Earlier this week I posted about my favorite Indian cookbook on my lovely friend Debbie's blog for the vintage-obsessed, Did You Buy That New.
On Sustenance, I put up some beginner's tips for starting seeds indoors.
And today I posted to MOMocrats about the 21st century American phenomenon of health-insurance-based marriages of convenience.
Showing posts with label Gardening. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gardening. Show all posts
Friday, February 19, 2010
Monday, February 15, 2010
In Which I Resume Chronicling My Gardening Addiction
Readers of the backyard food growerly persuasion take note:
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
Food Karma
A few days ago, I found myself sitting at my dinner table, silently rejoicing because, for the first time ever in his life of five and a half years, my son ate a whole hot dog, complete with bun, without my prompting, wheedling, or bargaining with him to get him to finish it.
A hot dog. And not one of those fancy organic locally processed free range all-natural nitrate-free hot dogs, either. Just a hot dog. From Oscar Meyer. I bought it in a bright plastic package at the grocery store, on sale, plucked from a whole refrigerator case full of processed meat.
All right, it was a turkey-based highly processed, highly packaged, nitrite-filled factory farmed meat hot dog. But still.
I am a vegetarian. I am an environmentalist. I am a gardener. I am a from-scratch baker. I read every book Michael Pollan writes. I am concerned about the health and environmental consequences of our heavily industrialized food system. I feel morally troubled, not so much over human consumption of meat in principle (hunting animals for food is, after all, a thing we apex predators evolved to do), but over the particular treatment of domestic animals in the factory farm system.
When I can afford it, I try to buy locally grown and/or organic food. In the summer, I grow my most of my own vegetables and buy my much of my fruit at the farmer's market. I sneakily swap free-range chicken and beef into my carnivorous husband's diet.
And yet I take my son to Burger King and let him choose a hamburger that has probably been processed with a mechanically rendered beef fat slurry treated with ammonia. I let him eat cheap chicken nuggets sometimes from Tyson (which once plead guilty to 20 violations of the federal Clean Water Act in a town just three hours away from mine, was investigated by the Justice Department for illegally smuggling Mexican undocumented workers into the country to work for little pay in dangerous conditions, and was investigated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for animal cruelty after a shocking video released by PETA).
And I rejoice when he eats a hot dog.
Before my son was born, I, like so many people who do not have children but plan to, held a vision of my future as a parent that was thoroughly colored by idealistic naivete.
Certainly, I had encountered children who were picky eaters before I myself became a parent. I had gone to school with children who would only eat cheese pizza, plain hamburgers, and french fries; I had been a babysitter to a girl who would not eat anything that was green; my own (much) younger brother once went through a month-long phase during which all he would eat willingly was white rice seasoned with butter, salt, and pepper.
Outwardly I sympathized with the parents of these children (including my own beleaguered mother), and would never have breathed a word of criticism to their faces, but, secretly, I judged them. By and large, I thought, parents of picky eaters who subsisted on junk food simply hadn't tried hard enough to get their children to eat more wholesome things.
Wasn't my own mother much more lax with my little brother, her youngest child, in every regard than she had been with me, the oldest? Didn't she allow him liberal access, as a toddler, to nutritionally questionable foods like white bread and soda, both of which had been largely forbidden to me in my early years in favor of wheat bread and juice?
Not that I blamed her, exactly, for going a little soft with my kid brother — she was much busier as a mother of three than she had been as a mother of one, after all — but, well.
I was sure I that, whenever I got around to having my own child, I would be capable of preventing any junk food addictions and overcoming any picky tendencies with proper planning and diligence.
My child would learn to prefer fresh fruit to cakes or cookies, because I would limit sweets and provide a wide variety of the tastiest fresh organic produce at all times.
But, at the same time, my child would not develop a secret, deprivation-driven obsession with desserts and confections, because I would not deny them to him altogether; he would have candy at Halloween, and cake at his birthdays; I would be reasonable.
My child would learn to love broccoli and spinach, because I would introduce vegetables at an early age, and eat them at every meal myself in front of him.
My child, if he ate meat, would learn to be ethical in his choices. I would do my best to serve him organic, hormone-free milk, and eggs from free-range chickens. I would offer him sausage from locally hunted wild deer, or hamburgers from ethically raised grass-fed beef. We would not eat at fast food chain restaurants except under serious duress. (Not that I always followed this rule myself, of course. But I would when I was a parent.) When he was old enough to understand, I would tell him why I, as his mother, made these choices about our food.
My child would never develop a taste for highly processed, environmentally hazardous junk foods, like Oscar Meyer hot dogs, because I simply would not have them in my house.
My child would never go on a month-long rice-only jag.
Right.
I had no idea, before my son was born — in fact, I had no idea before I started trying to feed my son solid food — that I would one day find myself praying desperately to a variety of divine beings I don't even necessarily believe in that my son would eat even just one bite of white rice.
That despite my best intentions, despite my most diligent efforts, despite my careful consultation of all the most respected child-rearing manuals (from Sears to Spock), despite advice from family members and friends and pediatricians and dieticians and nutritionists and, later, as the situation grew more obviously dire, a whole host of medical specialists with much longer titles, the goal posts for getting my child to "eat healthily" would move from "Teach him to eat organic vegetables and whole grains!" to "Teach him to eat, um, anything besides breastmilk and three flavors of baby food?" to "Dear God, please get my child to eat ANYTHING AT ALL."
Yet that is where I found myself, just a few years ago: at the table, in a house with a pantry and fridge filled top to bottom with healthy, tasty, natural food, facing an underweight, slowly wasting toddler with failure to thrive, desperately trying to feed a clearly desperately hungry child who would eat almost nothing I offered him.
At his thinnest during this period of self-imposed starvation — at around 12-18 months,when his weight was no longer even present on the growth chart for a child his height and age — Isaac was so thin he looked sick to me. Though he was an energetic, intelligent little boy with bright eyes and a quick smile, when his clothes were off, you could count every rib and see every knob of his spine. He lacked the characteristic pillowy paunch of a toddler. His belly, instead, curved inward. I could not bear to look at his terrible thinness, and yet I could not look away. He looked like a public service poster of a starving child. But he was a real child, in front of me. He was MY child.
These were, without a doubt, the most frustrating, depressing, terrifying few months of my entire life. When I think back on it now, I still shudder. I've been attacked on the street for the last ten dollars in my purse; I've spent nights sleeping hungry and cold in car too young to understand why I'd lost my home and not knowing if I'd see a home again; I've had my heart so utterly broken by a lover's betrayal that I felt it might never beat again. And I would take any of those days over my worst days of fear and helplessness worrying over the health of my son.
I spent thousands of dollars I did not actually have at this time taking my son to expensive medical specialists. An endocrinologist. A pediatric gastroenterologist. A pediatric food allergist. A child psychologist. He was tested for every genetic disease, every bacterial or viral infection, every hormonal imbalance or food intolerance or oral-motor developmental delay or structural intestinal defect these experts could think of that might cause an otherwise healthy and normally developing child to simply refuse to eat. I held my screaming toddler down while phlebotomists with impossibly large needles withdrew vial after vial of his blood from his tiny arms. I strapped him to a table while specialists taped bizarre plastic devices to his private parts to collect urine samples. I restrained him while an allergist pricked his naked back with 40 simultaneous needles. I watched him wheel away, sedated and anesthetized, to a room where a doctor would shove a camera snake down his throat to examine his intestines. Every time I held my child and allowed someone to hurt him in the name of helping him, I wished desperately that they were hurting me instead.
And for months of this, no one could give me an answer.
I was constantly worried that my son might stop eating altogether require surgery to install a feeding tube. I was terrified — cold sweats, nightmares terrified —that someone among this team of experts who could not solve the problem of why my child would not eat would decide that I must be purposefully starving him — that I was abusing him, that I was one of those awful evil Munchausen by proxy parents (which I only even knew existed after watching The Sixth Sense). During my nightly fevered internet searches for things like "failure to thrive" and "post surgical post-traumatic feeding disorder of infancy" and "infantile anorexia" and "Dear Sweet Internet Gods, why the F@#K won't my starving child eat?" I had come across a single message board posting by the friend of a relative of an innocent woman who had supposedly had her failure to thrive child taken away from her by the state under suspicion of abuse, only to have child services discover that the child would not eat in foster care, either, and in fact had a terrible medical condition underlying her self-starving ways, which of course only worsened during the stress of separation from her parents, etc.
Because I hated myself (what mother who can't successfully feed her child doesn't hate herself?), I bookmarked it and reread it from time to time in ritual self-flagellation.
In reality, I spent nearly every waking hour either attempting to get my child to eat, or thinking about how I ought best to attempt to get my child to eat.
I was a terrible bore at playdates and children's birthday parties. "What is going on with you?" the unsuspecting might ask. And I would say, "Oh, my son still isn't eating well at all. I'm very worried. I don't know what to do." And then, compulsively I would relate, in obsessive detail, my latest medically-guided attempt at intervention. A detached part of myself would observe my nervous patter and mentally shout, "Change the subject! Talk about the weather!"
But for me, there was no weather. There were only Days When Isaac Ate Well, and Days When Isaac Did Not Eat.
Friends and family gave me constant well-meaning advice that made me want to punch them in the face. It's not natural, or at least is certainly seems unnatural, for a seemingly healthy, hungry child to refuse all food for months on end, and so naturally most people with casual knowledge of my situation assumed I must be making some simple parenting mistake.
"Don't try so hard to encourage him to eat." "Try harder to encourage him to eat." "Stop breastfeeding him." "Nurse him more often." "Strap him to his high chair and don't let him leave all day until he's finished his whole plate." "Tell him if he doesn't eat one bite of peas you'll make him eat the whole bowl." "Try plainer foods." "Try spicy foods." "Let him see other children eat in front of him." (When he ate with other children, he would, in fact, helpfully give the other children all of his food.) "Get someone else to feed him." (His father, his grandmother, and his aunt had all tried.)
Others assumed I was exaggerating the extent of the problem and advised me he would simply grow out of not eating if I just left him alone.
Every time I spoke in public about my son's eating problems, unintentionally hurtful judgment and well-meaning but uninformed advice surrounded me until I thought I would drown in frustration and self-loathing. And yet I had nothing else to speak about. Because my days were consumed with trying to solve this problem.
When an occupational therapist finally helped my family find a diagnosis — sensory processing disorder — and I finally, finally found therapies that would slowly but surely help my son overcome the severe tactile sensitivity and texture aversions that were driving his fear of solid food, every bite my son took of every new food seemed like a blessing. It didn't matter, to me, whether that new food was a fresh-picked organic locally grown Winesap apple or a hot dog. It was FOOD, damn it, and my son was eating it. My new motto became "If it has calories, and it's not obviously poison? He can eat it."
I know better, now, than to judge the parents I see feeding their children chicken nuggets and fries and soda at McDonald's. Not until I've walked a mile in their shoes. Not until I've taken the beam from my own eye.
But now, with a solid space of four years between me and the worst trauma and fear over my son's initial failure to eat enough to thrive, I am beginning, once again, to judge myself.
Has my gratitude at his graduation from pathologically picky eater to typical picky eater — his transformation from a child who was thisclose to life on a gastric feeding tube to one of "those" picky children, who only (ONLY?!?) reliably eats plain-tasting sweet breakfast cereals (that must be dry), toast, plain, white flour pancakes with plain syrup, plain scrambled eggs, bacon, chicken nuggets, hamburgers, hot dogs, grilled cheese sandwiches, plain quesadillas, plain macaroni and cheese, Swiss (it must be Swiss!) cheese and crackers, french fries, corn chips, potato chips, ketchup, applesauce, sugar-sweetened cooked carrots, mashed sweet potatoes IF they have marshmallows on top, strawberry-flavored fruit leather, the occasional raisin or dried blueberry, vanilla ice cream, and vanilla or banana-flavored yogurt — has my utter, blessed, soul-healing relief that my child finally eats enough of a variety that we can take him to a fast food restaurant and order something he will actually eat off the menu, given me an unjustified feeling of permission to stop trying in the healthy food department?
Have I given up entirely on that dream of a child who blithely eats homegrown tomatoes, organic green vegetables, Indian lentils, and Thai curried tofu?
How do I feel, really, about my weekly purchase of Tyson chicken and nitrite-laden Oscar Meyer hot dogs?
The truth is, there is a little unhappy voice in the back of my brain that still protests every time when I plop factory-farmed meat and preservative-laden snack foods in my grocery cart. Even when I know we can't really afford this week to try the organic grass-fed beef hot dogs, at the very real risk that my son will reject them because they don't "taste right" like the brand he's accustomed to and they will rot and I will have to throw them away.
I struggle regularly with how hard to push my son about the fact that he eats no green vegetables, at all, ever.
As soon as he was old enough to hold a trowel I started involving him intensively in my work in the family garden, hoping that his enthusiastic affection for the bean and pepper plants he so carefully planted and watered himself might translate into some sort of affection for green peppers or green beans, but that hope was in vain. Oh, he's gamely popped fresh homegrown organic baby peas just picked off the plant into his mouth at my insistence, more than once, and screwed up his face in displeasure, and spit them out again. And I let him.
I've tried ordering beautifully presented, perfectly seasoned vegetables for him at restaurants, and he dutifully tries them and spits them out, and I let him. I've tried hiding vegetables in sauces (which he doesn't much care for anyway) and homemade breads, and he tries them and spits them out, and I let him.
After such a long exhausting battle to get him to eat enough solid food at all, I don't want to make his life, or mine, all about his eating now. But when he's grown, if he still hasn't developed a taste for vegetables or fresh fruit — if his limited diet starts once again to affect his health — if he, ever the sensitive soul, always rescuing stranded earthworms after a rain and asking his father to put spiders outside rather than smash them — realizes the impact of his childhood diet on animals and the environment — will he blame me?
Will he think I didn't try hard enough? Will he think I tried too hard?
A hot dog. And not one of those fancy organic locally processed free range all-natural nitrate-free hot dogs, either. Just a hot dog. From Oscar Meyer. I bought it in a bright plastic package at the grocery store, on sale, plucked from a whole refrigerator case full of processed meat.
All right, it was a turkey-based highly processed, highly packaged, nitrite-filled factory farmed meat hot dog. But still.
I am a vegetarian. I am an environmentalist. I am a gardener. I am a from-scratch baker. I read every book Michael Pollan writes. I am concerned about the health and environmental consequences of our heavily industrialized food system. I feel morally troubled, not so much over human consumption of meat in principle (hunting animals for food is, after all, a thing we apex predators evolved to do), but over the particular treatment of domestic animals in the factory farm system.
When I can afford it, I try to buy locally grown and/or organic food. In the summer, I grow my most of my own vegetables and buy my much of my fruit at the farmer's market. I sneakily swap free-range chicken and beef into my carnivorous husband's diet.
And yet I take my son to Burger King and let him choose a hamburger that has probably been processed with a mechanically rendered beef fat slurry treated with ammonia. I let him eat cheap chicken nuggets sometimes from Tyson (which once plead guilty to 20 violations of the federal Clean Water Act in a town just three hours away from mine, was investigated by the Justice Department for illegally smuggling Mexican undocumented workers into the country to work for little pay in dangerous conditions, and was investigated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for animal cruelty after a shocking video released by PETA).
And I rejoice when he eats a hot dog.
Before my son was born, I, like so many people who do not have children but plan to, held a vision of my future as a parent that was thoroughly colored by idealistic naivete.
Certainly, I had encountered children who were picky eaters before I myself became a parent. I had gone to school with children who would only eat cheese pizza, plain hamburgers, and french fries; I had been a babysitter to a girl who would not eat anything that was green; my own (much) younger brother once went through a month-long phase during which all he would eat willingly was white rice seasoned with butter, salt, and pepper.
Outwardly I sympathized with the parents of these children (including my own beleaguered mother), and would never have breathed a word of criticism to their faces, but, secretly, I judged them. By and large, I thought, parents of picky eaters who subsisted on junk food simply hadn't tried hard enough to get their children to eat more wholesome things.
Wasn't my own mother much more lax with my little brother, her youngest child, in every regard than she had been with me, the oldest? Didn't she allow him liberal access, as a toddler, to nutritionally questionable foods like white bread and soda, both of which had been largely forbidden to me in my early years in favor of wheat bread and juice?
Not that I blamed her, exactly, for going a little soft with my kid brother — she was much busier as a mother of three than she had been as a mother of one, after all — but, well.
I was sure I that, whenever I got around to having my own child, I would be capable of preventing any junk food addictions and overcoming any picky tendencies with proper planning and diligence.
My child would learn to prefer fresh fruit to cakes or cookies, because I would limit sweets and provide a wide variety of the tastiest fresh organic produce at all times.
But, at the same time, my child would not develop a secret, deprivation-driven obsession with desserts and confections, because I would not deny them to him altogether; he would have candy at Halloween, and cake at his birthdays; I would be reasonable.
My child would learn to love broccoli and spinach, because I would introduce vegetables at an early age, and eat them at every meal myself in front of him.
My child, if he ate meat, would learn to be ethical in his choices. I would do my best to serve him organic, hormone-free milk, and eggs from free-range chickens. I would offer him sausage from locally hunted wild deer, or hamburgers from ethically raised grass-fed beef. We would not eat at fast food chain restaurants except under serious duress. (Not that I always followed this rule myself, of course. But I would when I was a parent.) When he was old enough to understand, I would tell him why I, as his mother, made these choices about our food.
My child would never develop a taste for highly processed, environmentally hazardous junk foods, like Oscar Meyer hot dogs, because I simply would not have them in my house.
My child would never go on a month-long rice-only jag.
Right.
I had no idea, before my son was born — in fact, I had no idea before I started trying to feed my son solid food — that I would one day find myself praying desperately to a variety of divine beings I don't even necessarily believe in that my son would eat even just one bite of white rice.
That despite my best intentions, despite my most diligent efforts, despite my careful consultation of all the most respected child-rearing manuals (from Sears to Spock), despite advice from family members and friends and pediatricians and dieticians and nutritionists and, later, as the situation grew more obviously dire, a whole host of medical specialists with much longer titles, the goal posts for getting my child to "eat healthily" would move from "Teach him to eat organic vegetables and whole grains!" to "Teach him to eat, um, anything besides breastmilk and three flavors of baby food?" to "Dear God, please get my child to eat ANYTHING AT ALL."
Yet that is where I found myself, just a few years ago: at the table, in a house with a pantry and fridge filled top to bottom with healthy, tasty, natural food, facing an underweight, slowly wasting toddler with failure to thrive, desperately trying to feed a clearly desperately hungry child who would eat almost nothing I offered him.
At his thinnest during this period of self-imposed starvation — at around 12-18 months,when his weight was no longer even present on the growth chart for a child his height and age — Isaac was so thin he looked sick to me. Though he was an energetic, intelligent little boy with bright eyes and a quick smile, when his clothes were off, you could count every rib and see every knob of his spine. He lacked the characteristic pillowy paunch of a toddler. His belly, instead, curved inward. I could not bear to look at his terrible thinness, and yet I could not look away. He looked like a public service poster of a starving child. But he was a real child, in front of me. He was MY child.
These were, without a doubt, the most frustrating, depressing, terrifying few months of my entire life. When I think back on it now, I still shudder. I've been attacked on the street for the last ten dollars in my purse; I've spent nights sleeping hungry and cold in car too young to understand why I'd lost my home and not knowing if I'd see a home again; I've had my heart so utterly broken by a lover's betrayal that I felt it might never beat again. And I would take any of those days over my worst days of fear and helplessness worrying over the health of my son.
I spent thousands of dollars I did not actually have at this time taking my son to expensive medical specialists. An endocrinologist. A pediatric gastroenterologist. A pediatric food allergist. A child psychologist. He was tested for every genetic disease, every bacterial or viral infection, every hormonal imbalance or food intolerance or oral-motor developmental delay or structural intestinal defect these experts could think of that might cause an otherwise healthy and normally developing child to simply refuse to eat. I held my screaming toddler down while phlebotomists with impossibly large needles withdrew vial after vial of his blood from his tiny arms. I strapped him to a table while specialists taped bizarre plastic devices to his private parts to collect urine samples. I restrained him while an allergist pricked his naked back with 40 simultaneous needles. I watched him wheel away, sedated and anesthetized, to a room where a doctor would shove a camera snake down his throat to examine his intestines. Every time I held my child and allowed someone to hurt him in the name of helping him, I wished desperately that they were hurting me instead.
And for months of this, no one could give me an answer.
I was constantly worried that my son might stop eating altogether require surgery to install a feeding tube. I was terrified — cold sweats, nightmares terrified —that someone among this team of experts who could not solve the problem of why my child would not eat would decide that I must be purposefully starving him — that I was abusing him, that I was one of those awful evil Munchausen by proxy parents (which I only even knew existed after watching The Sixth Sense). During my nightly fevered internet searches for things like "failure to thrive" and "post surgical post-traumatic feeding disorder of infancy" and "infantile anorexia" and "Dear Sweet Internet Gods, why the F@#K won't my starving child eat?" I had come across a single message board posting by the friend of a relative of an innocent woman who had supposedly had her failure to thrive child taken away from her by the state under suspicion of abuse, only to have child services discover that the child would not eat in foster care, either, and in fact had a terrible medical condition underlying her self-starving ways, which of course only worsened during the stress of separation from her parents, etc.
Because I hated myself (what mother who can't successfully feed her child doesn't hate herself?), I bookmarked it and reread it from time to time in ritual self-flagellation.
In reality, I spent nearly every waking hour either attempting to get my child to eat, or thinking about how I ought best to attempt to get my child to eat.
I was a terrible bore at playdates and children's birthday parties. "What is going on with you?" the unsuspecting might ask. And I would say, "Oh, my son still isn't eating well at all. I'm very worried. I don't know what to do." And then, compulsively I would relate, in obsessive detail, my latest medically-guided attempt at intervention. A detached part of myself would observe my nervous patter and mentally shout, "Change the subject! Talk about the weather!"
But for me, there was no weather. There were only Days When Isaac Ate Well, and Days When Isaac Did Not Eat.
Friends and family gave me constant well-meaning advice that made me want to punch them in the face. It's not natural, or at least is certainly seems unnatural, for a seemingly healthy, hungry child to refuse all food for months on end, and so naturally most people with casual knowledge of my situation assumed I must be making some simple parenting mistake.
"Don't try so hard to encourage him to eat." "Try harder to encourage him to eat." "Stop breastfeeding him." "Nurse him more often." "Strap him to his high chair and don't let him leave all day until he's finished his whole plate." "Tell him if he doesn't eat one bite of peas you'll make him eat the whole bowl." "Try plainer foods." "Try spicy foods." "Let him see other children eat in front of him." (When he ate with other children, he would, in fact, helpfully give the other children all of his food.) "Get someone else to feed him." (His father, his grandmother, and his aunt had all tried.)
Others assumed I was exaggerating the extent of the problem and advised me he would simply grow out of not eating if I just left him alone.
Every time I spoke in public about my son's eating problems, unintentionally hurtful judgment and well-meaning but uninformed advice surrounded me until I thought I would drown in frustration and self-loathing. And yet I had nothing else to speak about. Because my days were consumed with trying to solve this problem.
When an occupational therapist finally helped my family find a diagnosis — sensory processing disorder — and I finally, finally found therapies that would slowly but surely help my son overcome the severe tactile sensitivity and texture aversions that were driving his fear of solid food, every bite my son took of every new food seemed like a blessing. It didn't matter, to me, whether that new food was a fresh-picked organic locally grown Winesap apple or a hot dog. It was FOOD, damn it, and my son was eating it. My new motto became "If it has calories, and it's not obviously poison? He can eat it."
I know better, now, than to judge the parents I see feeding their children chicken nuggets and fries and soda at McDonald's. Not until I've walked a mile in their shoes. Not until I've taken the beam from my own eye.
But now, with a solid space of four years between me and the worst trauma and fear over my son's initial failure to eat enough to thrive, I am beginning, once again, to judge myself.
Has my gratitude at his graduation from pathologically picky eater to typical picky eater — his transformation from a child who was thisclose to life on a gastric feeding tube to one of "those" picky children, who only (ONLY?!?) reliably eats plain-tasting sweet breakfast cereals (that must be dry), toast, plain, white flour pancakes with plain syrup, plain scrambled eggs, bacon, chicken nuggets, hamburgers, hot dogs, grilled cheese sandwiches, plain quesadillas, plain macaroni and cheese, Swiss (it must be Swiss!) cheese and crackers, french fries, corn chips, potato chips, ketchup, applesauce, sugar-sweetened cooked carrots, mashed sweet potatoes IF they have marshmallows on top, strawberry-flavored fruit leather, the occasional raisin or dried blueberry, vanilla ice cream, and vanilla or banana-flavored yogurt — has my utter, blessed, soul-healing relief that my child finally eats enough of a variety that we can take him to a fast food restaurant and order something he will actually eat off the menu, given me an unjustified feeling of permission to stop trying in the healthy food department?
Have I given up entirely on that dream of a child who blithely eats homegrown tomatoes, organic green vegetables, Indian lentils, and Thai curried tofu?
How do I feel, really, about my weekly purchase of Tyson chicken and nitrite-laden Oscar Meyer hot dogs?
The truth is, there is a little unhappy voice in the back of my brain that still protests every time when I plop factory-farmed meat and preservative-laden snack foods in my grocery cart. Even when I know we can't really afford this week to try the organic grass-fed beef hot dogs, at the very real risk that my son will reject them because they don't "taste right" like the brand he's accustomed to and they will rot and I will have to throw them away.
I struggle regularly with how hard to push my son about the fact that he eats no green vegetables, at all, ever.
As soon as he was old enough to hold a trowel I started involving him intensively in my work in the family garden, hoping that his enthusiastic affection for the bean and pepper plants he so carefully planted and watered himself might translate into some sort of affection for green peppers or green beans, but that hope was in vain. Oh, he's gamely popped fresh homegrown organic baby peas just picked off the plant into his mouth at my insistence, more than once, and screwed up his face in displeasure, and spit them out again. And I let him.
I've tried ordering beautifully presented, perfectly seasoned vegetables for him at restaurants, and he dutifully tries them and spits them out, and I let him. I've tried hiding vegetables in sauces (which he doesn't much care for anyway) and homemade breads, and he tries them and spits them out, and I let him.
After such a long exhausting battle to get him to eat enough solid food at all, I don't want to make his life, or mine, all about his eating now. But when he's grown, if he still hasn't developed a taste for vegetables or fresh fruit — if his limited diet starts once again to affect his health — if he, ever the sensitive soul, always rescuing stranded earthworms after a rain and asking his father to put spiders outside rather than smash them — realizes the impact of his childhood diet on animals and the environment — will he blame me?
Will he think I didn't try hard enough? Will he think I tried too hard?
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Salad Days
"I'm surrounded by plants! It's like a whole family of plants, and this is their house. And I'm in the living room."
"I can't reach the beans at the top."
"I will pick the green beans, but you can eat them, Mommy."
"You don't want to try even just one? But you planted these bean plants, kid. The plant grew the green beans for you."
"No, I don't want to try one. Nope."
"You don't want to try even just one? But you planted these bean plants, kid. The plant grew the green beans for you."
"No, I don't want to try one. Nope."
"Daddy can eat the green beans with holes in them."
Sunday, July 06, 2008
First Fruits
Tomatoes, meet your new friend, Basil.
I gave one of these first two tomatoes to my next door neighbor. Who promptly ate it whole, in front of me.
I gave one of these first two tomatoes to my next door neighbor. Who promptly ate it whole, in front of me.
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Anticipation
Anticipation
Aspirations
Disappointment
(Alternate Title: Death to All Sunflower-Eating Rabbits. Except They Are So Fuzzy and Cute. Why Are Ruthless Engines of Destruction Fuzzy and Cute?)
Anticipation
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
As I Watch Everyone Freak Out About Tomatoes
I kind of wish I had planted mine a little sooner this year. I had to plant practically everything later than I wanted to, because all that crazy rain we had in May interfered with expanding my garden plot and building a new fence in a timely fashion (and also temporarily turned my garden soil to sludge, and also encouraged fungal growth and insect infestation on the few plants I did plant on time).
But, at the same time, I do feel a certain sense of satisfaction that while most Americans will be eyeing their store-bought tomatoes warily all summer even after this recall is over with, in a month or so, I'll be happily munching organically-grown, salmonella-free tomatoes out of my backyard garden without a second thought.
And if last year's tomato harvest is any indication of the success this year will bring, so will several neighbors up and down the street.
(You're welcome.)
And to all those currently suffering from tomato phobia who do not yet have a backup plan: do note that tomato plants, stakes and cages are still on sale at hardware stores and garden centers. All a tomato plant needs is a patch of dirt, lots of sun, lots of water, and something to lean on. For about $5 and a few hours of your time over the next month or two, you can have two or three plants providing you with fresh produce, oxygen, a reduced carbon footprint, and a sense of accomplishment.
Plus peace of mind.
But, at the same time, I do feel a certain sense of satisfaction that while most Americans will be eyeing their store-bought tomatoes warily all summer even after this recall is over with, in a month or so, I'll be happily munching organically-grown, salmonella-free tomatoes out of my backyard garden without a second thought.
And if last year's tomato harvest is any indication of the success this year will bring, so will several neighbors up and down the street.
(You're welcome.)
And to all those currently suffering from tomato phobia who do not yet have a backup plan: do note that tomato plants, stakes and cages are still on sale at hardware stores and garden centers. All a tomato plant needs is a patch of dirt, lots of sun, lots of water, and something to lean on. For about $5 and a few hours of your time over the next month or two, you can have two or three plants providing you with fresh produce, oxygen, a reduced carbon footprint, and a sense of accomplishment.
Plus peace of mind.
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Hey, Sorry I Haven't Been Around Much, Folks
But I've had a busy couple of weeks. Aside from my involvement in an epic arms race against fuzzy, adorable, rapacious baby rabbits with a taste for rosemary, sage, oregano, dead nettle, (poisonous!) tansy, and, hey, apparently, ANYTHING THAT GROWS, I've been working on a series of interviews with political candidates.
If you'd like to see what I've been up to, go read the first half of my MOMocrats interview with Nebraska Senate hopeful Scott Kleeb, a cattle rancher, duck hunter, and genuine cowboy who also happens to have a Master's in International Relations and a PhD in History.
I promise to be back here soon with the final post in my Victory Gardens series, as well as a meditation on the question of whether or not to have a second child.
If you'd like to see what I've been up to, go read the first half of my MOMocrats interview with Nebraska Senate hopeful Scott Kleeb, a cattle rancher, duck hunter, and genuine cowboy who also happens to have a Master's in International Relations and a PhD in History.
I promise to be back here soon with the final post in my Victory Gardens series, as well as a meditation on the question of whether or not to have a second child.
Friday, May 02, 2008
My Victory Gardens, Part Two
Read Part One.
During my pregnancy with my son, on the verge of new motherhood, in the midst of my joy at prospect welcoming a new life, I found myself, as I think many women in that position do, more acutely aware than I ever had been before of the worst aspects of the world I would be bringing my child into, and helplessly anxious regarding my certain inadequacy as to act as a permanent shield against heartbreak and danger.
Driven by some nascent maternal desire to create an orderly, welcoming corner in an endlessly uncertain world, I started gardening in earnest during my pregnancy.
The apartment my husband and I shared at the time was tiny, and lacked a yard, but I was determined. I filled our tiny balcony with a motley collection of pots, and planted them with herbs and tomatoes.
The tomatoes didn't last long in such a confined spot, with a lack of good sunlight; after months of clinging tenuously, they succumbed to spider mites. But the herbs flourished, and soon I had a minature forest on my balcony. I was officially a gardener.
And every place we've lived thereafter, I've found a place to create a spot of green, for a boy whose fifth word was flower.
During my pregnancy with my son, on the verge of new motherhood, in the midst of my joy at prospect welcoming a new life, I found myself, as I think many women in that position do, more acutely aware than I ever had been before of the worst aspects of the world I would be bringing my child into, and helplessly anxious regarding my certain inadequacy as to act as a permanent shield against heartbreak and danger.
Driven by some nascent maternal desire to create an orderly, welcoming corner in an endlessly uncertain world, I started gardening in earnest during my pregnancy.
The apartment my husband and I shared at the time was tiny, and lacked a yard, but I was determined. I filled our tiny balcony with a motley collection of pots, and planted them with herbs and tomatoes.
The tomatoes didn't last long in such a confined spot, with a lack of good sunlight; after months of clinging tenuously, they succumbed to spider mites. But the herbs flourished, and soon I had a minature forest on my balcony. I was officially a gardener.
And every place we've lived thereafter, I've found a place to create a spot of green, for a boy whose fifth word was flower.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
My Victory Gardens, Part One
I started my first garden on my bedroom windowsill, when I was still a teenager in high school. A biology teacher had made a class project of repurposing clear plastic food takeout boxes as mini-greenhouses for starting seeds. It was supposed to nudge us to think of creative ways to reuse and recycle common waste containers; it wasn't meant to be an ongoing project.
But once those seeds had opened, and spread tiny green wings, I found couldn't abandon my little sprouts of rosemary and thyme. So I scrounged things resembling pots from around my home, and dug dirt from who-knows-where, and transplanted my seedlings, and prayed, and within weeks of creating my plastic greenhouse, I was tending my first tiny herb garden.
At the time, my family was struggling financially. My mother, my sister, my little brother and I were living in tiny bare bones apartment in a faceless brick apartment building in a post-industrial, semi-urban wasteland near the airport, right next to an infamous eminent-domain-created ghost town.
It wasn't really safe to spend much time walking around outside in that neighborhood. My sister had been shot at, once, while she was out after dark trying to coax a stray kitten into a box so she could take it to a shelter. The bullet had come so close, she had felt it brush her hair.
And there wasn't much to look at outside, anyway. The landscape was dominated by dirty parking lots, crumbling buildings, litter, and weeds.
It felt so nice to have something green in that place. Something growing and alive and scented of sunlight and good earth. I used to bury my nose in the rosemary plant and breathe its clean, spicy scent before I went to sleep at night. It seemed to clear my head. And to this day, the scent of rosemary calms me.
I don't know why those herbs grew so well on my windowsill, under my untutored care. I've had a lot of trouble, in years since, convincing herbs in general and rosemary in particular to thrive indoors. Herbs, for the most part, crave the sun, and a windowsill generally just won't do it for them unless it has excellent sun exposure.
I also don't know how I kept the cats we had from eating those plants, or knocking them over, especially given I was mostly at school all day.
But somehow, they managed to make it in those tough surroundings. After all, they had a gardener who needed them. And they had no place else to grow.
But once those seeds had opened, and spread tiny green wings, I found couldn't abandon my little sprouts of rosemary and thyme. So I scrounged things resembling pots from around my home, and dug dirt from who-knows-where, and transplanted my seedlings, and prayed, and within weeks of creating my plastic greenhouse, I was tending my first tiny herb garden.
At the time, my family was struggling financially. My mother, my sister, my little brother and I were living in tiny bare bones apartment in a faceless brick apartment building in a post-industrial, semi-urban wasteland near the airport, right next to an infamous eminent-domain-created ghost town.
It wasn't really safe to spend much time walking around outside in that neighborhood. My sister had been shot at, once, while she was out after dark trying to coax a stray kitten into a box so she could take it to a shelter. The bullet had come so close, she had felt it brush her hair.
And there wasn't much to look at outside, anyway. The landscape was dominated by dirty parking lots, crumbling buildings, litter, and weeds.
It felt so nice to have something green in that place. Something growing and alive and scented of sunlight and good earth. I used to bury my nose in the rosemary plant and breathe its clean, spicy scent before I went to sleep at night. It seemed to clear my head. And to this day, the scent of rosemary calms me.
I don't know why those herbs grew so well on my windowsill, under my untutored care. I've had a lot of trouble, in years since, convincing herbs in general and rosemary in particular to thrive indoors. Herbs, for the most part, crave the sun, and a windowsill generally just won't do it for them unless it has excellent sun exposure.
I also don't know how I kept the cats we had from eating those plants, or knocking them over, especially given I was mostly at school all day.
But somehow, they managed to make it in those tough surroundings. After all, they had a gardener who needed them. And they had no place else to grow.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Food
This morning while tending my vegetable garden I noticed the first bell pepper fattening on the vine, its waxy green skin glimmering new and unblemished under an umbrella of broad leaves. As I left, thinking of the taste of a fresh roasted golden yellow pepper a month from now, I double-checked my garden's chicken wire fence to make certain there weren't any gaps that would let a rabbit in to steal my prize.
Back inside the house, I brought out my good heavy mixing bowl and started gathering the ingredients to make biscuits for the strawberry shortcake I had planned for tonight's dessert after dinner. We had Bisquick in the pantry, but I skipped it, opting instead to make the biscuits from scratch: flour, salt, sugar, cream, butter, baking powder.
When the dough came together, I rolled it out and cut it into heart shapes with a cookie cutter.
While the biscuits baked, I took out a box of ripe strawberries and selected the nicest ones and rinsed them. The strawberries were too red and juicy for me to resist eating a couple. I sliced the rest, and put them in a bowl with some sugar. Then I put the sugared strawberries and fresh-baked biscuits in the refrigerator to chill.
When the neighbor girl came over around midday to play with my son, I made a point of showing her the first pepper. She had helped me plant some of the herbs in my herb garden, and I thought she'd want to see how quickly the vegetable plants across from the herbs had grown. She was excited about the pepper, but impatiently disappointed to see the tomato plants I planted just a few weeks ago covered in yellow blossoms, but no fruit.
Later this afternoon, while running errands, I stopped at the hardware store and found that the herbs were on sale. I picked up a peppermint plant and a chamomile plant to put in pots on my patio. Between those two and the spearmint I already had growing, I thought, I'd be set for the rest of the summer for fresh herbal tea.
At dinnertime, despite the rain outside, my husband fired up our new grill for the first time, grilling hamburgers and veggie burgers and ears of corn over charcoal and soaked hickory chips under the shelter of the carport. The new grill made a quick, clean fire and the burgers came out tender with crisp edges.
When we'd finished our barbeque, I brought out some heavy whipping cream, mixed in sugar and vanilla, and whipped it into a rich whipped cream. I spread this over the biscuits I'd baked earlier, and added the sugared strawberries.
As I bit into a crumbly, strawberry-juice-soaked, cream-topped biscuit, feeling utterly decadent, I considered that the simple recipe I'd used for my strawberry shortcake was probably not all that different from the recipes used by women fifty or even a hundred years ago. Only, I imagined that the whipped cream would have tasted much better a hundred years ago, if it had been skimmed earlier that same day from milk milked that very dawn from one's own personal cow.
Still and all, I decided, this strawberry shortcake was pretty damned good.
But my son wouldn't eat the strawberries, or the shortcake, or the cream.
He didn't care for the barbeque sauce on his burger, either, come to talk of it, and he didn't even want the grilled corn touching his plate.
The chamomile plant and the mint plant I bought earlier today? They will both make great tea to soothe upset stomachs the next time one of us gets sick. But I know my son won't tolerate even a drop of warm tea on his tongue. Not even with sugar in it. I've offered it to him when he's been sick before, many times.
The fresh peppers and tomatoes and beans I'm growing in my garden? The basil, parsley, oregano, and sage? Chances are, he won't willingly take a single bite of any of these things when they're ready to be eaten.
Because none of these things are on his list: the list of things he is willing to eat. That list that has grown so much over the past year, after so much work, into something that, finally, sort of resembles a sustainable balanced diet. That list that has grown so much, yet sometimes still seems so terribly short to me.
For as long as I can remember, since I was a very little girl, toddling after my mother in the kitchen or my grandmother in the garden, growing and cooking and eating good food has always been such a pleasure for me. Despite the issues all sorts of people, including me seem to have with food these days-- worrying about this or that food making us too fat, or causing cancer, or heart disease; worrying about where our food comes from, and whether making that food harmed the planet or caused other people suffering, etcetera-- despite all that, food has so often been a source of so much wonder and joy for me.
And the fact that my only child doesn't seem to enjoy food much as all is so devastating to me when I think about it in the context of the joy I have experienced in connection with food. It's the same to me as if a person could, somehow, hear, but not hear music; the same as if a person could walk, but could not dance.
And my sadness over the world of happy experience I imagine my son is missing out on now haunts every happy moment I experience watering a tomato plant (and breathing in the sultry tomato scent the plants give off each time they are watered), or kneading bread dough (and feeling the elasticity grow beneath my hands, and imagining the fine texture it will produce in the finished loaf), or biting into a tart new apple or a slice of fresh-baked cake.
Back inside the house, I brought out my good heavy mixing bowl and started gathering the ingredients to make biscuits for the strawberry shortcake I had planned for tonight's dessert after dinner. We had Bisquick in the pantry, but I skipped it, opting instead to make the biscuits from scratch: flour, salt, sugar, cream, butter, baking powder.
When the dough came together, I rolled it out and cut it into heart shapes with a cookie cutter.
While the biscuits baked, I took out a box of ripe strawberries and selected the nicest ones and rinsed them. The strawberries were too red and juicy for me to resist eating a couple. I sliced the rest, and put them in a bowl with some sugar. Then I put the sugared strawberries and fresh-baked biscuits in the refrigerator to chill.
When the neighbor girl came over around midday to play with my son, I made a point of showing her the first pepper. She had helped me plant some of the herbs in my herb garden, and I thought she'd want to see how quickly the vegetable plants across from the herbs had grown. She was excited about the pepper, but impatiently disappointed to see the tomato plants I planted just a few weeks ago covered in yellow blossoms, but no fruit.
Later this afternoon, while running errands, I stopped at the hardware store and found that the herbs were on sale. I picked up a peppermint plant and a chamomile plant to put in pots on my patio. Between those two and the spearmint I already had growing, I thought, I'd be set for the rest of the summer for fresh herbal tea.
At dinnertime, despite the rain outside, my husband fired up our new grill for the first time, grilling hamburgers and veggie burgers and ears of corn over charcoal and soaked hickory chips under the shelter of the carport. The new grill made a quick, clean fire and the burgers came out tender with crisp edges.
When we'd finished our barbeque, I brought out some heavy whipping cream, mixed in sugar and vanilla, and whipped it into a rich whipped cream. I spread this over the biscuits I'd baked earlier, and added the sugared strawberries.
As I bit into a crumbly, strawberry-juice-soaked, cream-topped biscuit, feeling utterly decadent, I considered that the simple recipe I'd used for my strawberry shortcake was probably not all that different from the recipes used by women fifty or even a hundred years ago. Only, I imagined that the whipped cream would have tasted much better a hundred years ago, if it had been skimmed earlier that same day from milk milked that very dawn from one's own personal cow.
Still and all, I decided, this strawberry shortcake was pretty damned good.
But my son wouldn't eat the strawberries, or the shortcake, or the cream.
He didn't care for the barbeque sauce on his burger, either, come to talk of it, and he didn't even want the grilled corn touching his plate.
The chamomile plant and the mint plant I bought earlier today? They will both make great tea to soothe upset stomachs the next time one of us gets sick. But I know my son won't tolerate even a drop of warm tea on his tongue. Not even with sugar in it. I've offered it to him when he's been sick before, many times.
The fresh peppers and tomatoes and beans I'm growing in my garden? The basil, parsley, oregano, and sage? Chances are, he won't willingly take a single bite of any of these things when they're ready to be eaten.
Because none of these things are on his list: the list of things he is willing to eat. That list that has grown so much over the past year, after so much work, into something that, finally, sort of resembles a sustainable balanced diet. That list that has grown so much, yet sometimes still seems so terribly short to me.
For as long as I can remember, since I was a very little girl, toddling after my mother in the kitchen or my grandmother in the garden, growing and cooking and eating good food has always been such a pleasure for me. Despite the issues all sorts of people, including me seem to have with food these days-- worrying about this or that food making us too fat, or causing cancer, or heart disease; worrying about where our food comes from, and whether making that food harmed the planet or caused other people suffering, etcetera-- despite all that, food has so often been a source of so much wonder and joy for me.
And the fact that my only child doesn't seem to enjoy food much as all is so devastating to me when I think about it in the context of the joy I have experienced in connection with food. It's the same to me as if a person could, somehow, hear, but not hear music; the same as if a person could walk, but could not dance.
And my sadness over the world of happy experience I imagine my son is missing out on now haunts every happy moment I experience watering a tomato plant (and breathing in the sultry tomato scent the plants give off each time they are watered), or kneading bread dough (and feeling the elasticity grow beneath my hands, and imagining the fine texture it will produce in the finished loaf), or biting into a tart new apple or a slice of fresh-baked cake.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Back to Scare Your Pants Off
Today, when I woke up, I could breathe. This was a remarkable experience after after two weeks of nearly hacking up a lung every twenty minutes (because, apparently, I can't just come down with a case of the blahs-- oh no-- I have to come down with a case of the cold from hell, too, or, shoot, maybe it was whooping cough or pneumonia something; I don't know, but the boy didn't catch it, which is good, considering that for the past several days my husband has been gone on an extended business trip! Hooray!)
Since I was feeling quasi-normal I decided that today might be a good day to FINALLY get some work done on my new herb garden. This despite the fact that after two weeks of illness I had laundry on the bedroom floor, dishes in the sink, and a Matchbox car obstacle course in my office.
You see, I've been planning to dig a plot for the garden and lay out a cement brick border for weeks; I'd already purchased a couple of plants and they have been getting quite literally sick of living in tiny plastic containers on a windowsill under crappy fluorescent lighting. If I wait much longer to plant these poor creatures, they'll croak.
Isaac was itching to get outside anyway after days of being cooped up with a loony sick woman who sounds like a broken robot when she speaks.
So, when we got a break in the rain this afternoon, I went out to dig.
After marking out two small garden beds next to my patio, I started digging up the grass. Isaac pretended to help me with his little trowel, and insisted that I rescue every worm we came across. Things were going pretty well, albeit slowly. Every ten minutes or so, I had to stop to catch my breath; my lungs were still pretty unhappy after two weeks of coughing.
I had gotten about half of one bed dug when I realized it was almost dinner time. I decided to cut a sharp edge with my trowel, lay the cement bricks in one one side of one bed, and then go back inside.
As I dug, my trowel struck something that was decidedly un-dirt-like. I pushed back the dirt with my gloved hands, and discovered a piece of coarse, dirt-encrusted fabric. I could see a seam down the middle of the exposed piece.
Could it be a bag, I wondered? A few weeks ago, while planting fruit trees, my husband had dug up an old-fashioned, dented silver serving spoon. We'd wondered whether it had been buried by a child playing with some old worn-out silverware, or an adult who had some sort of poverty paranoia who had decided to hide silver trinkets throughout the yard.
When I hit the cloth, I thought that perhaps it was a bag full of coins, or more silverware, buried by the same silver-hoarder.
I dug more carefully, with my hands, gently exposing the fabric.
It wasn't a bag.
It was a pair of jeans.
There wasn't a body inside them.
(Phew!)
I may or may not have googled, "What should I do when I find clothes buried in my backyard?" this evening . . .
(Being married to a former Catholic has its advantages. When your husband has a family roughly the size of a small town, he's bound to be related to someone in just about every profession. So I already called the police-officer-in-law tonight. His thought is that maybe the rehabber who owned the house briefly several years ago, just before the people we bought the house from moved in, may have buried a bunch of junk that had been left in the house in the yard before sodding over it, because it was easier than taking it to the dump. What's your theory?)
Since I was feeling quasi-normal I decided that today might be a good day to FINALLY get some work done on my new herb garden. This despite the fact that after two weeks of illness I had laundry on the bedroom floor, dishes in the sink, and a Matchbox car obstacle course in my office.
You see, I've been planning to dig a plot for the garden and lay out a cement brick border for weeks; I'd already purchased a couple of plants and they have been getting quite literally sick of living in tiny plastic containers on a windowsill under crappy fluorescent lighting. If I wait much longer to plant these poor creatures, they'll croak.
Isaac was itching to get outside anyway after days of being cooped up with a loony sick woman who sounds like a broken robot when she speaks.
So, when we got a break in the rain this afternoon, I went out to dig.
After marking out two small garden beds next to my patio, I started digging up the grass. Isaac pretended to help me with his little trowel, and insisted that I rescue every worm we came across. Things were going pretty well, albeit slowly. Every ten minutes or so, I had to stop to catch my breath; my lungs were still pretty unhappy after two weeks of coughing.
I had gotten about half of one bed dug when I realized it was almost dinner time. I decided to cut a sharp edge with my trowel, lay the cement bricks in one one side of one bed, and then go back inside.
As I dug, my trowel struck something that was decidedly un-dirt-like. I pushed back the dirt with my gloved hands, and discovered a piece of coarse, dirt-encrusted fabric. I could see a seam down the middle of the exposed piece.
Could it be a bag, I wondered? A few weeks ago, while planting fruit trees, my husband had dug up an old-fashioned, dented silver serving spoon. We'd wondered whether it had been buried by a child playing with some old worn-out silverware, or an adult who had some sort of poverty paranoia who had decided to hide silver trinkets throughout the yard.
When I hit the cloth, I thought that perhaps it was a bag full of coins, or more silverware, buried by the same silver-hoarder.
I dug more carefully, with my hands, gently exposing the fabric.
It wasn't a bag.
It was a pair of jeans.
There wasn't a body inside them.
(Phew!)
I may or may not have googled, "What should I do when I find clothes buried in my backyard?" this evening . . .
(Being married to a former Catholic has its advantages. When your husband has a family roughly the size of a small town, he's bound to be related to someone in just about every profession. So I already called the police-officer-in-law tonight. His thought is that maybe the rehabber who owned the house briefly several years ago, just before the people we bought the house from moved in, may have buried a bunch of junk that had been left in the house in the yard before sodding over it, because it was easier than taking it to the dump. What's your theory?)
Thursday, April 20, 2006
If You Plant It, They Will Come
If by "They" you mean big-@$$ garden spiders:*
Which you must tolerate. Because they eat the evil little insects that destroy your plants.
Just stay in the pots, ladies. Stay in the pots, and we'll keep things neighborly-like, see?
*What? They don't look that big to you, you say? Oh yeah? These spiders? They're JUVENILES. Just wait three months and tell me how not-that-big they are.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
Dirty Hands
For some women, it's shoes. For others, it's designer bags. For still others, it's perfume, or professional-style kitchen gadgets, or high-end scrapbooking accessories, or collectible china.
For me, the weakness, the addiction, the unwholesome obsession which, if I give it a moment's free reign, sucks away my time and drains my bank account before I even realize what I've done has become:
MY GARDEN.
That's right—my postage-stamp, too-poor-for-a-real-yard patio container herb garden.
After last year's excesses, this year I promised myself (and my husband) that I would cut back. No experimenting this time with exotic finds from the county herb society sale like lovage or borage or wormwood. (Seriously. Wormwood? Was I planning on brewing bathtub absinthe?). Stick to simple, hardy culinary herbs. Maybe just some sweet basil, and oregano and sage. The old standbys. Easy to grow, frequently used. Just a few pots. No more plant explosion crowding my patio to the point that a person might have to climb over a small tree just to get out the patio door.
But then, last week, we went to the hardware store. Just to pick up some potting soil—organic potting soil—that was on sale at $2 for 40 pounds! And maybe, just maybe a small plant or two. And then—just what was that intriguing purple plant there, with the pretty semi-gloss fringed ovate leaves, arranged invitingly in flats outside the garden center next to the marigolds and pansies? A cabbage, you say? Sweet spring cabbage? Edible and ornamental. A very nutritious vegetable. And hardy! At just $1.79 for six plants. How lovely. I'd never grown cabbage before. Picture a fresh cole slaw at the end of the season, with bright purple cabbage slices plucked fresh from my own garden. Lovely fronds of purple cabbage floating in a golden vegetable soup.
Perhaps, just a single set of six?
And then, you see, once the cabbage was purchased, it suddenly occurred to me that surely it would be best to grow it in hanging pots. After all, one had to consider the previous season's terrorist garden attacks by roving gangs of thug squirrels. The squirrels, grown bold as rats and sleek as seals thanks to a hand-fed diet of fresh fruit and peanuts provided by my neighborhood's resident crazy squirrel-loving lady, would surely be tempted to take a fat bite or ten out of those lovely violet leaves.
But the shallow hanging pots we bought last year couldn't possibly be deep enough for a cabbage. And then, at Target—- what was this? A just-in shipment of elegant powder-coated cast steel hanging baskets with natural moss liners? For just $14.99? Really, a steal.
But then, once the baskets came home, it occurred to me—- won't my young cabbage plants seem so lost all alone in these big, deep, metal baskets, hanging so high? The baskets would need something else, too, at least until the cabbage matured. Some more color, perhaps. Some trailing vines down the side?
Well, how about some lavender pansies? Look! On sale at the K-Mart down the street! Such a nice compliment to the dark purple leaves of the cabbage. And while we were at the K-Mart, well, I thought, why not pick up a few pots of marigolds, too, to put on the garden wall? To keep the squirrels away, of course. (Though they didn't work last year). And these jersey gardening gloves sure do look smart! $2.99 a pair? Why not?
Hmm. That basket would still look a bit empty with nothing but cabbage and pansies, though. Still needed something trailing! "Let's take a quick trip to that nursery just down the street and see if they have creeping thyme. Just to see how much it costs. Maybe it's on sale."
Wouldn't it be lovely cascading down the sides of those baskets, growing into the moss liner? And with a shallow root system it's sure not to choke out the cabbage or pansies. What a perfect idea I'd had! Just a few sprouts of creeping thyme.
But there was no creeping thyme in yet at the nursery—- only the boring French upright kind. What a shame. Still, the nursery had ruffled purple basil! We had looked all over for that last year! And those rosemary plants—- so healthy and upright. What a heavenly scent. "One won't do, will it dear?" Why not two?
Aha! But we still needed to find that creeping thyme. Just to fill out the basket. So why not saunter on down to south city? Such a beautiful day, and the parks there are lovely. We could take the boy to a playground. And stop at this little ol' nursery down in the botanical garden district on the way.
Once there, why look! The red creeping thyme was almost gone! Only one flat left! Why not take the whole lot? Some lime thyme, too, just for a bit of variety. And really, that cilantro there—- already so full—- what a deal! Don't I cook with cilantro at least once a week? Hmm, marjoram, also somewhat tempting.
And oh yes—- I must pick up some sweet basil, oregano, and sage. After all, I promised myself and my husband I'd have those plants in my garden this year.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Battle of the Bugs
First I must apologize for my slackness in posting the past few days. I still have a bit of lingering infection from my recent dental surgery (yes, still, even after two rounds of antibiotics), and two-and-a-half weeks of constant pain in my jaw (pain when I talk, pain when I eat, PAIN when my son affectionally slams his head into my face as toddlers are so wont to do) has really been dragging me down. And no, I haven't been back to the dentist yet, because I keep hoping if I ignore the problem hard enough it will just go away. And yes, I am being irrational and sort of a wuss, but read my recent wisdom-tooth-removal-related posts and see if YOU feel like going to the dentist. See? And you didn't even live it. You just read it. So there :P
Now, on to my post.
THE BUGS ARE COMING.
A few days ago, I saw one. A big fat slick black waterbug, lying legs-up on my carpeted hallway floor, twisted, twitching. Death spasming.
I hopped over it with a shudder of my own, and grabbed a wastefully thick wad of papertowels from the kitchen. I scooped it up gently in the towels, and bundled them tightly around it, and then made myself smash the little bundle as hard as I could. Quicker that way, I thought. Put the poor damn thing out of its misery.
MAKE SURE IT'S DEAD.
You see, I have a problem with bugs. Bugs in my house.
Oh, they're all right outside, keeping to themselves, living their little buggy lives. Part of the ecosystem. Circle of life, and that. Pollinating and nourishing my garden. Tiny, intricate creatures, so delicately made, so alien to my comparatively massive mammalian self. Outside, sometimes, I think they're facinating. Sometimes even beautiful. In fact, there is a tattoo of a dragonfly on my back. Dragonflies seem so lithe and graceful, and have such lovely iridescent glassy wings; yet, there is a fierceness in their movements that is startling. Quite engaging creatures, certain bugs.
When I find them in my house, I want to smash them.
(I usually make my husband smash them for me).
There is something about these little creatures invading my domain that seems to activate a primal warding instinct. That line of little ants that seems so quaint and prim to me upon the sidewalk looks like an invading army of ugly, filthy marauding thieves crossing the threshhold of my patio door. The spider that seemed so friendly and useful spinning her delicate web above my basil plant seems full of malevolent intelligence on the rim of my bathroom sink.
Last summer I discovered much to my horror that the thin, shoddily constructed walls and poorly sealed window frames of my apartment building here in the wooded suburbs admitted many more unwelcome arthropod guests than I'd been accustomed to living closer to the city. In the space of one season, we suffered no less than three ant invasions, from three different species of ant-- black ants in the bathrooms (coming through my mildewed water-damaged wall), pharoah ants in the baby's room (coming through a poorly spackled fist-sized hole in the wall adjacent to the windows, and then around the unsealed window frame itself), crazy ants in the living room (sneaking under my patio door). Every time it rained, we played host to at least three quarter-sized refugee spiders. Waterbugs and spindly crickets abounded in the utility closet. And in one week, I caught no less than three GIANT FLYING COCKROACHES. I didn't even know Missouri had flying cockroaches. They sure showed me.
After I filed several complaints, the apartment office finally sent over a bumbling exterminator who looked amazingly like a stereotypical TV caricature of an exterminator-- right down to the poor posture, stained clothes, creepy stare, and amazingly bad teeth-- who tended to spill things in places he shouldn't, and once asked if he could pour some sort of toxic pesticide from one container to another in my kitchen sink. After two visits, he and his noxious chemicals scared me more than the bugs did, so I stopped asking the apartment office for help (which I strongly suspect may have been their plan all along).
My second line of response to this mass invasion was to invest heavily in boric acid traps, seal every crack in the poorly made, water-damaged walls I could reach with spackle, insulating foam, and caulk, and put all the food in my pantry in air-tight plastic or glass containers.
I had already been keeping my house quite clean (not always neat, mind you, but clean). I consider superior cleanliness necessary when you live with someone who spends a good deal of his time on the floor looking for odd things that aren't food to put in his mouth.
The Battle of the Bugs raged on into the fall. I lost most of my patio herb garden to the crazy ant invasion, but I did manage to keep my kitchen and pantry bug-free. (Except for that unfortunate flour weevil incident, but I blame that entirely on my Schnucks grocery. After all, who on earth expects a swarm of mature flour weevils to eat their way out of a sealed bag of chickpeas purchased at the store only two weeks prior? Well, I do. Now.)
Then winter came, with its blissful killing frosts. And away went the bugs.
But the winter was unseasonably mild.
And spring has once again sprung.
As they say in the movies:
This time, I'm ready.
Caulk gun? Check. Non-carcinogenic bug killers? Check. Enough air-tight plastic in my pantry to make a entire Tupperware party swoon? Check.
I don't care if I have to lay down a perimeter of diatomaceous earth and boric acid around this whole apartment building, my pretties. I don't care if I have to pot three different species of insect-repellant shrub. I don't care if I have to hire a team of trained bug-eating bats.
You're not taking my house, bug army. Go build yourselves a buggy civilization outside.
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