To be fair, he’s not so new to me (though he makes every day feel new, which is, perhaps, better than his actually being new). But until now (admittedly because I haven’t been blogging much…), I’ve managed to keep him under wraps.

Now, however, I’m getting to the part where he’s going to come up in conversation.

He and I talked about this, the issue of how he might appear on the blog, back in April. “At some point, I’m going to have to write about you,” I said. “There’s no way you can’t be part of the story.”

“That’s fine,” he said. “Just don’t use my real name.”

(“He’s a smart man,” said my father, when I told him about this exchange.)

“What do you want to be called?” I asked. “You don’t have to answer right away.”

“You can call me whatever you want,” he said.

So I thought about it, and I thought about a conversation I’d had with a friend shortly after he and I decided to call what we had together something more, well, perennial.

She and I were headed into the city to meet him and some other friends for karaoke. While we rode BART, I told her how I’d never dated anyone who matched me so well, who shared so many of my interests, who challenged me so thoroughly, and who could not only keep up with me, but might very well be able to outpace me, if given a chance.

“It’s a miracle,” she said. “You’ve found a unicorn!”

“Yes,” I said. “I have found a unicorn.”

And then, about an hour later, when he got up and started singing karaoke and revealed his amazing voice, she turned to me, wide-eyed and said, “MOTORCYCLE-RIDING UNICORN.”

So, readers of mine, consider yourself introduced to the newest character in this tale of food and things that grow from the dirt, this man who has utterly stolen my heart, and who will show up in the very next story I tell: The Unicorn.

• Introducing 100 Proof Stories
• Seedlings, not seeds
• The Edible Movie: Toast
• No turning back
• Three years, one post at a time

Unfortunately, the aforementioned move means that, once again, I am a gardener without any gardening space. I’m back in an apartment sans balcony, and that means no plants to speak of.

Ordinary people might just let the blog go and retire the name, but I would prefer to keep this venture afloat, even if it looks and feels a little different than it did a few years ago. However, to make this work, I want to hear from you, readers. What do you want to see on the Inadvertent Gardener going forward? What are the posts you love to read the most?

I’ve built a little survey that I’d love for you to take. I’ll collect answers over the next week or so, and then report back about where this is going. In the meantime, thanks for sticking around while I went dormant, and I hope to soon bring you new stories and photos of food, plants, and the occasional disaster.

• Go west, young gardener
• Feelin’ groovy
• From one gardener to another
• Win $100 from Foodzie for Valentine’s Day
• Housekeeping

It’s all a little exhausting.

But it’s time to spit out what I’ve been somewhat loathe to actually put on the page. It’s time, for a whole variety of reasons, for me to put The Inadvertent Gardener on ice for a few months.

Blame it on 2010, which has, for many reasons, been a really odd year for me. I generally avoid talking about work on the blog, and I’m not really going to start now, but to say this has been one of the most emotionally intense of my career. And personally? It’s also been something of a roller coaster.

All of that has gotten in the way of a project that I promised a friend I’d have written by the end of the year. If you’ll notice, that year? It’s getting older by the minute. And I need to carve some very focused time to write this project that has dogged me for a couple of years now.

This isn’t goodbye. This is just a little break—a few months, give or take. Let’s call it a dormant season, shall we? And in the meantime, if you’re curious what I’m up to, you can find me on Twitter. Plus, there are always (and will continue to be) plenty of 100 Proof stories to parse through.

Thanks to those of you who have followed this journey since May 2006. Thanks to those of you who will still be around when I resurrect this blog at the appropriate time. I’m going to miss all of you, and I’m going to miss showing up here. But I’ll be back. I promise.

• The Inadvertent Gardener wants to hear from you
• The dog can’t eat this homework
• A garden tour-inspired photo story
• Losing the lavender
• Three years, one post at a time

This wouldn’t ordinarily be a big deal. After all, it is still tomato season in California. I’ve been breakfasting on tomatoes since they showed up at the markets this year. In fact, this time of year, it’s not odd in the slightest for me to have more tomatoes on hand than I could possibly eat before they burst, ripely, in the bowls where Fatemeh and I store them.

But these? These were the first two tomatoes off my plants in the wine barrels.

No, really. The first two tomatoes I managed to half-assedly nurture to health in California. It was a momentous occasion, people. In fact, it was, perhaps, the best possible way to kick off a Monday.

Were they the best-flavored tomatoes I’ve ever eaten? No, they were not. They tasted like they’d been stressed throughout their growing season, as they have been. And they were awfully runty. But you know what? All things considered, they were pretty damn good.

It seems only fitting that I’m writing this post on my apartment patio, sitting with my feet propped up next to the card table that served as my back porch table for so long in Iowa City. It’s a warm, summery night here, which has been a long time coming after an unusually foggy summer. I think I just got a mosquito bite or three. And I’ve got a glass of Templeton Rye on the table next to me. There’s much the same in this scenario as two and a half years ago, and yet, there’s so much that has changed.

So, sure. Maybe I didn’t have tomatoes in July like I would have had in Iowa. But sometimes? Even if it requires a wait, life gives you exactly what you need, just when you’re meant to get it.

• Spacing out
• Unmatched bookends
• Three years, one post at a time
• Losing the lavender
• Go west, young gardener

But getting ready to attend Burning Man requires a lot of attention to detail, which meant I paid essentially zero attention to the tomatoes, and then headed out to Black Rock City without dealing with the heavy branch.

When I returned, though, the branch was fine. A little stressed, but fine. So I continued with the laissez faire approach, until a few days after I’d gotten home.

That evening, I came home from work to find the branch drooping even more precariously than usual. And of course, it was in no position to stake it.

String, I thought. I need to find some string to tie it to the stake.

I began tearing through our apartment like I was being chased, searching drawers and closets for anything resembling string. I checked my wrapping paper stash for ribbon. I considered dental floss.

And then I pulled open the drawer where I keep every extra button that has ever come with any item of clothing that I have ever bought. They’re all nicely organized in a zippered plastic bag, but do I actually ever sew buttons onto clothes? No, no I don’t. Instead, I collect them in a hidden museum of Outfits I Have Known.

But in the bag was a smaller bag with a coiled chenille thread, apparently once the backup thread for a sweater that has long gone to Goodwill. String!

And this is how my tomato plant got outfitted in chenille. Don’t ever tell me my plants can’t make a fashion statement.

• The weight of water
• This goes out to my city peeps
• Where it’s at: September 2
• Forecast calls for Tormatoes
• The password is…sturdy

The end.

Translation: I have much to share with you, good readers of the Interwebz, but life has been moving at a breakneck pace, and today, I’m choosing to opt for a little work slowdown on the blog to add some breathing room.

I’m also heading out to the land of the giant, fire-breathing flowers once again, so this space shall remain quiet until my return. But when I’m back, there will be stories of gardens that tower overhead, and butter cows, and a status update on my containers, and all that. Since we’re actually just heading into Bay Area Summer, there are plenty more tomato updates to come in the beginning of what is Fall in the rest of the country.

Have a great rest of August and early September, and I shall return anon. I promise.

• Where things (don’t) stand with the community garden
• Where it’s at: August 19
• Your stories and pictures can help Midwestern farmers
• Staying indoors as criminal act
• Five local gardens to visit

I'm a BlogHer Voice of the Year!

I’m excited and honored to announced that one of my recent posts, A healing garden and an affirmation, has been selected as a finalist in the BlogHer ’10 Voices of the Year competition in the Opinion-Editorial category. The piece will be honored as part of a gala event and art auction benefiting the Nature Conservancy and Gulf restoration efforts. I’m so grateful to the judges for their consideration.

If you’re attending BlogHer ’10 and the gala, please come say hello! I’ll be there, too, checking out the art and the work of the other finalists.

• BlogHer dirt
• Plants under plastic
• Off to the Pleasure Island of tawdry food…
• Going to BlogHer 2008?
• Where the spice road led me

That was then, and this is now. Though I live in California, at the point when I moved into this apartment, I indeed did not have the requisite cast-off flip-flops available, the shoes that are still intact but not yet viable for walking around.

I realize there are plenty of people who feel that flip-flops are never viable, but come on. See above. I live in California, even if I do live in the super-temperate Bay Area. Plus, I’ve always been more of a flip-flop girl than, say, a Jimmy Choo girl.

The shoes most ready to be cast away at the time were a pair of slip-ons that I bought at Payless back in Iowa. (See? It’s like I said. And I know all you Jimmy Choo girls just threw up in your mouths a little.) Though they’re not flip-flops, they were perfect for stashing out on the patio so I could step out without tracking dirt in and out of the house, and now that I’ve mashed down the heels so they are morphing into some sort of broken-down mules, they’re even easier to slip on and off as I come and go.

Here is what else I didn’t have when I started gardening this time around: normal-sized tools. I have the world’s greatest mini-tool set, one that my friend Susan gave me as a gift, and that I love. And so I extracted its garden shovel when I got ready to plant my tomatoes because, well, it was the only little shovel I had.

It’s a good thing I needed two hands—one for the little shovel and one for the tomato plant—when I actually started planting. Otherwise? I would have had to photograph myself using the teeny tiny shovel. And that? That would have invited ridicule. I know how it is with you real gardeners out there. Size, indeed, matters.

• Last-minute additions to the to-do list
• Plants under plastic
• Breaking the ice
• Three years, one post at a time
• Soaped up

The tomatoes. I planted them.

With four seedlings, it seemed reasonable to put two in each wine barrel, but that left room for other things. I still had some lettuce seeds lying around, and some sage seeds that I brought all the way from Iowa. I had some basil seeds, and I’d picked up some random bean seeds along the way during the Bay-Friendly Garden Tour.

Seeds went in. Plant markers, not so much (I’ll get to those eventually…). But by the time the sun went down, it was official: After two years in California, I finally had a garden again.

• Bay-Friendly Garden Tour Highlights: Edible Kitchen Garden
• Relishing my time here
• Starting, with seeds
• Harvest preserved: The I.G. learns about root cellars
• Gardens where I’d like to live

But when I went to get the dirt for my pots, I thought maybe, just maybe, I was guesstimating it right.

I mean, it can’t even be called estimating when one is imagining the size of the wine barrels in one’s head and then eying the bags of dirt on the pallets and hoping that they’re picturing it right. I did, actually, do quite well in Math in high school and college, and given a set of measurements, I indeed know the equation to apply to the situation.

But when I dumped the first 1.5 cubic feet of dirt into the first wine barrel, it became very clear to me that I had severely overestimated. See, I had seven bags of dirt, but one bag filled more than half the barrel.

I’d like to say that I used only words suitable for children at this realization, but those of you who read me closely probably know better than that. I hope there were, indeed, no children on the other complex balconies. I do believe I used a compound phrase, a series of words that, when strung together, indicated, at the very least, my extreme displeasure at the realization that I would, indeed, have three bags of dirt left over when all was said and done.

Yes, that’s three bags. And no, I have not yet figured out what to do with them.

• Bay Area gardeners: It’s barrel time again!
• 10.5 cubic feet of dirt
• Help at the hardware store
• The demise of the hoodie
• Not ready for the spaceship