Recently in Gardening Category

I just went to the browser on the computer Julie and I share, and typed in the address for FinancialArmageddon.com, an economic freakout site. It prompted me to go to FindWorms.com, a composting site apparently frequented by the more grounded half of this partnership. Draw the obvious conclusion. ;-)

Leslie Halleck is growing fava beans in her backyard. So is Julie Dreher, provided that stupid dog of ours can be kept out of the raised bed. Man, I love me some favas. So meaty and delicious. I like 'em best sauteed with diced pancetta. Though I must say, at this point in Great Lent, I am so over beans.

When summer gets here, I will do as I often do, and have a supper of nothing but fresh tomatoes and sliced cucumbers, dressed with only salt, pepper and a little balsamic vinegar. Really, summertime doesn't get any better than that. We're putting in tomatoes and cucumbers this year. And if they don't make, we're going over to Leslie Halleck's house and steal hers.

Livestock on the White House lawn? It's been done before.

Yesterday we were talking with some friends about why home vegetable gardening and raising livestock became so strange in American culture. We discussed how, as the country got richer after World War II, raising your own food came to be seen as a sign of poverty, of being low-class. A Dallas friend told me a previous mayor first successfully ran for City Council by promising to get rid of chickens and clotheslines in people's yards. This politician was a liberal Democrat; clearly it was meant to rein in the working-class and poor Mexicans, who did this sort of thing. This too, said my friend yesterday, is why it became illegal to grow vegetables in your front yard: you didn't want to give people the idea that this neighborhood is the kind of place where people can't afford to buy food at the supermarket. Perhaps if the Obamas make vegetable gardening hip, that'll change.

Historian Carl Sferrazza Anthony notes another cultural marker at work here:

For much of the 20th century, people believed canned vegetables were as good as fresh. That families -- including the one in the White House -- could have a wide variety of fruits and vegetables out of cans was seen as the cutting edge.

I grew up with garden vegetables, but then again, I was raised in the country, and didn't know any different. But my mother definitely had a certain attitude about meat, one I completely absorbed. She thought, and I did too, that if it didn't come from the supermarket, it was somehow DIRTY. I can't tell you how deep that went psychologically with me. To this day, I gag at the thought of eating venison, which most people where I'm from eat lots of; this is entirely a legacy of growing up thinking that deer meat was in some sense defiled. Which is odd, because we ate deer meat at my house growing up. I just somehow got the idea that meat had to come from a factory to be clean. I don't believe that now, and I eat meat straight from the farm today. Still, the psychological barrier is hard to overcome.

My mom's generation -- she's an early Baby Boomer -- was raised with propaganda against home cooking, and were taught to believe that things bought at the store or made at the factory were more hygienic, more modern. Finally, we seem to be breaking the spell, but it was and is powerful.

Three cheers for First Lady Michelle Obama, who will break ground today on a kitchen garden on the White House lawn! Excerpt:

Such a White House garden has been a dream of noted California chef Alice Waters, considered a leader in the movement to encourage consumption of locally grown, organic food. She has been appealing for change through the taste buds since the 1960s.

She organized a series of fundraising dinners in Washington before President Barack Obama's inauguration in January that served foods purchased from local producers at an area farmer's market to show how it can be done.

Reached Thursday at her Berkeley, Calif., restaurant, Chez Panisse, Waters said she was thrilled by the news.

"It just tells you that this country cares about people's good health and about the care of the land," she said. "To have this sort of 'victory' garden, this message goes out that everyone can grow a garden and have free food."

Surely praising this initiative and the example it sets is something that conservatives and liberals can agree on. What's not to like about growing your own vegetables, in your own backyard? You get fresh food, you learn something about how the real world works, you develop some self-sufficiency skills, you have fun.

The other morning, I woke up and looked out the window at our backyard. It's an ordinary backyard in the city in most respects. But there were fava beans, cilantro, lettuces, and other vegetables waking up in raised beds. There were chickens puttering around their run. There was, behind the shed, a compost pile taking all the fruit and vegetable scraps from our kitchen, and turning our kitchen waste into food for the vegetables we would eat this summer (seriously, we are amazed by how much less garbage we put in the bin now that we recycle assiduously, and compost all the organic waste; it takes us two weeks to fill up the normal trash bin now). My backyard, in other words, is alive.

And let me point out: my wife Julie did that. I had hardly any hand in it. She made this happen. I'm so proud of her.

UPDATE: Maybe the Obamas will get R2-D2 to garden for them!

I spent my post-liturgy Sunday moving dirt. Julie ordered last week four cubic yards of organic soil to be delivered to the house. The truck couldn't get into the backyard, so it dumped the pile right onto the front lawn. This soil is rich and manurey; we had a swarm of some sort of fly hovering over it. I had to transport as much of it as I could into the back yard, one wheelbarrowfull at a time. Worked all afternoon till my back just about gave out, and still didn't finish. This soil is so composty-rich, though, that a wave of heat would radiate out from it when I'd tuck my shovel into the center.

We're going to make raised beds for our fall and winter garden. The backyard soil here in Dallas is pretty awful, hence the having some good stuff brought in. We hope to plant turnip greens, salad greens, fava beans, onions and cilantro. I'm going to push for mustard greens too. It typically doesn't freeze in Dallas until late November, and our winters are fairly mild. So we'll see how it goes.

Are you putting in a fall garden? If so, what are you planting?

The stretch from October until the New Year is my favorite season of all. I wish it were more autumnal here in Dallas. I'm ready for hearth fires, Scotch, dark beer, roasts, beets and greens, cello music and corduroys. As ever, when we finally reach the No Turning Back point -- meaning that there's no chance of summer heat returning -- I'll have the ritual playing of Van Morrison and the Chieftains' "Irish Heartbeat," and we can all finally relax, having survived another Texas summer.

Here's a cool video from a man who is trying to encourage the next president to plant a kitchen garden on the White House lawn, to set a good example. More power to him! In this short video, set to...

Meet Dorothy. She's one of our three new chickens (Cleopatra and Pat Buckley -- the glamorous, intimidatingly self-possessed, fashionably black-clad one -- are her sisters). I'm reconciling myself to their presence. They're really something to watch scratch around the...

Actual real-life dialogue from my house this morning, as I saw Julie perusing something on the computer: Me: "What are you looking at?" Her: "I made a deal with a horse farm to pick up some horse manure." Silence. Her:...

That's the title of Holly Lebowitz Rossi's report about conservative Evangelical churches that are getting into gardening, partly as as a way to serve the poor. Excerpt: If contemporary faith and science clash on issues from evolution to abortion, environmental...

I know, I know, it's fatally easy to laugh at rich people who want to be locavores, but don't have time to garden or to go to the farmer's market, and who therefore hire people to do it for them....

Here's a neat story from today's Dallas Morning News tracking a trend among twentysomethings to do volunteer work on organic farms. Excerpt: WACO - In 27-year-old Chris Becker's cramped New York City apartment building, neighbors rarely greeted one another beyond...

Julie wants chickens. One of my young hipster co-workers, she's got chickens in her urban backyard, and raves about them. Julie is envious, and is going to go over and visit Jo's chickens this weekend, I think. Some women want...

It was sad to get home and see that much of our garden is lost to the heat, which hit triple digits for several days while we were gone. The cucumbers, on closer inspection, aren't going to make it. The...

Brief housekeeping note: The post titles will appear in the above format from here on out, just so you know. From Time comes this idea for useful front laws: Clarence Ridgley is the most popular guy on his block, and...

The Wall Street Journal takes notice of the trend in home vegetable gardening, which is taking off nicely in this time of economic stress. Excerpt: George Ball, chief executive of seed giant W. Atlee Burpee & Co. in Warminster, Pa.,...

I spent part of the weekend refamiliarizing myself with Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" in preparation for this morning's interview with him (which will be published in an upcoming issue of The American Conservative). Michael seemed amused to learn that...

Check out this cool video report from the NYT on the Dervaes family of Pasadena, Calif., who are raising 6,000 lbs of fruits and vegetables every year on one-fifth of an acre of land in the middle of the city....

In a must-read essay from the NYT Magazine, Michael Pollan addresses the dilemma that so many of us face: given the overwhelming problem of global warming, what can we individuals possibly do to make a difference? I was reading along...

In which Your Working Boy takes Boy Matthew's laptop outside and film's a short, humorless clip showing the wee backyard kitchen garden we planted. (And experimented with adding a video element to this blog). I promise future ones will be...

I seemed to recall today that the Armenian Orthodox theologian Vigen Guroian is an accomplished gardener, and that he'd written at least one book about gardening and theology. Well, I found a webpage from the public radio program Speaking of...

If you know the (excellent) film "Jean de Florette," you're going to think this is funny, but anyway, here goes: last night Julie and I watched the movie (for the first time in years), and decided at the end of...