Scarborough fair on my deck - and in my turkey

I didn't get a real garden going this summer, since we were in the middle of a move. That's a bummer.

But, I do still -- in November -- have fresh rosemary, sage and thyme growing in pots on my porch. I loved that I went from plant to pot in a few steps. They were great on the turkey the other day and tonight when I whipped up some leftovers. Deck gardening at night!

This morning, I picked parsley to put in my fresh juice with beet, carrot, celery, a little lettuce, lemon, ginger and garlic. It was awesome, and my brother-in-law enjoyed it, too.

Now if only I'd remembered to pick some oregano when I was cooking the eggs.

Food is good if it's good and fresh. Thank you, earth and sun!

A kitchen with a view

We are hoping to move to a bigger home very near our house. We will lose some of our back yard, probably some gardening sun, and our super-social corner placement. My son loves watching the school buses come up the hill behind our house and the neighbors walk their kids to school, but I am hoping he'll come to love watching wildlife outside in the woods behind the new place. I don't know if the squirrels are as active over there or if the neighborhood cats stroll through the other yard like they do at our place. But I hear a fox makes regular visits. And in any case, I'm pretty psyched about the view from the kitchen sink.

Where does your food come from?

An article about seasonal eating in today's Washington Post reminded me how annoyed I was a few weeks ago at the National Air and Space Museum. In "I'll Miss My CSA, but It's Time to Go," Stephanie Witt Sedgwick reflects on her season of buy-in to Potomac Vegetable Farms' community-supported agriculture program (CSA). She concludes that it was a great experience that kept her largely out of the supermarket for months, but now she's ready to move her seasonal produce-buying over to farmers markets. PVF owner Hana Newcomb says she welcomes this kind of turnover.

Despite the interest among green types and even others to become locavores, there's still a strong sense of entitlement out there that we Americans here in the 21st century can eat whatever we damn well please.

Case in point: The America by Air exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall. We had just finished the Fannie Mae Help the Homeless Walkathon and made a stop in the museum to warm up before walking back to the L'Enfant Plaza Metro station. I was struck by the irony of coming in from an event about people who don't have a place to live to read a placard bragging about how, thanks to aviation, we're no longer limited to eating what's local or in season. Not that I never eat an apple in the early spring or an orange in the middle of summer, nor do I shop only at the farmers market. (Like Sedgwick, I enjoyed my summer and fall CSA through PVF last year but didn't return, mostly due to the inconvenience of having to go out to get the bag during my son's nap.) I do try to look at labels when I shop in the grocery store, though, and I put some thought into what I eat when.

I don't expect Air & Space not to tell the story of aviation, but I do think the museum could just think about the impression it leaves on a kid to gloat about being able to get whatever, whenever.

Off with our heads

"Where's Mommy's head? Oh, I found it."

My son enjoys playing with the magnet a friend made for us 10 years ago after we appeared as Homer and Marge Simpson at her Halloween Party. But a few months ago, he put the craft-store magnet to the test and found that it was not difficult to rip his parents' heads off.

As if we needed any help with that.

E's dad and I do not exactly exemplify the kind of mindful, intentional life we value. LJ is great about getting good gas mileage, so I know he's paying very close attention to the way he drives - spending time in neutral (we have an automatic), not accelerating when he's going to have to stop. I admire this and try to follow his example, but it's easy to get out of the habit, just like it's easy to forget to sit up straight with my abs supporting my back. I can get on a roll but then get lost in NPR or Music Together and realize I'm racing to a red light with slumped shoulders.

Lately we are just about at each other's throats over the house and our finances. After seven years in our home, we're trying to purge as though we were moving. This is necessary and cathartic but also time-consuming, and challenging to do with a 2.5-year-old. We have also found ourselves at odds over money. We do not go on lavish vacations or buy expensive jewelry or technology, but we do spend a lot on good quality food and alternative health care. And kid clothes, and some toys, and classes, and childcare. And sippy cups.

So somehow we've started spending a lot more than we did 2.5 years ago -- even 1.5 years ago when the kid was only eating from his mama (who was so tired she needed lots of acpuncture and other support to keep her thyroid and depression in check). And by "somehow" I mean we both have analyzed our spending individually but haven't worked on a budget and protocol that makes sense for both of us for right now and for our future. In this economy, our failure to watch our lead foots is, as my husband says, "stupid." I'm offended to be insulted, but he's right.

I don't know how long it's going to take, but we have to get this stuff out of our basement or happily into storage spaces. I've been Freecycling and Craigslisting like crazy. The soft vinyl bags LJ barked at me for buying months ago are indeed yucky, not only for the off-gassing they did but also because the soft flexibility I bought them for (to ostensibly fit better in a small space) is frustrating. They don't stack or smoosh - they are just kind of messy. It's just like our lack of clear-cut boundaries and guidelines for ourselves.

My last post was almost a month ago, "Gardening at Night," in which I wrote about what a difference it made to spend 15 minutes as a family weeding in our front yard. Once all the grass was gone, the liriope started to flower. It was like the plant could finally breathe, finally had the nutrients it needed. We'll have to get back in there and weed again soon, I know. It doesn't end.

I'm hoping we can work toward moving our physical and financial lives into the land of purple flowers.

Gardening at Night

"I think you left a diaper at playgroup," my friend said, offering to drop off the stinky yellow Fuzzi Bunz a few hours later. Now sporting a white diaper and blue Crocs, my son accompanied me outside when she drove up and, after she pulled away, he insisted on going to the end of the street in search of the neighbor's cat.

After initially turning him down because dinner was almost ready, I decided some outside time after a late nap was a good idea. But as we too frequently meet neighbors while in varying states of undress, I insisted we first go inside to slip on some toddler shorts. I asked my husband if he wanted to join, which I immediately re-heard through my son's mouth: "Do you want to come with us, Daddy?" We all ventured out into Friday night dusk in search of felines, but somehow we got fixated on the ground instead. "We could weed," I offered, having lamented just that morning how I was almost as overwhelmed with the overgrown yard as I am with our overcluttered house.


So we all started crouching down, pulling up the tall grass that seems to be loving our drought, cracked earth and all. It wouldn't look so bad if we hadn't actually gotten landscaping done that makes it obvious it's not purposeful filler among the more manicured liriope. We probably did a decent job with some but just did damage control with others that will grow back.


There's still plenty to do, but what we did in 10 minutes made a big difference to our eyes. And in the process, we got to breathe still warm but non-conditioned air, talk about roots, and listen to cicadas, a word my son now knows at age two that I don't think I knew until I was twenty-one. My husband told me a story about he and E seeing a cicada up close at the park the other day; its clumsy flight as it left a leaf almost slamming it into their heads before it caught its breath and lifted up and away. That's an image I might never have owned if we hadn't gone out tonight.

Always a resister to seriously setting a routine, I wondered how much less out of control -- and more connected to each other -- we'd feel if we did ten minutes of weeding every Friday night. We spend so much time in tag-team mode, with one parent playing with the kid while the other cooks or cleans. As a result, our son misses out on some basic, work-oriented family time where we all just undertake a task together. It may be that he is only now ready to participate and have much patience in yardwork and housework, but my husband and I have been stuck believing we are more restricted than we actually are -- as parents, as owners of a small house with too much stuff, and certainly as people who just don't have enough time.

While I snapped this photo, the cat let my son touch his ear for the first time.

Sometimes it takes a stupid thing like a forgotten diaper to get our heads out of our butts.


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See R.E.M singing "Gardening at Night" on YouTube

Like mother, like son?

"Where's the red pepper?" I asked E as I spooned the pesto out of the VitaMix. We'd just returned home from a week in Maine. While I unpacked, my husband came in from watering the plants with a huge bunch of basil and a small pepper that was about the size of our toddler's fist -- a little bigger and much redder than when we left. Volia: a dinner concept.

The pepper plants were gifts from an apartment-dwelling friend who ran out of room on her patio. E and I planted her leftovers in containers, too, because the plot where we used to garden in-ground has in the past two years become too shaded by ill-conceived pear trees (even though we removed two of them), and we weren't willing to utilize more visible parts of the yard for a garden. We did a few herbs in the ground in our side yard but did the peppers, tomato, basil, oregano, rosemary and some peas from seed (way too late, but they sprouted) in containers near the kitchen. I figured he'd benefit from the experience of a little planting even if it wasn't in the ground. He loved his Toddler-sized garden gloves and Kids' Hand Tool Set I bought from The Wacky World of Children, but the Toddler's Single Watering Can has gotten the most use.

"I eat it," he said, pointing to his empty mouth to clarify he meant past tense. LJ and I looked at each other.

"What do you mean? Where?"

"In the dining room."

We looked around for evidence. Nada. No seeds, no stem. A week later, we believe him; he really did eat it all, apparently while I was whirring away with the blender and stirring the Tinkyada rice pasta. We picked a green pepper a few days later, and his first thought was, "I want to show Daddy," who wasn't yet home. His second thought was to lick it and tease me that he was going to eat it. His third thought was crunch. The half-eaten pepper went into the fridge as evidence.

I'm told I did the same thing as a child -- ate peppers right out of the garden. But a major difference is, we really had a garden. We outfitted my whole fourth grade class with pumpkins. There were rows and rows of vegetables, thickets of berries, huge sproutings of rhubarb. Somehow I keep thinking my son will have those memories of living in the country even if it's not his experience.

LJ and I have been flirting with the idea of adding on to the house for a long time. Recently we've thought that we just need to purge all our unnecessary stuff and then just move out of the DC area to somewhere with clean air -- a place where our money will buy a bigger house and a bigger yard where we can grow most of what we'd want and live with less negative impact than our current suburban lifestyle. I loved that my son got to pick asparagus and strawberries at my parents' house in Michigan in June and that in July he walked right up to fennel growing at Beech Hill Farm in Mount Desert Island in Maine. (Well, I liked that he had the opportunity, not so much that he was so manic my husband had to take him out of the barn while I bought produce). Part of me wishes gardening was an everyday part of our lives.

But there sure is a lot of driving that goes on to get to my folks' house and to get to places out in the country. Maybe moving out to the western DC suburbs isn't such a crazy idea after all, LJ and I started to think. Housing prices are tanking. We could get something roomy and with a big yard and still be commutable to lots of places without much more time/gas/money than we currently spend. Why do we need to live so close to the city?

But I think we've come to realize we do like where we are. I've got a lot of friends here. I can walk to a grocery store and quickly get to whatever other places I need to go without having to cross town or country. And I can be on the bike path in about three minutes, carrying me to parks, a nature center and miles of wooded trail. I've got several options for natural foods grocery stores. I can get organic (and local when available) produce delivered to my home through Washington's Green Grocer, I'm not far from a farm drop where I can get pastured eggs and grassfed beef, and I could be part of any number of CSA's (community-supported agriculture) for produce if I could get over the issue of negiotiating an afternoon pickup around a child's sleep schedule (the main reason I didn't continue this year with Potomac Vegetable Farms).

And honestly, we have a big yard for this area. There's an entire steep slope that gets plenty of sun, and it's no picnic to mow it. So why don't we just make it a priority to garden? That would take something of a mindshift for us, since I'm not my dad and my husband is not his step-dad, who last year donated tons of produce to Food Gatherers in Ann Arbor. Somehow my fairly mainstream neighbors can find the time to grow a nice garden with three kids. The mom recently told me, "R just picked a green bean and ate it. Now I don't have to worry about her getting a vegetable!" As the parents of a son for whom green beans are our default/backup/quick-easy food and who will choose my sugar-free cookies with zucchini and carrot over frozen Van's (gluten-free) waffle, surely we can muster the mettle.

So it's not a done deal, but our next quest -- along with purging our junk through Freecycle and Craigslist -- is to research what we'd need to do this fall to prep our slope for a terraced garden in the fall.

I hope that by next summer we won't have any more Fuzzi Bunz diapers drying in the sun to broadcast our crunchiness, but I do hope we can build a decent garden.