Thursday, February 18, 2010 | by nathan

Growing

My latest piece is up at Open Salon. Here’s an excerpt:

I want to put a seed in the ground, throw a little water down, and then have steamed zucchini on a plate. I don’t want to wait, and I certainly don’t want to tend. I’m hungry now! And no matter how much compost I throw down, no matter how much I crouch on the ground waiting for the little green shoots to crack the dirt, I have absolutely no control over the timing.

This is why you’ll find me, in the coming days of early spring, with the seeds in the ground and all the life happening where I can’t see it, four or five times a day staring intently at my little two hundred square feet of tilled-up dirt. I squat, I stand, I get down on all fours and squint, then stand back up again, wave my hands over the whole business, and shout, “GROW!”

There you have it: a picture of my spiritual life in action.

And as to the identity of the "friend" I mention in the story – all I will say is that this is the most highly-fictionalized piece of creative nonfiction I’ve ever written. No essayist tells the entire truth; David Sedaris, Anne Lamott, all my literary nonfiction heroes pepper their personal narratives with changes of detail, meant to protect the innocent*, as it were. All I’m saying, kids, is don’t litter my comments section or my Facebook wall with guesses, mmmmkay?

* The person(s) in question are hardly "innocent," but they didn’t ask to be written about and certainly don’t deserve to have me shouting their names from the rooftops, even if such a thing weren’t legally questionable.

Monday, October 5, 2009 | by nathan

Summer’s Last Gasp

Sometime in the next two weeks we are likely to get our first freeze; this means that, officially, the garden is over for this year. Which, to be honest, is totally fine with me. It’s been a great garden in a lot of ways, but a disappointment compared to last year. A lot of this is due to me; I didn’t take the same steps I did in 2008 to keep grass out of the plot, and a bunch of the new stuff I tried this year was a resounding failure. The squash especially, because it got infested with squash bugs that I never figured out how to get rid of, and the brandywine tomatoes were all split and rotted before they even ripened. The aurora peppers, though! They were GREAT! And the little yellow Beam’s Pear tomatoes! Put those things together and you’ve got a hell of a salsa.

This week I MUST get out and pull in as many of these peppers as I can, because my dad tells me they will freeze quite nicely. But as for the rest of it, I can’t say I’m going to be entirely sorry to take the tiller to it and return it all to the earth.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009 | by nathan

Basilicious

These are the flowers at the top of my basil plants. This stuff is so great, and we’ve been cooking with it all summer. One of the best things to do is to cook some walnuts in a bit of olive oil, then add in some basil, a mess of spinach and some minced garlic, with some salt and pepper. Throw the whole thing over some whole wheat pasta and top with a little bit of cheese. DELICIOUS.

Wednesday, August 5, 2009 | by nathan

Postcards

We had such a great time in Kenmare that I want to send our hosts at the bed and breakfast a nice note thanking them for a great time and telling them that we’ll definitely be back, all that nice stuff that one is supposed to do when one has been taken care of. So everywhere I go I keep looking for nice postcards of Oklahoma, and without fail they’re always some terrible cowboy bullshit with buffalo or actual cattle or – worst – a shot of the prairies that make them look so unappealing and boring that no one would ever, ever want to come here. So I’ve decided to design my own, have it printed with VistaPrint, and send it to them myself. Because you know what? I have spent the past several years honing my photography skills – such as they are – on these prairies, and I know for a fact that they’re beautiful and gorgeous, and that they have a lot more going on than stupid-ass windmills and cows. So suck it, postcard companies, you had your chance and now you’ve blown it, and I’m taking my damn 35¢ elsewhere, thank you very much. I’m going to have you guys help me pick one out, and whoever picks the winner gets something cool in the mail, I dunno, I haven’t decided yet.

Sunday, August 2, 2009 | by nathan

Hot Mess

This right here is a whole mess of red, ripe Aurora Peppers. They’re just the best things ever, and in my garden they are going insane. They are insanely hot; so much so that Brian and I have taken to calling them "Insanity Peppers," because the first time we found a couple of them ripe, we just cut them open and ate them raw. And then, four days later when our sense of taste returned, we vowed never to do that again. They’re searing hot and smoky; we were determined to find something to do with them.

One of the coolest things about these peppers – other than their amazing taste – is what they look like on the vine. They start off purple, then turn yellow, orange, and then red. They’re gorgeous:

Really, really pretty, right? They add a great splash of color to my garden. And let me just say, if you don’t have a backyard, these things do great in pots, so you really don’t have any excuse not to grow them. And after our raw-tasting of them went south, I was determined to make something out of these suckers. Then it came to me. We went out and harvested a whole bunch of these guys:

These are Beam’s Yellow Pear tomatoes, and they are growing like crazy. So we picked a whole huge mess of them, with some peppers:

We went to the store and got some fresh pineapple, some cilantro and a red onion, some salt and vinegar, and we stuck it all in a food processor, and we made THE MOST AMAZING SALSA HOLY CRAP SERIOUSLY? And the smoky, searing flavor of the Aurora Peppers were the perfect bit of spice and the perfect complement to the tomatoes. You guys, it was seriously delicious. Now there are so many of these peppers coming ripe that it’s getting a little out of control. I’ve got to find some people to take some of these, give them my salsa recipe, and then hand them a legal waiver, you know, just in case. There’s nothing like fresh food you’ve made yourself to remind you that it’s summertime. I’m going to try to make a huge batch of this stuff and jar it up and save it for winter, when it’s cold, nothing’s fresh, and I can sit back with some blue corn tortilla chips and just pretend.

Thursday, July 2, 2009 | by nathan

Garden Update, July 2

Wow, okay, so this was the garden on April 22:

Aaaaand here it is today:

I KNOW, RIGHT??

I’m going away for ten days starting today, so I wanted to get one last look at the whole thing to see how it changes while I’m gone. Today the Beam’s Golden Pear Tomatoes started to ripen:

Don’t those look great? There are about a hundred more of them that are still green and will probably ripen while I’m away. D’oh! But I’m going to try to take a few with me to D.C. so Brian can try them.

Also starting to change colors are the Aurora Peppers:

They started out a deep, deep shade of purple but will turn yellow, then orange and red. I’ve got a ton of these plants, and I think they look so neat:

I’ve also got a whole bunch of rooster spur pepper plants growing in pots.

Some of the rooster spur plants have started to put on fruit, though only just:

Last night my mom came over and we went shopping, but first I gave her a bunch of leaves off my basil plants, which have FINALLY started to really take off:

So in ten days when we get back I imagine that all of this will be taking off and we’ll be able to enjoy the fruits of all this labor. In the meantime, our housesitting friend Casey, my mom, all the neighbors and friends are invited over to pull whatever ripens while we’re away. That’s one of the best parts of having a garden – getting to share the bounty with the people you love. I’m off to D.C. tonight and won’t be posting *as* regularly in the next ten days, though I do plan to try to do Daily Photo posts as regularly as possible. We’ll have two days next week without internet access, and I’m not making any promises, but I’m trying not to go away entirely. Enjoy your Fourth of July!

Tuesday, June 16, 2009 | by nathan

Some Buttermilk, Some Flour, And …

Now that we’ve started seeing real, live, edible food coming out of the garden, I thought it was high time we start consuming the, ah, fruits of our labor. So yesterday, when I found yet another ginormous black beauty zucchini on the vines when I got home from work, I bade my handsome husband go to the grocery store to get some buttermilk, and we sliced a few of those babies up and fried ‘em. Other than the moment when I almost started a grease fire, I’d have to say my first attempt at frying zucchini was a huge success, and although we have much healthier fare planned for the remainder of the crop, this was a fantastic way to kick off.

Thursday, June 11, 2009 | by nathan

Black Beauties

So last night I went outside to sort of look around at the garden. This is a twice-a-day ritual for me; I go out in the morning when I let Sam out to pee, and then again in the evenings. The morning visit to the garden is usually a pretty quick affair, as I have to go inside and get ready for work pretty quickly. But the evening visit to the garden is very zen, as I get to take time and just be around these plants I’ve helped to bring into the world, these whole life forms I’ve ushered up and which I will someday eat and share.

Last night I was on this visit, and I looked down and saw this:

A HUGE! black beauty zucchini, and the first real bit of harvest from my garden. To be honest, I hadn’t had any clue that the zucchini were getting this big, and I might not have even seen this guy if I hadn’t been looking REALLY SUPER CLOSE. So then I enlisted the help of my super-handsome husband, and we managed to find two more just like it:

Brian knocked a little stem off some of the purple basil while we were picking, and so we washed that off and brought it inside as well. The biggest one here is the one from that first photo, so the other two are not as big as that first one I found. There are some yellow ones out there but they’re not as big as the green ones.

So here it begins. We’re going to make black bean and zucchini quesadillas out of these tonight, and I JUST CAN NOT WAIT, because once the food starts coming in the house – well, when it rains, it pours. BRING IT ON.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009 | by nathan

Soaking Up The Sunshine

This is what the garden looked like just over a month ago: 

This is what it looked like on Monday:

So it’s all going great. The most exciting thing I saw over the weekend was this guy: 

See him? Here, let’s get closer:

IT’S A F***ING TOMATO! This guy is going to get really big and turn yellow – he’s a Golden Jubilee tomato! This is on one of the two plants that I picked up from Home Depot, which are the tallest plants in my garden right now. All the tomato plants have flowers, though a bunch of them got tossed around pretty badly in the thunderstorms we had over Memorial Day weekend, and I need to cage them tonight to get them pointed toward the sky once more. While this guy is already producing some fruit, my hot peppers, which grow much more slowly, are just starting to grow out of the seedling stage:

These guys are growing in a little bit of shade; they don’t usually hit full sun until about 11 AM, and though I always thought that hot peppers needed full sun, these part-sun peppers are growing much taller and more quickly than the ones that are getting sun starting at about 8:30 AM.

The birds – blue jays especially – love to come down and snip these guys down to their roots. They don’t eat them or use them to build nests; it’s just sort of a recreational activity for them. On top of that, I’m continuing to find presents left by the neighborhood cats, who use the loose soil in my garden as a litter box. They poop near my hot peppers, then cover the poop up with some of the soil. As much as I love that, as great as that is, what happens is that half the time they either bury or kick over one of these plants, which are still too small for the cats to notice, unlike the squash or tomatoes. And so that’s why I have my Reserve Pepper Brigade:

There are about 30 extra of each of my two kinds of peppers that have yet to go into the actual plot. The ones in this photo live indoors at night and come out to enjoy the sunshine in the daytime. They were living on my grow shelf but got too tall for it. The others in the reserve are in my container garden on the other side of the yard, where for some reason the birds never find it, and they get to enjoy the company of this guy:

This is the blackberry bush I planted in May 2008. It grew well but never produced a single flower or berry last year. This year, on the other hand, it’s gone completely insane, taken leave of its senses and is currently home to between 3 and 4 dozen blackberries. It’s expanding, too, threatening to take over the whole bed where it lives. This is fine with me, as I love fresh blackberries. The one in this photo is my star; he should be ripe any day now. I wonder if my first harvest should go into a healthy smoothie or a wonderful blackberry cobbler? Stay tuned.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009 | by nathan

It’s Alive!

Check that out. The garden is off and rolling like crazy. Currently there are 20 tomato plants in three different varieties, and a row each of two different kind of hot peppers. I had a lot of trouble with hot peppers last year; you may recall that I ended up with only one real plant. This year all the seedlings I’ve put down have survived a great deal, including incursions into the plot by birds and the stupid, stupid cats who roam wild in my yard because the across-the-street neighbor feeds them. The cats have taken to using my seeding mounts as litter boxes, so every day for a couple weeks I came out to find huge mounds of dirt flung up to cover their turds, which I had to then dig out. The neighbor and I are going to need to have a talk about the cats, as they’ve gone from being cute ragamuffins whom she’s feeding to now actually harming my garden. So Brian did a little research, and in addition to using blood meal to fertilize, which apparently repels cats, we also have this:

That red powder is cayenne pepper, with which I lined the entire bed and which is supposed to keep the cats away. So far it’s working; two nights and no new cat turds, no dug-up or buried seedlings. It’s raining like a mother today and washing the whole thing away, so I may have to redo it every few days. I’m also considering erecting a very rudimentary electric fence if that doesn’t work.

You might not be able to tell it in this photo, but the hot peppers are doing great. They’re all still small but really thriving, adding new growth, slowly, and so far the birds are avoiding them. This is a nice change, as last year I only had one pepper plant that reached maturity because the birds had so much fun snipping off the seedlings. The other day after we got back from the Mesa I had just enough daylight left to take some more of the pepper seedlings off the grow shelf and put them in the ground:

That’s an Aurora pepper, one of the two types of hot peppers I’m doing this year. It seems to be very similar to the Bolivian Rainbow Peppers I did last year, which started off purple, then ripened through yellow, white, and into orange and then, finally, red. They were beautiful; they looked like this:

But the Aurora Peppers are already notably a better breed, mostly in that they’ve germinated with much more gusto than the Bolivians did – it took two plantings before the Bolivians did anything at all, and as I mentioned before, the birds seem to be ignoring the Auroras, which they definitely did not do with the Bolivians. Also if the SeedSavers website is to be believed the Auroras will produce a bigger fruit that will be a little less hot than the Bolivians were, which is great, as they were so hot as to be almost inedible. "Bolivian Insanity Peppers," we called them.

This is a Rooster Spur Pepper, the other kind I’m growing. They took longer to germinate but have really gone crazy on the grow shelf. I put a whole bunch of these down on Sunday afternoon:

The row of these sorta weave in and out of my spinach, which has been in the ground since February and has recently started to do really well.

These leaves are about as long as my thumb and almost twice as wide, so nowhere near ready to pick yet. There about four other plants about this big, plus six or seven more that I seeded much later. There are hot peppers all around them, weaving in and out of the row. God, I can’t wait until all this gets bigger. My tomatoes are already well on the way, as this flower and future golden jubilee tomato will witness:

I’m excited to see this guy, because we also have a bunch of these guys: 

The smaller of the two trees in our backyard is LOADED with bees this year, which is always good to see when you worry about Colony Collapse Disorder as much as I do (which is a lot, I have to tell you. I worry about Colony Collapse Disorder WAAAAAY more than any well-adjusted person should). Of course, all is not going smoothly for the tomatoes. The birds did get to a couple of the plants, chewing off entire stems and leaves JUST FOR FUN. Some of that has started to grow back now, though, which is encouraging:

Seriously, if between the birds, the cats and the rain, this garden manages to survive, it’s going to be tough as nails. The squash has been the cats’ main target, but so far it’s doing fine:

So who wants to speak for a grocery bag of zucchini, tomatoes and peppers? There’s going to be so much of it, you guys.