But I have a bowl of heirlooms on my kitchen counter right now, because it’s July, and even if Bay Area weather is gloomy and ever-so-non-summerlike, it’s still tomato season just on the other side of the Oakland Hills. And even when I’m not eating tomatoes, I sure do think an awful lot about them.

Though I know this information isn’t going to be helpful to those of you who don’t live within striking distance of San Francisco, I wanted to invite you to join me at an event where everyone will be thinking a lot about tomatoes: About the labor rights issues around the growing of those tasteless balls of cardboard you find in most grocery stores, about research on tomato varietals happening at the University of California, Davis, and about heirloom varieties grown in this area of the country.

It’s the July 26 edition of Kitchen Table Talks, which are held once a month to talk about issues related to our U.S. food system. Registration for the event opens this morning, and it’ll be held at Viracocha, at 998 Valencia Street at 21^st Street, in San Francisco. Doors open at 6:30 pm (and there will be food! And wine!), and the discussion begins at 7 p.m.

Hope to see some familiar faces there, and if I haven’t met you but you spot me in the crowd, come say hello! I’m always excited to meet a few more of my kindred tomato spirits.

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• Tomatoes, at exactly the right time
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• Tomato porn worth peeking at

Though I’m certainly happy to take advantage of his product, I have to admit: I could care less what Mark Zuckerberg takes on as his annual self-improvement project. One year, he wore a tie every day. Last year, he learned Mandarin. This year, he’s killing to eat.

Over at BlogHer, I’ve shared my thoughts on the issue. I encourage you to head over there and join the conversation, because while I may not care about Mark Zuckerberg’s latest dealio, I do care deeply about what it could mean for eating well in America.

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• Finally, the non-mosquito bugs come out to play
• Introducing The Unicorn
• Hungry for a Cause: Hunger Challengers Underway for Third Year
• Plant-sitting duty

The results don’t surprise me, really. After all, the sample set for the survey was professional and recreational gardeners who chose to join a social network set up specifically for those of the green thumb persuasion. You’d expect these folks to be a little more interested in gardening than, say, all the aggregate members of Facebook or whatever.

Garden-Share suggests the survey data shows it’s all that much more important to get kids involved with gardening early. (I suppose, as long as you’re not involving them in World Naked Gardening Day, I can totally get behind this premise.)

The Garden-Share folks provide some handy tips for how to get said kids involved outside:

• Give them kid-sized tools;
• Give them toys (or, at least, play areas) in the garden;
• Give them their very own container to plant;
• Read them books about gardening (Johnny Appleseed is on the suggestion list); or
• Tie gardening to school subjects they like (I’m not really sure how this works with toddlers, but hey…if you’ve got a fourth grader who’s all fired up about life sciences, then, well, winning!).

There are two more suggestions that appeal to the I-am-still-a-kid side of me. The first? Plant a rainbow.

No, I know. Those of you who know my cynical side are probably all like, “Um, Genie? Plant a rainbow? You have been in California WAY too long.” And to that I say this: First of all, that I could actually plan out a garden where flowers came up in an orderly fashion in rainbow-colored rows is pretty much impossible. It would take a miracle, and honestly? I’d be as aghast as any little kid if I walked out in my (currently nonexistent) garden and discovered I’d grown something that appeared to have a plan to it.

But still. I’m intrigued by the idea of setting in plants so they create a pattern. I’m the kind of person who would totally try to spell out my kid’s name with tomato plants or something like that. (I would probably fail, but damn…it’d be a delicious experiment.)

The final suggestion, and the one I like the best, is based on the premise that kids (and, come on now adults, you know you love this, too…) love playing with water. The Garden-Share folks suggest having your kid help water the garden…with their water gun.

Please stop now, and imagine the possibility. A hot summer day. Super Soakers. A bunch of kids.

Yeah, I can see how this could be disaster, too, but holy wow…FUN disaster, right?

And I’m in favor of this, as someone who, well, learned exactly how much of a fun disaster gardening can be when I lived in Iowa.

So yeah. This summer? Find yourselves some 10-and-under kids and some water guns, and on a hot dry day in a garden near you, kick off an epic battle. If a couple of zucchini plants get trampled, no matter. It’ll be a blast, and you never know…you might foster the next generation of gardeners.

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• Time for lunch…and a little activism
• Open for business
• Submit your idea for BlogHer Food ’12 in Seattle

But something has spurred me on today to post. Because, good people of the Internet, it is time I alert you to this Very Important News:

Tomorrow, May 14, is World Naked Gardening Day.

Stop blinking at your screen—I’m not kidding in the slightest. World. Naked. Gardening. Day.

The people behind this holiday from gardening gloves and, um, gardening aprons? They’re organized. They have a website. They have an ethos.

Why garden naked? First of all, it’s fun! Second only to swimming, gardening is at the top of the list of family-friendly activities people are most ready to consider doing nude. Moreover, our culture needs to move toward a healthy sense of both body acceptance and our relation to the natural environment. Gardening naked is not only a simple joy, it reminds us—even if only for those few sunkissed minutes—that we can be honest with who we are as humans and as part of this planet.

Um, I’m going to raise my hand right now and admit to plenty of swimming in the nude. Under no circumstances did that happen as a family-friendly activity. I’m just sayin’.

And gardening nude? As a girl who has mowed over a hive of wasps before, and who DID NOT ESCAPE TROUBLING INJURY from that event (Yeah, I know what you’re probably thinking happened, AND YOU’RE PROBABLY RIGHT.), I would prefer to keep my underwear solidly in place on when gardening. I mean, sure. Bare legs? Bare feet? Bare hands? (After all, I never did get very good at wearing my gardening gloves…) Those are all within the bounds of acceptability. I don’t think you need long sleeves to, um, trim your chives.

But World Naked Gardening Day is not a holiday I care to participate in. Sorry, members of the Body Freedom Collaborative. It might be amazing what I’ll do for a good tomato, but apparently I won’t get naked to grow one.

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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.

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But five things? That means I’ve learned more than one thing per year. Or something like that.

Regardless, today I’d like to invite you to step over to Heather Mak’s Five Takeaways blog, where I am featured in a post that tells you my five takeaways of gardening. Learn from me! Really! Your plants will be fine!

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• The Inadvertent Gardener wants to hear from you

The winner is Janet of Pretty Green Girl, who I met at BlogHer Food ’09! Janet, I’ll be in touch about getting your copy to you. And again, to all of you who left comments, thanks so much — I appreciate each and every one of my readers!

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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.

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

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