The Urban Garden And The Drought Of 2016

Acorn squash. Tiny fruit and hardy any foliage.

Six weeks ago the urban garden looked pretty good. Hopeful. We were getting rain, and the temps were staying in the 80s F. Then came July.

Now, I'm almost ashamed to post pictures. This blog post should come with a trigger warning, that the images might be upsetting if you're, say, a vegetarian. This is the worst garden I think I've ever had in my life. Weeks of 90+ degree weather and drought conditions can kill a garden, which is pretty much what happened. Zucchini is something that everyone can grow. First time gardeners: Grow zucchini to really boost your confidence. They will grow to the size of small baseball bats if you don't watch them. But I think we've harvested about three summer squash and one zucchini, and the rest might just get pulled and thrown in one of the compost bins, which, by the way, are heating up in the summer sun and cooking the beejesus out of the compost, killing weed seeds and decomposing the material.

Remember that the deal we have with our landlord is we would only use collected rainwater to water the garden to keep the water bill from going sky high. But, when there isn't water coming out of the sky to replenish the water collection barrels, well... I was at Boston Public Market on Saturday, and one of the farmers there said they dug a pond for water, i.e. they dug a hole to get to the water table to access a supply of water. We did just have about two days of steady rain, and of course that's all it took for the weeds to take off and start choking out the plants.

It's hard to watch a garden get like this. You feel helpless. You total up all of the money you spent on seedlings and take your loss, and you tell yourself, well, at least we're not depending on surviving this way. And of course, then your imagination does wonder what it would be like if you actually did count on this for survival. And in a way we do. We count every penny, and last year, we cut our food bill dramatically with this little garden, so we're going to feel it in our wallet in the coming months. Last year we were living on salads from our garden during the summer, and the squash and eggplant, and I think it was well into March of this year that we finally finished the tomato sauce we had in the freezer from tomatoes we grew ourselves.

Other urban gardeners in our neighborhood are showing varying levels of success. Some gardens are really struggling. When I see one that's thriving, I just assume they're watering every day. One garden I noticed was laced with soaker hoses.  The boxes on the porch, which I hand water sometimes twice a day--between the sun and reflective walls, the porch can really heat up like an oven--are doing fine.

Tomorrow I think I'll do triage, dig up what's not going to survive, and plant peas, just to get them in the ground. I'll pin burlap down over the seeds and wait for cooler weather. Maybe next year we'll put out more than the two rain barrels that we have. Put them under as many downspouts as possible for the inevitable heat wave.

The herb boxes on the porch hang in there with extra TLC.

Oregano (along the back) is very heat tolerant.

Peppers have been producing small, but very flavorful fruit.

Sad potato patch.

The zucchini is barely alive. So sad. We miss sauteed zucchini and onion over pasta, a low-cal summer favorite of ours. 

Summer squash are very small this year.

We're getting tomatoes, but the actual plant is very fragile. Fruit is small.

It's almost unbelievable that these plants can actually yield.

This thyme has been in the garden for a couple of years now, surviving that terrible winter two years ago and this summer.

The Urban Garden In The Aftermath Of The Orlando Shooting

This year's first strawberries.

It's all over my Facebook feed and all over the news--the shooting that occurred Sunday at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. And I feel totally helpless. Should I post anything on Facebook? What can I add or say that hasn't already been said? Should I record my outrage for eternity? Honestly, that's not different than clicking "like", and I'm getting tired of that pointless ritual. Sure I can write to my senators, but I already know they're pro gun control. There seems to be nothing a person can do in this country to elicit change, especially in the political process. One guy tries to blow up a plane with his shoe--his shoe!!--and suddenly we're all taking off our shoes before we board an airplane. But these massacres happen time after time after time, and nothing happens. Nothing changes in the way we buy or handle weapons. No legislation. No one is voted out of office. Nothing.

So, at least every other day I go into the garden where I can do something. In the garden, weeds are easily identified and pulled, one by one or sometimes even in handfuls. If a plant needs some special care, I can give it. I work barefoot and feel directly connected to the earth through my skin. My fingers feel so many feelings; rough sun-heated earth and firm ripe healthy fruit and I can feel pinpricks to my knees when I kneel because I'm getting too old to just bend over or squat. I know, I'm not changing the world. I'm not directly affecting human beings, except maybe this one, and maybe that's the point. When there's nothing we can do, the best thing you can do is take care of yourself so that abject feeling of helplessness doesn't eat you up. I can work there and there are no pesticides getting on our food, and when I cook and eat it and watch Sue eat it and enjoy it, I know I did that. In a small way, I helped the world become a better place.

Today when I go shopping, I'll buy flour, both bread flour and whole wheat flour, for our bread that I'll make with my own hands. I'll buy food that was raised organically and meat that raised humanely, and it will cost us more because that's the way our society is organized right now: you need more money to stay healthy and treat animals and people well, otherwise there's no profit in food and people, and I think that it's Sue who goes out to her job and works everyday, and it's not always enjoyable, but at least for her labor I can take care of us, and I give thanks for that. Not thanks to your God, not to anyone's God, but to something that I know it out there, I don't know what, but maybe someday in my life's journey I'll learn.

The front bed is responding to the rain we've had, and now the sunshine.

Already the view of the garden is starting to fill in.

The squash bed is established, and the Jerusalem artichokes are in their glory.

Either this rain barrel has a hole in it, or one night an animal came and took a long drink of water.

Potatoes are up, and the lettuce will be ready to pick soon.

Looks like tomorrow I'll be staking tomatoes.

The Urban Garden Has Peppers

For some reason, I haven't been able to successfully grow peppers in the garden in the back here in Quincy. If any fruit did develop, it would always be small and hard and measly. It's always been kind of embarrassing. Men here, gardeners, always talk--they brag--about their "peppas." They'd grow them then "throw them on the grill" with onion for their steak tips. It was typical. I'm not a red meat guy, which always makes me suspect in the male grilling world and I certainly don't do steak tips on the grill. I'd say, save it for your Patriots tailgate party but in my 35 years living in Boston, I've been to exactly two Patriots games. My specialty is a nice, thick salmon steak slathered with mayo/lemon/fresh dill served with new potatoes in the oven, or boneless chicken thighs marinated all day in a Caribbean jerk.

I've never had trouble with peppers before. I always thought they were kind of a no-brainer kind of plant to grow. But then, when we moved to Quincy, the trouble started. Maybe peppers are the teenagers of the vegetable world, their job is to push the envelope and embarrass their parents at every turn, and I never asked to move to Quincy in the first place.

But, like teenagers, you don't give up on them.

So this year, I thought I'd give them one more chance and planted them in the a box on the porch. I found three of these boxes last spring on the curb in the garbage. They're old packing crates, and this will probably be the last season I'll get to use them. They're made of thin pine and the weather is taking its toll on them. This past winter, though, we stapled some heavy plastic over them and turned them into cold frames. With the mild winter that we had, we had fresh herbs well into January.

As you can see, the peppers are doing great. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's the intense heat they get on the porch, and the nice rich organic soil I've got them in. Maybe they're loners and introverts and just wanted space to themselves. Or maybe it's the chill environment they have, and they really love the sound of a wind chime.

The Urban Garden After Two Days Of Rain

Clothes drying on a gorgeous late spring day.

Chronicling the day-to-day of a garden is difficult, some say as interesting as watching grass grow. But there really is always something going on. Remember when I planted the seedlings and I was worried about the heat and the water? Well, so far the late spring is proving to be gorgeous. Let's hope we can have a lot of what we've had for the past couple of days, which consisted of about 24 hours of heavy downpours, giving the garden a really good soaking and filling the rain barrels, and now a few days of mild, eighty-degree days with nice puffy clouds floating in the sky. The wash is drying out on the porch. We dry our wash outside as many days as we can, including the winter. We do it because it's cheaper; we wash in cool water and we're not paying for gas to dry the clothes. The sun is a lot easier on our clothes than the dryer that beats your clothes up, so you're extending the life of your clothes. And the sun and breezes give them that outdoor smell and kind of soft and at the same time scratchy feel. If you don't understand what the garden and doing laundry has in common, I'll explain it later in another post.

So, the garden seems established. The seedlings seem to have rooted nicely. Friday was our wedding anniversary, and if you read the blog that day you'll know I get Sue irises for our anniversary every year, so they needed planting. Some of the onions are flowering, and I'm interested to see what they'll be like. Onions are bi-annuals, which means they need two seasons to seed. Once they seed it's too late to use the bulb, but I've heard the flowers are good to eat, so I'm excited to watch these grow.

Last week I noticed a widow-maker up in a tree in our neighbor's yard. I kept an eye on it, not wanting to be anywhere near it when it came down. I told my neighbor, Tom, about it, and there wasn't much he could do short of calling an emergency tree service. Thursday night around 10:30 Sue got a call to go out on the hotline (Sue occasionally works the after-hours emergency hotline.) She had just left the apartment and I had come into the office at the front of the house and put on some headphones and started to watch a movie when I heard a rumble. I immediately called Sue and when she asked what I wanted I said I just wanted to hear her voice. It turns out the limb had fallen, and I actually heard it in front of the house with headphones on. It was just dumb luck that Tom or no one esle in his family were in the yard, because there wouldn't have been any warning. In a vacuum, this limb would have fallen at 186,000 miles per second. Here on earth, it would have been slower, but not much.

Irises waiting to go onto the ground.

Onions starting to flower. The flowers are supposed to be pretty tasty.

Well, let's look on the bright side: Tom has a nice load of firewood to sell.

The 40-foot limb just cracked off under its own weight and from the rot of the trunk.

Another bunch of irises added to the garden.

Why Make A Garden...For Free?

A perfectly delightful little patch of urban heaven.

When I talk about gardening, I tend to use the countrified term, "making a garden," instead of using what I was taught was the more citified way of speaking, "planting a garden." I talk in the old-fashioned vernacular on purpose, and I do it for the same reason I still haven't expunged the word, "ain't", from my vocabulary. Using "make" for "plant" is just one more example of how gardening connects me to my roots in the country. And if I didn't continue to use that language--e.g. I ain't makin' a garden for nothing--or perform certain acts, which could only in certain ways be called sacramental, like continuing to use a double-edge razor like my father used to feel connected to him, I would be, in the words of Malcolm X, metaphorically cutting out my own tongue.

So I ask the question, Why would you make a garden for free? Why would you make a garden on a piece of property that wasn't yours, paying for it in quite a few hundred hard dollars and hours of sweat equity? I kept asking myself those questions as Sue and I worked the little plot of ground in front of the house where we rent in Quincy, Massachusetts, when the landlord and his brother won't even stoop to pull a weed. Am I some kind of chump? And, just like a lot of other answers I've stumbled upon, it came to me while I was sweating and chopping and bent over, my back aching, while planting because gardening for me is meditation and yoga combined.

Bottom line: I was raised to believe that every person in the world should accept an opportunity presented to them to make the world a better place. See, just like everything, it goes back to my southern/Midwestern roots. Sometimes making the world better means simply smiling at someone on the subway who clearly is having a bad day. How hard is it to smile? It might mean handing out your last dollar to a homeless person. But sometimes it gets a lot harder, and I'm not saying making a garden is the ultimate sacrifice. On the scale of smiling on the subway being at one end and giving someone a kidney being on the other end, I'd say a garden is still pretty low on the continuum. But in this age when giving a "like" and a "share" on Facebook now seem to be the benchmark for social activism (click a button and keep scrolling; you've done your part) getting your hands dirty amounts to some serious responsible behavior. However, in all honesty, if I had known how much money it would take--upwards of $400 plus--to complete this project, I might have balked. Still, I was aware this wasn't going to come cheap, and I still went ahead with it.

And there it was: Sue and I were presented with the opportunity to make the house where we live a little more pleasant for all of the people who live here, and also, let's not forget, the people who would pass by on the way to and from work. They could use a little cheering up, too. It's not that we felt we didn't have the option to say, no; it was more seeing a job that needed getting done, and we were the only ones who could (or would) do it. I think we understood the possibility better than some.

"To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived--that is to have succeeded."  --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our landlords, John and Steve, know nothing about growing plants. The proverbial green thumb? In their cases, they don't even have thumbs, much less thumbs of another color. They couldn't tell crabgrass from pachysandra, and honestly, they don't want to know. They watched with amazement as their weed patch of a front yard turned into what I would call a perfectly delightful little patch of urban heaven. For me, it was like being a cook and watching people enjoy a meal. I took delight in their delight.

 People who we didn't know, people who we've seen but never spoken to, would stop and comment and chat as we worked. It seems the front yard project became something of a topic of conversation for the neighborhood. I'll be watching, said one woman, an Asian who's first language wasn't English, meaning she'll be looking forward to what grows. A neighbor across the street, the wife in an older couple who have a pristine, Chem-Lawn lawn, actually flagged me down and stopped me while I was driving to compliment us on the front yard. In truth, the yard was a bit of a blight on the neighborhood, and I think there is a collective feeling of ownership, not only when something isn't looking good, but also when things are looking up.

And, of course, there were quite a few people who, when they learned we didn't own the house and no, we weren't getting reimbursed for the materials and labor, looked at us oddly and sometimes teased us and sometimes downright belittled us. Well, I hope your landlord appreciates you, said one, in a tone that suggested she never believed our landlord would appreciate us and we were simpletons to believe that he would. The answer that we were simply making the world a better place was, at times, greeted with  bemusement, in the way idealistic hippies were addressed for believing there could be peace in the world. Ours is a transactional world, and quid pro quo is expected.

So, there is a 15 x 15 foot plot of ground in Quincy, Massachusetts that is a little better today than it was yesterday. And I think there are a few people who are also. At the risk of sounding like the idealistic hippie that I once was and probably still am, if everyone in the world took 225 square feet and improved it, well, that would go a long way in making the world better for all of us.

The day after a storm. We have two full rain barrels. A barrel of water doesn't last that long during a hot summer. Let's keep praying for rain.

Coincidentally, irises were both Sue's and my father's favorite flowers, so for a few of our past anniversaries I've been giving Sue irises for the garden. See how a garden can reach back to your family's roots and make your life so much richer?