The Inadvertent Gardener

Over the weekend, I went in a giant grocery store in Madison, Wisconsin with my friends in search of some local cheese curds. We found what we were looking for, but since it has been so long since I regularly shopped at that kind of store, the aisles and aisles of brightly-colored boxes of processed food overwhelmed me.

At the end of the weekend, on my way home from the airport, I stopped at my local Whole Foods, a behemoth of a store in itself, and certainly a bastion of its own panoply of processed foods. Let’s not kid ourselves, right?

But I was psyched to find, there in the produce section, sandwiched (oddly) between two different kinds of radishes, a pile of bunches of beautiful baby golden beets from Happy Boy Farms, a local producer that I buy from at the farmers’ market almost every week.

Sure, it was Whole Foods. And sure, it’s California. But the fact remains that, in this country, the food producers getting the tax breaks, the government support and attention, and the most shelf space in most American grocery stores are the industrial producers, not the smaller, local guys like Happy Boy.

This week, though, you have an opportunity to help change that balance. This week, Change.org is hosting a crowd-sourcing competition called 10 Ideas for Change in America, and the top 10 ideas will be presented to relevant members of the Obama administration. Even better, Change.org will mobilize its grassroots network to support those 10 ideas.

Among those ideas? Slow Money, a radical idea to fund real, healthy food by investing in small producers and local farmers. The return on that investment—for our environment, for our health, for our food security—is certainly more than any results I’ve seen in my 401(k) lately…

The voting on the top 10 ideas runs through Friday, and I encourage you to go over and check out the options. I’d love to see Slow Money make it into the top 10, but there are other great ideas that will improve food systems, including the American Farmland Trust’s effort to save ranch and farmland across this country, and an effort to put a garden at every school.

Don’t delay. It’ll take about five minutes of your time to promote 10 ideas you think can change the world, and maybe change what’s on the shelves at your local grocery store.

Gardeners, plant and nature lovers can join in Green Thumb Sunday every week. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

The move to the new apartment is complete, but I’m still unpacking. Plus, it’s been raining in Northern California. Raining a lot. Except for yesterday, when, of course, I was at work, and couldn’t actually work on implementing my Grand Patio Garden Plans.

Fatemeh was at work, too, but her business operates out of the apartment, which gave her the opportunity to send me this little multimedia message. Thanks to the stupid that is my first generation iPhone and it’s inability to actually receive such messages, I got to view this on the web, which means I can also share it with you:

Yes, those are indeed empty wine barrels sitting in full sun. Which means that soon-ish, that full sun will fall on some freshly-planted soil. I cannot tell you how thrilled I am about this.

Giant. Freaking. Rabbits.

(Thanks to Deb Roby for pointing this one out to me.)

Here’s the thing about wine barrels. Even when they’re empty (and oh, how sad that they were empty…), they are quite awkward and heavy. The photo you see here may indicate that one person can hold these, and they can, but you may notice the photo is a bit more blurry than I might have liked.

“Come on, camera,” I said while I was taking it. “Focus.”

“It’s probably saying it can’t focus when the subject’s legs are shaking so badly,” Fatemeh said. The damn barrel was, after all, nearly as wide as she is tall.

She had met me at the back stairs to haul the barrels up the stairs and along the back side of our building to our patio. I told her we would have to do them one at a time.

“They’re splintery, and there’s nothing to hold on to,” I said. “In fact, I just gave myself a splinter.”

Fatemeh pulled her sleeves down over her hands. “I am deathly afraid of splinters.”

“That’s why there are two of us,” I said.

We hauled the containers up one by one, sneaking along the back side of a number of other apartments, keeping our voices to a whisper so no one would become alarmed.

After they were in place, I told Fatemeh about what I’d learned about how blueberries love the acidity. “I’m not growing blueberries,” I said. “That seems like a lot of commitment.”

And maybe it would be. But that leaves the next question to be answered. If not blueberries, then what to plant? It’s time, after all to begin planning my very first urban crop.

It should be noted that the wine barrels came with instructions.

“Have you ever planted in these before?” asked the guy who sold them to me.

I admitted I had not. I did not tell him the kind of jackass arrangements in which I had planted before.

“Well, you’re definitely going to want to drill holes in the bottom,” he said.

“Of course,” I said, thinking to myself about the fact that I own nary a single drill. I drifted off into reverie for a brief second about trying to just put a bunch of nail holes in the bottom, then brought myself back to reality.

“You probably ought to put a layer of rocks in the bottom, too,” he said. “Maybe an inch or so, for drainage.”

I then thought about the fact that any rocks I haul up to the patio will have to come with me up a flight of stairs, and that they will also, upon eventually moving out, have to be hauled back down those stairs. I considered ignoring this recommendation.

“And because of the acidity, blueberries love these,” he said.

“Really?” I said. And here is where I thought the following: Oh my God. Acidity. That means I’m going to have to actually figure out how to amend my soil due to whatever’s leaching in from the wine-soaked wood. And I have not a single idea how to do that. Of course, here is what I said: “Cool!”

Because, my fellow denizens of the Internet, that is how I roll.

Here’s the thing about container gardening: You have to have containers.

Luckily, when I least expected it, an opportunity arose to drive to East Oakland and acquire a pair of half wine barrels. I pulled into a dead-end street just after dark next to two stacks of the barrels and, as a BART train roared overhead on a track, handed over $40 in cash to a friend of a friend.

“These smell amazing,” I said, breathing in the deep, winey fragrance.

“They were just used this past season,” he said. This is a guy who knows how to find things: chanterelles in the Oakland hills, locations for underground dining events, and, in this case, enough recently-drained half-barrels of wine to distribute them throughout an entire community of horticulturists in the East Bay.

“I had 70 here yesterday,” he said. There were 10 left after we loaded my pair into the back seat of my car.

“They fit perfectly,” I said. “They look like a pair of kids back there.”

Off I drove, back up onto 880 and off into the night, keeping a careful eye out for cops. After all, when the entire inside of one’s car smells like a winery, one should attempt not to get pulled over, even if one has not had a single drop to drink.

Earlier this week, Michelle Obama launched “Let’s Move,” the new national childhood obesity prevention campaign. Though I rarely talk about work here, it was an exciting day for my organization, which has been working on this issue as part of a larger initiative funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

As with all Washington, DC announcements, this one came with a major press conference that featured pro athletes, local politicians, and even gardening rock star Will Allen, CEO of Growing Power Community Food in Milwaukee.

But my favorite moment (besides the part where a Mississippi mayor actually talked about my organization by name) was when the first lady started talking about kids’ reactions to visiting the White House garden and learning about what was growing there.

In particular, I would like to invite one kid to be part of my Official Tomato Club.  He wasn’t mentioned by name, but he’s the one who spoke the truth. He said, “The tomato is a fruit, and is now my best friend.”

Before I was able to add myself to the lease for the new apartment, I had to meet with the property manager, a wonderful woman from Alabama who met me for coffee. “What is it that you do?” she asked, and I told her all about the job that brings in the money.

Later, I mentioned something about this blog. “One of the things I’m most excited about,” I said, “is that patio—I’m hoping I can grow tomatoes.”

“You’re a gardener?” she said. “I’m a gardener, too.”

She proceeded to tell me about another tenant, one who grows prodigious plants on her balcony, and about the sunlight I should expect to get, which might make tomatoes problematic, but should be fine for plenty of other edibles.

“I have plants in my garden that people tell me I should pull out,” she said. “I can’t do it, though. I figured they’ve stayed with me and survived so long, I can’t possibly get rid of them.”

I understand. If it hadn’t died on me before I left, I would have tried to bring my Iowa lavender plant with me to California.

When she left, we both said what a pleasure it had been to meet each other. And it was. Back before I started growing things, I never thought it would be possible to connect with someone over plants, but the readers of this blog proved me wrong on that front from the get-go. My new property manager? Just another incarnation of that same garden-connection effect.

When I shot these flowers on Oahu, I thought they were snapdragons, but they’re not. If you know what they are, I’d love to know via the comments!

Gardeners, plant and nature lovers can join in Green Thumb Sunday every week. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information.