If you're living anywhere near me right now, you probably woke up into a Disney movie this morning. Not the modern Disney, mind you--no pirates, no Darth Vader, no Captain America. This would be the Disney of your grandparents, in which bluejays did laundry and princesses sang through open windows to emphasize just how unreasonably gorgeous it is outside. Indeed, as I sauntered through the doorway this morning, coffee cup in hand, I whistled my joviality at a passing bluejay, hoping at the very least that it might ball a pair of socks for me. Instead it opted to crap on my car. I suppose I deserved that.
Undeterred, I set out into the world, equipped only with the vaguest idea regarding the shape of my garden, a cloth mask, and a firmly intact terror of other living beings. Not because of fear of the coronavirus, mind you--if I haven't picked that up in the ICU full of critically ill coronavirus patients, I'm not worried about transmission through two masks from a Home Depot greeter--but because when other people get twitchy about their safety, I start to worry a bit about my own.
Maybe this is seguing toward Bad Religion territory.
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| Not pictured: the desiccated sacrifice to Nurgle, Chaos god of pestilence, by the assembled mob. |
Anyway, plants. I had a few goals in mind for the garden this summer:
- Salsa. Many moons ago, on a lovely day with weather not unlike that which we drink in right now, my dear mother declared that she was going to go into her own garden and come back with salsa. As I searched dumbstruck for the Tostitos tree, she plucked a few succulent tomatoes, diced them up with an onion, some garlic, and cilantro, mixed it all together, and presented it with a bowl of freshly baked tortilla chips. I thought it might be cool to be able to do that.
- Hot sauce: In a similar vein, I thought it would be a handy combination of my enjoyment of self-sufficiency, creation, preservation, and schadenfreude to be able to make a hot sauce out of ingredients I can grow myself. My first thought was that the vinegar may be difficult to source; my next thought was that I need only get lazy when I cork the last bottle of my next batch of wine.
- Function: Generally speaking, I'd like to be able to wander into my garden, spot a ready vegetable, pluck it off the vine, and have dinner. While obviously a mouthful of jalapenos probably won't suffice, for that reason I worked in squash, eggplant, and what may prove to be a colossal amount of potatoes. More on that last part in a minute.
- Survivability: Let's not get ahead, here. I've pulled off this whole "garden' thing exactly once, and while 100% is a nice figure, N = 1 diminishes it substantially. I suppose I still lack the stones to do this from the seed, which is why everything I put in the ground today already has leaves on it. But hey, full stomach > green thumb cred every time.
So, the garden. If you want to see the shell of it, check it out here. I have three beds, terraced, about 3' by 6', 7', and 9', top to bottom. The top has the frame of a cage that didn't see enough chicken wire, so now it's the laziest arbor in Montgomery County. In irrational shoot of kale made it through the winter and is thriving in the top bed, which I let lay as a sacrifice to the god of rabbits.
I'm pleased to announce that as of 1 p.m. today, the garden itself arrived in the prepared shell, in a flourish of split mulch bags, dogged scrabbling in the dirt, and a gentle soak with the hose to settle everything in. Behold!
Last year, I took a shotgun approach and let the tomatoes run free, turning the center planter into what I've dubbed Tomato Borneo. To my surprise they all thrived, and with only the flimsiest latticework to hold them, they soon exploded outward, linking up into a verdant rampart. If you could penetrate the outer thicket of vine, you'd be rewarded with the lush scent of about ten thousand Sun Sugar cherry tomatoes, free for the plucking, plus a few cucumbers laid across the ground for good measure.
Traditionally the bottom bed has been chock full of flowers, but flowers don't taste great and their nutritional value is nil as I am not a ruminant. My concession, however, was that vigorous looking lily you see at the very foot of the whole garden. There's a wooden lattice in the midst of that leafy embrace, and according to the tag the lily is only at a third of its full height, so I look forward to figuring out a clever way to support that as it grows.
Ah, and the potato box.
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| Zdravo, podrug. |
Doesn't "potato box" just land? Grapes, grapes are regal. Distinguished. Grapes get a trellis. Tomatoes, those lofty drops of heaven, they get towers. Potatoes? You put potatoes in a box. They are peasant food, and I mean that as an honor because I start most days with half of one.
The principle is brilliant: a small box of dirt, with room to expand. Plant the potatoes, wait until they break the surface, add more box, bury the plant again. It breaks the surface again, you bury it again. Rinse, lather, repeat, until you have four vertical feet of ground, chock full of potatoes. Unscrew the box panels as needed. I've heard of people breaking 100 lbs of potatoes on four square feet of patch just by building skyward, and I'm very interested to see if I could pull off something similar.
So to recap: a (relatively restrained) crop of tomatoes, peppers, squash, eggplants, and potatoes, plus one majestic-ass lily that alleges it can turn into a tree. We'll have to see what else I come across as spring progresses.
Y'know. Assuming the famished mobs don't rip me to shreds.
Listening to: (surprisingly not Bad Religion!) Martin Miller Session Band-Kashmir
(Re)reading: House of Chains by Steven Erikson (Malazan Book of the Fallen book IV)
Drinking: Workhorse Baltic Porter (Oh my god)
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