After suffering through the first few hours of a drearily overcast May gray morning and early afternoon yesterday, I decided to go walk through our little urban garden here at the commune. There won’t be many of these moments here after this, as we are moving in two weeks…more on that later. But Sweet Moses was I grateful for what we found on the property yesterday! Everything you see below came out of the ground, off of a tree, or from a bush yesterday afternoon!
Some of our May bounty!
In addition to the artichokes, green beans, white nectarines, blackberries, fava beans, strawberries, and blueberries, we harvested our first onions and garlic cloves yesterday. Check out Matt and Bethany behind the artichoke plant with some of their (upside-down) treasures:
The Requisite Harvesting Pose, naturally
We’re even more excited for the tomatoes and corn that are working furiously to produce themselves for Bethany’s coming graduation party. Homemade salsa and homegrown grilled corn, c’mon!
As I (Lars) have very limited gifts when it comes to more traditional artistic expression (song, dance, rhythm, whistling), I find that most of my expression these days comes through gardening. As with many vehicles for artistic expression, mine comes mixed with motivations ranging from pure self-indulgence to expressions of altruistic social consciousness. First, I just love watching things grow. It feeds my soul to watch something go from seed(ling) to table, whether that be rosemary or fresh-cut roses (see below). But even more gratifying yesterday was knowing that what we took out of the ground was the product not of a petroleum-industrial-complex fueled food chain, but the labor of our own hands, backs, and hearts. And lots of waiting. We as a people in this country are not accustomed to waiting for our food, at least not waiting more than 20 minutes, let alone 20 weeks. And that is why we ship our food and produce all over the country in refrigerated fossil-fuel guzzlers. The average American raw ingredient for one meal travels roughly 1500 miles from the ground to the table. That’s insane. Ours traveled about 12 feet.
What is even more gratifying is knowing that we did not ingest a gram of pesticide residue last night. All of our garden is organic. That presents some benefits, like healthier fruits and bodies, reduced fossil fuel consumption (form the production of pesticides and fertilizers), and a sustainable environment, but also some difficulties. I for the life of me have not yet figured out how to grow organic strawberries well. Slugs and bugs get to way too many strawberries than I would like to admit. But I’m not about to pour poison onto my food to prevent it from being the dinner of some lesser creature. I’ll just have to experiment and learn to get creative. And to wait.
Waiting is really difficult for me. I like to be active. I don’t like to contemplate. I certainly have a pet peeve with inefficiency. All of which are being challenged as we try to grow artichokes. I’ve only barely acquired a taste for them, and still can’t bring myself to eat them with mayonaisse, which is like kryptonite in fermented form. That’s another story. For now I cannot decide if the artichoke is a gross exercise in inefficiency or a slow, beautifully unfolding agricultural artpiece. What started as a seed and then grew into three pitiful leaves was then transplanted into the ground outside our house in the middle of January. Yesterday it looked like this:
The artichoke - garden tyrant? or ag-art?
And hidden within this mass of xylem and phloem cells is fruit that is days away from harvest, though nothing of the sort appears evident from without. There are actually three artichokes in the photo below, can you spot them?
Hidden treasures...
The beautiful thing about urban gardening and harvesting is knowing that I didn’t have to pour gasoline into this artichoke to get it to our table, which is essentially what the food-industrial-system does to the vast majority of what enters our bodies. For many foods, from corn to beef to veggies, 10 calories of fossil fuel energy are used/consumed to grow the product for every 1 calorie of nutritional energy that enters our bodies. And that’s just the growing process, before we even burn barrels of oil transporting our food around the country.
So perhaps the artichoke is not the master of inefficiency. All it does is soak in energy from the sun and nutrients from the soil. Both of which are free, or with an irrigated drip line and a bill-paying landlord, virtually free. Free of charge, and free of artificial stimulants and chemicals coaxing the plant to grow bigger, faster. Even though the artichoke doesn’t appear to be the most efficient being on the planet, it is more efficient at transferring natural solar energy into food than any business model could dream of. It just takes a bit longer. But I’m getting used to that. The waiting game provides more time to hang out in the garden, pull out threatening weeds, to be with creation, and to reflect upon the Creator who designed us to steward the planet, not to kill it by transporting created things across the face of it because of market factors and elite sensibilities.
A sweet aroma complimented our sustainable evening
Part of the enjoyment last night wasn’t eaten at all, but was in the fellowship of hanging out with my wife and our roommate Matt, catching up, talking about politics, enjoying LeBron James’ resurgence against Orlando, and cooking. And recognizing that sustainability is not wholly about function, but form as well, these roses, which we did not eat, traveled petroleum-free the 20 feet from our front yard to our table to remind us that beauty and art are well worth the wait, and worth eating without a side of crude oil.
Recent Comments