Fall

It's fall here, and we're currently having our third or fourth rain day. Fall in Santa Cruz means golden 75 degree days interspersed with 60 degree rain days and cool nights, of which we're supposed to have several this week. This is a Good Thing, as it means that we'll get some water up there in Loch Lomond reservoir, which is our only local water supply and was pretty dry this summer. The grass is greening up and things are sprouting, and I've planted my onions, garlic, mustard greens, leeks, lettuces, and kohlrabi, all from seed. Leeks and onions don't do well from seed, I've discovered, but I'm going to let them go a little longer and see what happens.

I'll post some pictures soon. The garden is a mess in its current state, but I'm working through slowly and cleaning it up. It was a beautiful summer but I was not in picture taking mode. I was a bit of a mess over the summer myself -- tired and in a sort of state of transition in many ways. Excepting certain things, letting go of others.

Fall is a contemplative time for me. Tonight we're baking bread and making chicken soup, and planning to watch a movie later. I've been kvetching about the passing of summer for weeks, but as the seasonal change is taking place I've realized that I'm actually looking forward to the quieter, wetter months.

This Season and the Next...

Not a single post from me all season, and not a picture to be seen! In part, this is because I'm fairly convinced that I no longer have any active readers (if you're out there, please comment and let me know that you're still checking in), but more to the point it's because my writing energy has been so taken elsewhere all year. But it has been an absolutely incredible year for the garden, in part because my busy lifestyle in spring during planting time made me let go of some of my former garden control issues, and much of the garden therefore got to plant itself. I had volunteer cucumbers, radishes, carrots, beets, sunflowers, zinnias, cosmos, tomatillos, onions, and potatoes, all of which seeded themselves from last year's crop and came up where they pleased (I did transplant more than a few of them into better locations, though). I planted beans (green and scarlett runner), corn, pumpkins, more strawberries, greens, peppers, basil, onions, gourds (loofa and birdhouse) and six incredibly productive and wonderfully producing heirloom tomato plants (the Brandywine are the champs again, second year running). In addition, I let purslang, dandelion, and amaranth have some space in the garden this year (none of these were things that I sowed, they all just found their way into our patch of soil of their own accord), and I've extended my cooking vocabulary quite a bit as a result. My girlfriend Kim and I have been making amaranth soups and quiches and spanikopita with amaranth and dandelion greens. It's incredibly tasty, and it's so nutritious. I'd say that this year, the garden has given us easily one third to one half of our total food intake -- we've eaten far less flesh and carbs, we've saved money, and it has been incredibly rewarding to grow and eat our own food. Kim has goats and chickens as well, and so we've been getting eggs and goat milk and cheese (which is surprisingly creamy and sweet -- and non-stinky -- when it's fresh). It's nice to live from the land to such an extended degree even while being in town. This, coupled with an increased meditation practice, has helped me to feel so connected to my place and the earth this year. It's a great feeling.

We're planning our winter gardens now, with seeds on order from Bountiful Gardens up in Willits. We're going to grow lentils, fava, mustard greens, radishes, carrots, beets, snow peas, kohlrabi, napa cabbage, bok choy, leeks, onions, garlic, and chicory. One of the best things about living in expensive, crowded California is that we have the ability to grow so much of our own food year round. It's pretty amazing.

If I still have readers, I would love to hear about your garden season and your plans for either extending the growing season or wintering over. Happy Harvesting!

I'm Back

Yes, it's been a terribly long time since I've posted anything to this blog, primarily due to my focus on my academic work (and the accompanying blog, Brain Can Hold. The garden lay fallow over the winter, with the exception of some beautiful rainbow chard and dinosaur kale plants that managed to winter over despite the mulitple freezes we had. It's been a cold, dry winter in California and we're expecting a hot, dry summer. To that effect, I'll be planting crops that are a little less water dependent this year. As much as I adore fresh corn, I probably won't do a huge stand of corn like I did last year (corn is incredibly thirsty stuff). I envision lots of dry farmed tomatoes, hardy greens, and multiple varieties of potatoes (which do very well in my garden), and a heavy coating of OFSA (organic farming soil amendment, a mixture of rice hulls and chicken manure which makes for an incredible mulch as well as fertilizer) over it all.

I'm very much on a personal, spiritual, physical, and creative journey right now, almost a quest of sorts, and the garden is very tied into that consciously. So I expect my writings here to more introspective this year -- more about the thoughts and contemplations that the garden brings to my mind when I am out there digging in the soil and tending the plants, and less about the crops themselves, although there will plenty of pictures!

More soon...

I Got a New Toy!

This is one of the reasons I dearly love my job. A couple of weeks ago, I asked my boss if the department would buy me a high quality digital camera, and bless her easy going heart, she said "Sure!".

So I now have in my posession a Canon EOS Digital Rebel, with a telephoto lens, and I gotta say -- it takes amazing pictures! Without further ado, I'll post a few from my trip to the Westside Farmer's Market and Natural Bridges (beach) last weekend so ya'll can have a look at the tropical lushness that is California in autumn. Veggies are so beautiful!














And finally, a butterfly that landed on the hand of Man O' Mine... I really love this shot!

October

Well, fall is here. Today we're having our first rain, which means that the frosh up at Porter College are even as I type this stripping down to the buff to pad across the campus in the nude (this is First Rain -- the capitalized event -- said to define the culture of UCSC. I think in many ways it does, particularly in the way that the one black guy stands out against so much pasty white flesh. But I digress...)

Many days have gone by with nary a post about the garden. Mostly this is because my readers (all three of you) are acutely aware of the garden through other means, either because they (yes you, Mom) visited and took care of said patch of veggies, or because I visted and talked ad nauseam about it. I do have some pictures to post of the thing at the height of its glorious harvest, and I will do that as soon as I can figure out how to get the darned things off the cell phone without paying a fee (hacker Man O' Mine figured this out, but I can't remember how to do it without him).

Anyhow, the garden oasis is slowly transforming into the study oasis. I'm in college full time this year, and working 20 hours a week. In short, I'm damned busy and more often than not to be found with my head in a book, or at the very least a dense essay about installation art theory. Yeesh.

But there will be more garden to come. I'm planning to keep most of the patch going year round, so I'll be planting onions, pees, garlic, greens, and broccoli rabe. I will seed the remainder of the patch with favas again, as that worked out beautifully last year. The beans themselves are stinky eatin', but the plants are dramatic and pretty and they do fix big ol' clumps of nitrogen in the soil.

Okay, that's it for now. Back to theories of gender in figurative space imaginings, or whatever is on the syllabus for tonight.

Me

Small Justice Achieved in Carrot War

So, I'm in the garden last night tying up tomato vines, and one of the kids who hangs out in the park (see Park Urchins entry below) comes over and says, "Excuse me?"

This is one of the nice kids, probably the most polite and least rotten of the bunch. Rotten only by association, really. "Hey Jacob" I say (I make a point of knowing all their names).

He shuffles his feet and shyly says, "Christian's rabbit got out, and we're trying to catch him." He points, and who do I see but the kid whom I suspect of carrot-napping, desperately trying to corner a rabbit beneath a bench in the park next to the garden.

"That's too bad," I say.

"Um, yeah," Jacob replies, and shuffles his feet again. "Um, can we have a carrot from your garden to catch him?"

Hmmmm. "I'm sorry, but I can't help you," I say. "Someone pulled up all my carrots. If someone hadn't pulled my carrots up, I might be able to help you. Too bad, huh?"

Jacob turns just a little red, and says, very quietly, "Yeah."

"But thanks for asking me," I say, meeting his eyes. "That's the right thing to do, you know. ASK."

Who knows if it will sink in at all? Maybe. Ten year olds aren't great at Cause and Effect. But maybe they'll think twice next time about asking if they want something from my garden.

Or not. But at least I felt a little bit better. When I finished up in the garden an hour later, Christian was still trying to catch his rabbit.

Rotten #@$%# Park Urchins

When I went out yesterday evening to water, I found the season's first evidence of park urchin inflicted damage. About three fourths of my carrots, bless their little stubby roots, had been pulled up and scattered around. They lay there like fallen soldiers in the path, their frothy tops only just beginning to wilt. About half an hour earlier, I'd ridden by the garden on my way home from work and seen two of the local ten year olds (boys, of course) using the hose next to my patch. When they looked up and saw me ride by, they scattered like roaches. Hmmm, what are the odds that they were rinsing off the only couple of carrots they found that were actually big enough to eat?

This is THE bummer thing about gardening in a community garden, particularly one that is next to a big slummy apartment building (with no yard) filled with children that are apparently unsupervised about 95% of the time. Most of these kids come from large families that live in one bedroom apartments (I've seen the living conditions in there, and it's not pretty). The majority of the adults are absent (presumably working) most of the time. In short, there are few if any consequences in these kids' lives for bad behaviour, and I seriously doubt that any parent or guardian has bothered to explain to them that taking things from the garden is stealing -- or that stealing is wrong.

I'm debating what, if anything, I should do about this particular incident. Talking to the kids themselves will get me nowhere -- if anything, they'll just take it as a challenge to be more sneaky and do more damage. A couple of the fringe members of the gang live in houses nearby and do have responsive parents, so I guess I'll start by talking with them. But I'd be very surprised if those kids are the ones who are partcipating in the vandalism. And the parents of the ones who are, if I can even locate them or catch them at home, don't speak the same language I do and would probably find it laughable for some gringa woman to bitch about their kids pulling up a few carrots.

Sigh. There's a big sign on the notice board at the garden that says any vandalism should be reported to the police department. But again, I can't quite bring myself to call the cops (who are busy right now with an overwhelmingly active drug trade and a bunch of recent violent gang related events) to report the damage to the garden. "Uh yeah, officers, I know you're busy trying to figure out why people are randomly shooting at houses in the neighborhood, but a couple of ten year olds pulled up some of my carrots and I want you to stop them from doing it again." Yeah, right. We'll get right on that, ma'am.