I found myself in front of towering walls of dirt of various kinds: The kind that goes in beds, the kind the goes in pots, the kind that goes in landscaping projects of the kinds I’m not doing. Finally I located a pallet of something that looked fairly organic, and I swallowed hard and hoped I was right. At least it wasn’t a Miracle Gro product—we all know how I feel about Scott’s.

I recalled my size estimates in the hardware store and loaded 10.5 cubic feet of dirt onto my giant cart. I grabbed a couple of tomato cages, and off I went to load the trunk.

When I arrived home, I parked right by the door at the base of the steps up to the patio level. And this is when I started questioning whether or not I really cared to garden anymore. Bags of dirt? They’re impossible to keep hold of, they’re absolute dead weight, and they are not fun to haul.

But, one at a time, I hauled those bags up the stairs and onto the patio, wreaking havoc as I passed each apartment with a dog each time I came in and out. By the time I was done, I was filthy, but damn it if I didn’t already feel quite the sense of accomplishment. I was that many steps closer to having a garden again.

• The demise of the hoodie
• Dirt, and dirt alone
• First fruit
• Help at the hardware store
• Are we there yet?

Yes, I know there are alternative methods of putting containers together, methods that, indeed, are a bit less weighty than the rock method. Styrofoam peanuts, for example (although if you use the non-dissolving kind, that seems like some kind of major crime against the earth, and, well, I can’t imagine the dissolving kind last very long down there…), or two-liter bottles of soda (empty, of course….please do not be burying a full two-liter bottle in your dirt and then coming to cry to me about how your containers aren’t draining) with holes drilled in them.

But I generally drink my Diet Coke out of cans, and hadn’t really thought ahead enough to start collecting them in time to line the bottom of the barrels.

I also had this little piece of logistics to take into account: Access to our patio is either through the building and through our apartment, which has very light-colored carpeting. In other words, garden stuff? Gets carried up the back stairs. Which are very steep. And then said garden stuff gets carried across the back of every apartment on our side of the building, all the way to the patio.

And this? This is what haunts me at night. Everything I carry in? I’m going to have to, at some point, carry back out again, unless I figure out a way to rent this apartment, with or without Fatemeh, until they carry me out of it.

So about those rocks? I was not carrying rocks in, drainage or no drainage. And this is how, once again, I decided that this step in the container gardening process is totally overrated, and how, once again, I decided that those wine barrels would get filled with dirt and dirt alone.

• Instructions for barreling
• The patio garden and its stay of execution
• Nothing to it
• 10.5 cubic feet of dirt
• A bit of a water retention problem

I say this as someone who has, indeed, eaten a Double Down. (I know. I live on the edge like that.) I went on a secret mission, cloaked by half-truths, with another human who will remain unnamed here—it’s fair enough to out myself, but not to out my compatriot—and we tried the damn thing. And it wasn’t terrible, as these things go.

It was certainly too salty. The Colonel’s Special Sauce was both lacking in amount and was functionally tasteless. The “sandwich” looked much less appetizing than the advertisement (which isn’t really saying much). The wan cheese and limp bacon really didn’t offer any respite from the mediocrity.

While we ate our contraband, my compatriot said, “You know, this would be really good with some spinach in the middle,” which led me to comment on the ridiculousness of introducing a vegetable into a “sandwich” where the bread has been replaced with fried chicken, which then led us to discuss how the damn thing could be recreated at home.

I know. You’re sitting there saying, Um, Genie? Why would anyone recreate this at home?

And I retort with this: What if we could avert the apocalypse if we just shopped locally for the ingredients?

Thinking corporately, shopping locally

Here’s what the Double Down comprises:

• Two pieces of fried chicken breast (Note: There is a grilled option, but it has more sodium than the fried incarnation, and if you’re eating meat as a bread replacement, why do it in a half-ass manner?);
• The Colonel’s Special Sauce;
• A slice of Monterey Jack;
• A slice of Pepper Jack;
• A slice of bacon.

A trip to the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market on Saturday morning got me a long way toward all the ingredients on the list. I picked up a half-dozen Rock Island eggs from Petaluma Farms for $1.75, a rasher of Fatted Calf bacon for $9.68, and some aged cheddar from Pt. Reyes Farmstead Cheese Co. for $10. Inside the Ferry Plaza, I bought 750 mL of Stonehouse House Blend olive oil for $18, and stopped at Cowgirl Creamery to see if they had something to sub in for the Pepper Jack.

“I need something that’s preferably local, definitely regional, will sub in for a Pepper Jack in a recipe, and will melt a bit,” I told the cheesemonger, whose face lit up.

“I know just the thing,” she said, and she handed me a taste of Capricorns, a peppercorn-laced cheese from Tumalo Farms in Bend, OR. It might not have been from within a 150-mile radius of my apartment, but it was perfect. I bought a quarter-pound for $7.44.

Please note that, compared to the Double Down, which clocks in at approximately $5.65, depending on where you purchase it, this little trip to market was breaking the bank.

And I had not yet bought the chicken.

A plan, thwarted

I originally planned to go to Bakesale Betty, a local purveyor of some of the best fried chicken sandwiches in the area, to purchase said sandwich ($8.50) and strip the chicken out of it, thereby eliminating any need to actually fry my own chicken for the homegrown Double Down variation. But the new Bakesale Betty location near my office had a soft opening and then closed up shop again right when I had the free night to try this little experiment, so that was the end of that.

Luckily, the Internet knows all, so I located the Bakesale Betty fried chicken sandwich recipe online and figured out what ingredients I needed to make this project a reality.

I hit my favorite butcher, Baron’s Meat & Poultry in Alameda, for a Mary’s Free Range Chicken breast, filleted into two relatively equal-sized pieces. $6.77. And then I went across to the Alameda Natural Grocery to pick up some Clover Stornetta Farms buttermilk ($1.49) and some cayenne pepper for the dredging flour ($2.49).

I got home from work at 6:05 p.m. and turned right around to go to the store. I was home from the shopping trip by 7, which is when I stopped to total up everything I had spent so far in service of this little experiment and came to $57.62. That’s not counting the flour, paprika, salt and pepper I already had at home. Oh. And the half-bottle of canola oil, which is not exactly a trivial ingredient. Right.

I had to sit down just a moment, really, because I could have had at least 10.2 KFC Double Downs for that amount, and it wouldn’t have required nearly that many vendors.

Also, it should be noted that the Ferry Plaza trip took approximately three hours door-to-door, and the second shopping trip for the chicken, buttermilk and cayenne took another 45 minutes.

I believe I can fry

The trip to pick up the illicit KFC Double Down took approximately an hour and fifteen minutes, including a drive to a KFC in an undisclosed location far enough from where we originated so no one we knew would see us, the parking, the purchasing of said “sandwich,” walking to a park to eat it, walking to a liquor store to buy a post-“sandwich” Diet Coke (I know…but really, does ANY of this make sense?), and driving back to wherever we may or may not have driven from in the first place.

Also, let’s note for the record that I had never, before Tuesday night, fried chicken at home. But the recipe was clear, I do have a modicum of cooking skill, and it turned out not to be that hard.

I arrived home from the store and began the preparation. This included the following steps:

1. Seasoning the chicken and then marinating it in buttermilk;
2. Making homemade mayonnaise with the eggs and the olive oil and the juice from an Oakland-grown lemon I picked up for free during the weekend’s garden tour;
3. Frying up some of the Fatted Calf bacon;
4. Eating some of the Fatted Calf bacon, because, come on, people—it was still going to be awhile until dinner;
5. Mixing up the dredging flour;
6. Doctoring up some of the mayonnaise to approximate my own version of the special sauce (This basically involved adding sweet paprika and cayenne until the mayonnaise tasted sassy);
7. Frying the chicken;
8. Slicing the cheese; and
9. Assembling the “sandwich.”

I steadily prepped and cooked (other than a 20-minute break while I waited for the chicken to get its full hour soaking in buttermilk), and didn’t eat the damn “sandwich” until 9:15 p.m.

I don’t even want to think about how many KFC Double Downs I could have bought, one trip through the drive-through at a time, during the seven hours and 45 minutes I spent, total, on shopping for and prepping this particular meal.

And, true to American fast food culture, I made this meal on a night when my roommate was at a concert. I ate it by myself. I even made sure to stream an episode of 30 Rock while I ate so it was a more “authentic” experience. Hell, I probably should have just taken the damn thing down to my car and eaten it there.

Lesson learned

I will say this: The sandwich I made at home? It was eminently tastier than the KFC version. The chicken tasted like actual chicken, it turns out I can actually fry chicken like a champ even though I had no real idea what I was doing, the bacon was insanely good, and the cheeses? To die for. Even the Gratto’s Sauce (my version of the Colonel’s concoction) was tasty and outstanding. But I could only eat half of what I prepared, and it wasn’t just because I’d snacked on bacon earlier. I had to actually chew it.

Yeah. The Colonel’s version? Goes down significantly more easily. And that’s all I’ll say about that.

At the end of the experiment, I tallied the true total. I didn’t technically have to go across the Bay to buy all the ingredients, so I’m estimating a true shopping and prep time of about four hours. And when I cost out the ingredients per sandwich, it works out something like this:

• Egg: $.44
• Olive oil: $4.50
• Lemon: Free
• Chicken Breast: $6.77
• Buttermilk: $.37
• Cayenne: $.04
• Bacon: $1.76
• Cheddar: $1
• Capricorns: $1.86
• Flour, salt, pepper, paprika, canola oil: Undetermined value

TOTAL: $16.74

And that’s before the mark-up for profit, were I to sell it to you.

Even with the adjustments for actual ingredients and more realistic time spent on shopping, the difference is staggering. That quick trip to KFC? That $5.65? You may think you’re saving time and money, but you’re not. You’re just delaying the time and the money you’re going to spend at the doctor’s office when your heart stops.

Made with wholesome ingredients or not, the Double Down? It may very well be a sign of the end of the world…as we know it.

• Farm-fresh North Carolina goodness, year-round
• Shopping for the Hunger Challenge
• Lemon basil aioli
• Iowa City cowboy spaghetti
• Finding the closest farms at market

“How’s that garden coming?” random people ask me, and I do what I am Very Good At as a Communications Director.

“Fine,” I say. “A lot of work to do.”

Or some variation of that. It’s my talking point, see? It does not give any more information away than is necessary, and it’s absolutely and unassailably true. It works, for now.

But soon, people are not going to be satisfied with a lack of photographic evidence of something akin to progress.

My excuse? There have been barely any weekends when I’ve been home AND have had time to garden AND it has not been raining since I moved into my new apartment. And really? This has not been a gentle soaking rain of the type that is lovely to walk in. It has been pouring rain.

Which led to the next situation. An email. From the property manager. Asking me if perhaps I needed some assistance. With some drilling of drainage holes.

See, there is an actual, professional gardener who maintains the communal plants on the property—lovely grasses that create a natural border between our wall and the next rooftop. And apparently he noticed that I had not, um, done anything yet with the wine barrels. And that they were collecting water at an alarming rate.

Me, being an unprofessional gardener, had not paid any attention to this water retention situation.

Also, though I lived in Africa, and Iowa City, and therefore know a thing or 35 about mosquitos, it did not occur to me that standing water? Breeds the annoying little buggers. Did this occur to the pro? Why, yes it did.

So I dumped the water over the weekend, and now the barrels are on their sides, drying out. The property manager has intimated there might be an engineer on her staff who just might be able to meet me for a drilling expedition. The kind, that is, that creates drainage. And once that little task is done, I’m bringing in the dirt.

• From one gardener to another
• Help at the hardware store
• Dirt, and dirt alone
• Three bags full
• Water: It’s a good thing

One of the most interesting things he says, and that he has long espoused on his excellent blog, is that the consumers he’s trying to reach with his business are the ones who aren’t going to shop at box stores anyway. And those same consumers are the ones who will ignore advertising and shop via word of mouth, “one blog post at a time,” as he says.

Reactions, folks? Feel free to post them here, or over at Trey’s site. I’m following this debate avidly and am curious to see what you think.

• Business travel shorts
• Nominate your favorite blogs
• Coolest mantis photos ever
• A temporary goodbye
• Feelin’ groovy

They were visiting me for the first time in this new city I called home, and I wanted to show them the newly-dedicated Cathedral of Christ the Light, which I’d been attending since its dedication Mass just two months before. That celebration swept me up: the hymns, the readings, the prayers were all given in English, Spanish, Vietnamese and Tagalog. People wore big Sunday hats, kente cloth, silk Ao Dais, and Oakland A’s windbreakers. We passed the peace among us, pressing white hands to brown, smiles everywhere. It made the list of the most memorable and moving Masses I’ve ever attended.

I wanted to share this amazing place with my family.

We celebrated Thanksgiving Mass, and, at the end, greeted the couple behind us, an American woman married to a Nigerian man. My Dad and the man began reminiscing about Lagos, where my family lived for two years when I was in middle school, and talking about what has changed there since then. The man invited us to travel there with them. The woman invited me to join the choir. By the time we wrapped the conversation, it had been nearly 45 minutes. We all hugged as if we were old friends.

“I want to show you guys the healing garden,” I said then. “I haven’t been able to figure out where it is.”

The garden project attracted controversy during its planning stages. It was designed by a clergy abuse survivors’ group, hand-in-hand with the Oakland Diocese. It is tucked out of the way, in a place where survivors can come and meditate, cry, heal, but where they can do so out of sight of passersby on the main plaza, and without actually entering a church.

I can only imagine how reticent an abuse survivor might be to enter a church.

We found the garden on the cathedral grounds map and rounded the corner of the building. None of us spoke. None of us could have spoken had we wanted to. I made a sort of broken sound as I read one of the two plaques that read “This healing garden, planned by survivors, is dedicated to those innocents sexually abused by members of the clergy. We remember, and we affirm: never again.”

My father raised me as a Catholic, though my mother is a staunch Protestant who would not compromise her strong and fervent beliefs to join a church with which she could not agree 100 percent. My father, too, was raised as one of six children in a devoutly Catholic family, and my father’s youngest brother is one of the most gentle, most wonderful priests I have ever met. He has chosen to serve his entire career in upstate New York, and I can only hope the small parishes where he has devoted his life have any idea how lucky they are.

Uncle Steve, you see, is one of the very best of the good guys.

He is a priest who understands how love, humility and deep and abiding faith, combined with intelligent, proper discourse, can lead to a higher understanding of the broken and human Church. His diocese has sent him in to help heal parishes during terrible situations because he is both deeply spiritual and a thoughtful attendant to his flock, but also an incredible parish administrator. Like all his siblings, he is brilliant at what he does, and passionate.

It is because of him that, after I got divorced, I pursued and got an annulment. He presided over my wedding, so I wanted to close the books properly, in the eyes of the Church, on the failed relationship.

It is very much because of him that I continued to attend Mass regularly, even after many of my friends had abandoned organized religion. In fact, for the first year I was in Oakland, I not only sang in the Cathedral, but even cantored at the Masses. I credit his influence with keeping me on my knees even as the pastor of that parish preached before the 2008 elections about how we needed to vote with our “Catholic consciences” on issues like marriage equality and abortion rights (I did vote with my Catholic conscience, which, I must say, is identical to my Genie Gratto conscience. I voted for Barack Obama.).

But for a long time, my resolve to stay in the Church has slowly crumbled as my faith has grown. Along the way, I’ve hoped for an American split from Rome, thinking that might create a more liberal Church that is more friendly to the issues I care about. But honestly, based on the news exposed over the past decade and my personal connection to those stories, I don’t think the American Church has any idea, either, how to comport itself in a good, rather than a harmful way.

Still, I’ve managed to reconcile, for years, my pro-choice beliefs, my support for marriage equality, my assertion that there is zero reason that women should not be priests, with my ability to still attend Mass and be fulfilled by its ritual power.

Even less than a month ago, when I got some news mid-day that socked me in the gut so hard I could do nothing but shake and cry at my desk, my first instinct was to leave the office and go and sit in a pew of the Cathedral, tears rolling down my cheeks as two of the musicians practiced hymns for a later Mass. I lit a candle. I sent my prayers for peace in my heart up toward the soaring, light-filled rafters. It was more sanctuary to me than anything else I could think of.

But the news out of Rome only gets worse, not better. And on Wednesday, I read a piece in The Stranger in which Paul Constant demands his own excommunication:

“I demand to be excommunicated because I do not believe women are second-class citizens. I demand to be excommunicated because your missionaries are informing impoverished citizens of third-world countries that birth control is a sin when it is in fact the single most important thing they could do to gain some small amount of control over their economic situation and health. I demand to be excommunicated because your church has become a hate group as virulent as any this world has ever seen, one that is unnaturally obsessed with the sex lives of good men and women across the planet. I demand to be excommunicated because I do not condone child rape or the concealment of child rape.”

I am not ready to make Constant’s demand. I am a woman who always harbors hope for good, for better, for change. But I noted, this year, that I didn’t bother attending services for Ash Wednesday. That I ignored Easter. That I ate meat on every Friday in Lent. I noted, this year, that I’ve stopped singing at the Cathedral, that I don’t go to Mass anymore, and that even thinking about the current Pope spikes my blood pressure. And I agree with everything Constant says: I do not want to be associated with any organization that espouses those values.

I am not a survivor of clergy abuse. But this issue has touched my family and, therefore, me. The Church is broken, and as long as its current leadership is unwilling to deal with its past and present in an unequivocal way that heals that break rather than rends it further, I must turn away. I cannot condone this. I cannot continue explaining to people how I reconcile my personal position with the fact that, by giving my time, my voice, and my money to any agent of the Church of Rome, I am supporting something so deeply and systemically flawed as to perhaps be unfixable.

I hope. I pray. I want it to be different in my uncle’s lifetime. I want a whole, not broken, sanctuary, one in which healing gardens like the one here in Oakland are unneeded.

I remember, and I affirm: Never again.

• Eat at Bill’s? Not any longer
• Repot at your own risk
• A garden poem
• The nerd approach to garden location
• Normal becomes newsworthy

I got the paper, but also took a spin through the gardening section. Ordinarily I eschew big box stores for gardening supplies, but they had racks of seedlings out, and I couldn’t help but at least try to stop by.

I found the tomato varieties, many of the seedlings stretching tall and glorious from their little plastic pots. It has been so long since I’ve been able to think about tomato seedlings and planting some of my own, and it was thrilling to hang out and see those familiar leaf shapes again.

I looked up and down the aisle to make sure I wasn’t being watched, and then pressed a Big Boy tomato leaf between my fingers, trying to squeeze out a little of that green, spicy scent. I lifted my hand to my nose, and…

…smelled nothing but powdery potting soil.

I tried again. This could not possibly be, right? Tomato leaves with no scent? It made positively no sense.

But I had the same result, no matter how many tomato plants I mauled in my hunt for that familiar smell. Finally, I left, sheepish and sad for the people who would, no doubt, buy those seedlings. I have no scientific backing for this claim, but it seems to me that if the leaves have no scent, it’s likely the tomatoes will have very little flavor, as well.

• Repot at your own risk
• Tomato, stumped
• Put a stake in it
• Operation transplant
• What turns up

But when that party involves tomato destruction, well, I simply can’t condone it. And this is why I must condemn the (otherwise) good people of Buñol, in Spain, where they just celebrated the 64^th annual “Tomatina,” an opportunity for people to fill the streets and (I shudder) hurl tomatoes at each other.

How many tomatoes? Well, this year, 100 tons. ONE HUNDRED TONS. Do you have any idea how much gazpacho that would have made?

While you ponder that, I’m heading off on a decidedly non-tomato-throwing vacation to Burning Man. I’ll return after Labor Day with more tales to tell. Who knows…maybe I’ll stumble across some sort of desert garden while I’m out there? Watch this space to find out.

• First, best tomato
• Watch this space for stories of fire-breathing flowers
• Yellow gazpacho
• A tomato invasion, in song
• Where things (don’t) stand with the community garden

But tonight, I got to attend a preview of the new documentary, Food, Inc., and I watched much of it with my mouth open and my mind blown.

The movie’s prime players are the ones most folks active in food access/politics and the locavore world know: Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser. But I cried along with a mother who lost her two-and-a-half-year-old to E. Coli, and winced at the sight of industrial chicken farms and factories, and recommitted to only buying meat that’s grassfed and sourced locally.

Like An Inconvenient Truth, the movie is disturbing and absolutely clear in how it presents its opinion. But also like An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary tells its story in an engaging, gripping manner.

Due to a lateish lunch, I hadn’t grabbed dinner beforehand, and by the time the movie was over, it was pushing 10 p.m. and I needed to find something to eat near my hotel that wouldn’t offend my post-movie sensibilities. I ended up across the street at Ciudad, which serves local, organic and sustainable food wherever they can on their menu. I’m glad they came through for me, because after viewing Food, Inc., I don’t feel like I’m doing nearly enough. I can make better choices, and thanks to this movie, I am even more committed to do so when and where I can.

If you eat food, go see this movie. As a matter of fact, it’s probably more accurate to say if you think you’re eating food, go see this movie. It may be one of the most important films you’ll ever see. The movie opens in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York tomorrow, with wider release scheduled shortly thereafter.

• The Edible Movie: Toast
• Bringing deprivation into stark relief
• Finding food in farm country
• Free lettuce seeds from Earthbound Farm
• Contigo has stolen my heart

My work is done here.

• Search-o-rama
• How many of us think alike?
• Grow what’s been planted
• Tomato porn worth peeking at
• Tomato, stumped