I planted them too close together. I love sweet potatoes, though, so this will be worth another shot next year for sure.

Bottom line: I still love this hobby. Now that I've got the basics down, I am hoping to learn more this year about helping plants thrive and not just survive.

summer minibook 2013

The Eastern US is still consumed in a polar vortex, so let's take our minds off the endless winter with a summery project, shall we? In addition to daily cards and now art journal pages, I also occasionally make minibooks. My foray into minibook-making, as with many of my other projects, was 100% inspired by Elise's amazing archive. I bought this book from her two summers ago to document my first summer of gardening and finished filling it up last February. This is my paper-crafting magnum opus and for sure one of my favorite things I've ever made.

 

Other than the Elise Joy minibook and a bunch of stamps and labels, there aren't many pre-made embellishments in this book. (I'm happy to share supplies info if anyone is interested).

Instead, I had a great time collecting stuff throughout the summer to include in the book. In addition to more pictures of my garden than anyone wants to see, it includes seed packets, plastic garden markers, my sketch of the garden layout, a companion planting guide, and brochures from farmers' markets and gardening programs around the District. I cut up a free planting calendar and used those to mark off the months, along with a few lines of context about what was happening in the garden each month. I love the garden-y, organic (ha!) effect. Super fun to put together and fun to look through now. Now I just need spring to roll around again so I can get back into the gardening and crafting game.

Way to Plant, Ann(a)

(If I ever write a memoir about my farming life, and if people still remember Arrested Development in that future, that will for sure be the title.)

I have been meaning all summer to do a series of garden updates. But since I just pulled everything up and cover-cropped for the winter, this is going to be one big recap instead.

Overall, this was a fantastic year in the garden. I'd like to think that it's because I have some experience under my belt, but I'm not so sure. Sophomore year or no, I don't think I did anything very different. Maybe the weather was better (I think this was part of it – it was pretty cool and wet last summer). Maybe my Home Depot-supplied seedlings this year were genetically modified for survival, compared to their organically raised forebears last summer. Maybe I just had more magic on my side. 

So even though much of gardening is still a mystery to me, here are some of my big-picture thoughts and lessons from this summer in the garden.

Master the space issue. Last year I had a 12x12 plot. This year I had 24x12. It felt like an abundance of space, but when I hit Home Depot, my eyes were bigger than my plot and it filled it up pretty quick. It was enough to make me contemplate getting a full-size 24x24 plot next year so my plants are less squished – and so I could grow even more of what I eat, because how cool would that be?? But I also got lazy about garden maintenance by the time August rolled around. So maybe I'll stick with the 12x24 plot next year and just not cram as much in. 

Start with a clean slate. My 12x24 plot came with a little strawberry patch. I opted to keep them in, both so I could eat strawberries and because it seemed like the community-minded thing to do for future summers of gardeners (strawberries are perennial). But a ton of weeds popped up in the strawberries, and they were perpendicular to my other rows, which made for a sort of weird configuration. There were also big weeds growing on two sides of the garden that kept creeping in to my plot. Things got messy and hard to weed and maintain. I think next year I'll try to at least make everything neat at the start.

Plants are resilient and nature is so cool. The garden stayed awesome even when I got lazy and basically quit weeding – I only went once or twice a week as the summer wound down. Every time I'm there, I pick some squash that I hadn't even noticed before. It feels like free food.

I'm not sure what I'll do next year. I love love LOVE community gardening, but it can be sort of impractical to Metro to water it every couple days. We have some outdoor space at the new apartment, so maybe I'll go rogue and stick to container gardening, or some raised beds if I can finagle it. It would be awesome to be able to just step outside and fuss over my plants. But we shall see.

(Look for a post later this week with a plant-by-plant breakdown of how things went! Because I could seriously talk about this stuff all day.)

Il faut cultiver notre jardin

Three days later and this eggplant was exponentially bigger. Now that's what I call a monitoring & evaluation plan.

After a long day of work recently, I headed out to the community garden to do some watering and weeding. As tempting as it was crash at home, I always end up enjoying doing some mindless physical work outside. There’s a Zen satisfaction in plucking individual blades of grass from my rows of peppers and tomatoes, and I love feeling the sticky heat of the day give way to cooler evening breezes.

In my line of work, we deal with big, entrenched problems that don’t have easy answers. The heady early days of the Arab Spring have given way to something more complicated and less optimistic, to authoritarian backsliding in Egypt and fresh militia-driven conflict in Libya. It's also hard to define impact in the abstract work of democracy & governance - we're supporting democracy, not delivering x number of vaccines. And even if NDI could solve all the world’s problems, my role in the organization is a modest one. As much as I like to think that I’m single-handedly responsible for the successes (not to jinx it) of the Tunisian democratic transition, much of my work is administrative, a degree removed from the awesome activities in the field that it ultimately supports. 

So it’s nice to come to the garden to deal with concrete, solvable problems, one weed at a time, and to see short-term progress in the form of growing eggplants and reddening tomatoes.

As I was mulling the problem of the day (on this occasion, slavery in Mauritania), the words “Il faut cultivar notre jardin” from Voltaire’s Candide popped into my head. If my memory of high school French class can be trusted, it’s one of the last lines in the book, spoken after the characters have endured various trials and tribulations and gone in circles debating big existential questions. Depending on how you interpret it, it’s a call to pull back from the affairs of the world, or at least to stop with the endless philosophizing, and focus on the little patch of ground around you.

It also made me think of a book I recently read, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity, about the newfound interest in gardening and canning and knitting and cooking. Matchar argues that the trend is born out of frustration with a system that has failed us. If you don’t trust the safety of the food system and abysmal family policies make it all but impossible to “have it all,” leaving the workplace, growing your own food, and homeschooling your kids becomes incredibly appealing. Matchar expressed concerned that privileged, Whole Foods-shopping folks see personal lifestyle changes as the solution, instead of spending their energy advocating for change to the system that would benefit everyone.

I definitely see what she’s getting at, but I think that concern is overblown. I think we can both work towards solving the big problems—whether it’s by supporting democratic institutions in North Africa or tackling homelessness in DC or advocating to improve farm policy in the US—and doing what we can, where we are, to make the world a better place—whether by growing a garden or helping a new immigrant learn English. And in fact, I think that balance is a key ingredient for a satisfying life. Those personal actions may not result in the structural change we need, but they give us the satisfaction of seeing immediate impacts, forging new connections, and gaining a sense of control over our lives. They fuel us to take on the bigger challenges.

So go take on the big abstract problems of the world during the day, and in the evening, come home and cultivate your garden.

On Building Community

On Memorial Day, I joined a meet-up group for a nine-mile hike in the southern part of Rock Creek Park. I had been wanting to do more hiking but didn’t know where to start, so it was an awesome way to jump in. It was a great group of people, and when we stopped for a lunch that I hadn’t packed for, my fellow hikers shared theirs.

After an iced latte and some time in the air conditioning, I headed out to the community garden to continue preparing the soil for planting, hard but satisfying work. In the process, I met the woman in my neighboring plot, a nice older lady who gave me a thumbs-up and told me I was doing a good job. When she saw me awkwardly balancing my camera on my bag to take a self-timer picture of myself in action (because I’m a huge dork), she offered to take one for me and the result was this great photo.

All in all, it was a day that made me thankful for the kindness of strangers.

My Catholic elementary/middle/high school ascribed to five goals of the Sacred Heart that infused almost everything we did. This spring, I went to an alumnae retreat themed around the goals. In a breakout discussion of Goal IV, “the building of community as a Christian value,” I talked about the challenges of building community in these post-college years. In a school setting, you work and play (and sometimes live) with the same people, and you are embedded within a framework of shared values—whether it was the goals at Stone Ridge, or the international/environmentalist/ ethos of Middlebury. Now, I have great friends from high school, college, and work, but with everyone spread out across DC and across the country, it’s harder to identify my “community.” (Though with a shared mission and lots of awesome people, my work comes close to one.)

One of the alums, a few years older than me, commented, “Building community doesn’t have to be one big party.” It happens in the individual interactions – in strengthening friendships, reaching out to acquaintances, being kind to a difficult person at work. That was a lightbulb moment for me, and I’ve thought about it ever since.

I was happy to realize that what happened on the hike and in the garden was community-building in the true spirit of Goal IV – one individual interaction at a time.