Anyone listening carefully might have considered that an insult. Me? I considered it awesome.

• A tomato seedling delivery
• The arrival of the tomato circus
• The unscented tomato seedlings of Home Depot
• Space-age tomato seedlings
• Seedlings, not seeds

One of the offers came from a coworker, who told me she had a variety of heirloom tomato seeds and some Tokyo onions, a varietal that she described as somewhere between a green onion and a leek, and that is excellent when doused with brown sugar and soy sauce and thrown on a grill until caramelized.

“We pretty much throw them in the dirt and they grow,” she said.

“That sounds like the right kind of plant for me,” I replied. “I’m definitely in.”

A few days later, she popped her head back in the office. “I’m afraid I’ve communicated incorrectly about the seeds,” she said. “I may have been unclear.”

I assumed that she was about to tell me she didn’t really have any seeds, and that I was pretty much SOL on that front. I have one of those minds that makes up the story in absence of any sort of facts, so sure enough, I was already figuring out which one of my other friends might be able to share some of their seeds.

“I can’t give you seeds,” she said. “I’m going to have to give you seedlings. I already have them all started.”

Good people of the Internet, I cannot emphasize enough what LITTLE problem this is. Someone else will have done the work for me. For all intents and purposes, this is like going to a store and buying seedlings, except I don’t have to buy them. All I will have to do is throw them in the dirt in the wine barrels and call it done.

Of course, there is no dirt in the wine barrels yet. So, there’s that to be taken care of. Ahem.

• Help at the hardware store
• The tomatoes. I planted them.
• Three bags full
• Space-age tomato seedlings
• A bit of a water retention problem

“I’m not sure why,” I said. “I’m just rarin’ to go!”

She suggested perhaps it had been the peppers, which launched me into a further discourse about their fiery power.

And then I admitted the even riskier side of what I’d done.

“When you cook up the little green ones, you don’t even really have to clean out the seeds and all that,” I said. “So I just left the seeds in these, too, and ate them that way.”

“And the ribs?” said my coworker.

“I know,” I said. “It was not my smartest moment. And there are still three more to eat.”

She shook her head, and I shrugged. What can I say, after all. Occasionally, I play with fire.

None Found

It’s the 25th anniversary of this organic farm, which, to be fair, is about as industrial as organic farms get. But that doesn’t mean you can’t take the seeds and grow them in a sustainable, organic manner.

I’m hoping that by the time my seeds get here, I’ll have some dirt to put them in. But if that’s not the case, I’ve got a plan that involves a windowsill. I’ve had about enough of this not-growing business.

• Possibly the most important film you’ll ever see
• A little learning, farm-style
• Help a Vermont farmer
• The lettuce is not plastic
• Lettuce give it a try

Luckily, I was wrong. Of course, I was standing on Anita and Cam’s upstairs deck, pointing out seedlings like a cartographer, and from there, it appeared there was a Very Large Hole in the center of the bed I worked on.

“Down there are the radishes,” I told a friend who was patiently taking the aerial tour. “And those seedlings in the ditch are leeks.” I gulped. “And I don’t remember what it is in the middle, but they’re apparently not doing as well as the other things I planted.”

Anita, who was up there with us, leaned over. “No, everything came up,” she said. “You just can’t see it from here. Those are the beets.”

And indeed, as it turned out, upon a closer, ground-level inspection, everything had come up. The beet seedlings are near-microscopic, indeed, but you can tell that they’re what they purported to be on the package.

“See?” I said to anyone who would listen. “Beets!”

But since we were all there for a pig roast, people were much less interested in vegetables that afternoon than in meat. Still, after a summer away from gardening, it spurred me on toward locking in that community garden plot. Because as exciting as the pig was, it was at least as exciting, if not more, to see those seedlings popping up where I’d buried rows of small seeds.

• Situation: untenable
• Friends don’t let friends use tape measures
• Photography shouldn’t distract from weeding
• Seedlings wearing too-tight pants
• How to become a fried green tomato

They were ready to plant, he told me, and I suspect my eyes widened a bit. See, I’m still not quite used to the weather situation here. Granted, there’s snow falling this week in the Sierras, so it’s not like winter doesn’t come a-callin’ in California, but down here by the Bay? It’s not that cold.

(I know those of you who have lived here for awhile are scoffing at me, and I will admit my windbreaker was not appropriate clothing for yesterday’s chilly air, but people, really…)

Regardless, the only planting one does in Iowa in December is one’s ass. In a chair. Preferably under a very warm blanket. Because it’s already snowing there and people are already not going to work and sliding in the ditch and piling up their trucks and shutting down highways.

Planting in December? This I had to see.

“Do you need any help?” I asked.

“You would help?” Cameron asked right back at me.

“If I can blog about it, yes,” I said. I am prone to negotiations when the situation requires it.

A plan, underway
The next day, following the Manhattan and a few other cocktails that shall remain in the mists of memory, Cameron asked me if I was serious about the whole helping thing. I was, so we affixed a date.

There was a corollary plan. While San Francisco is a city of incredible restaurants, there are a handful of absolute stars that have been on my yet-to-be-tried list. Among those were SPQR and Range, two that I knew are particular faves of the Married With Dinner consortium. We agreed planting, followed by dinner at SPQR, would be an excellent way to spend the afternoon and evening.

Cameron suggested I arrive at the closest BART station at 1 p.m. so we could be sure to have enough time to get everything planted. It was, I will admit, at this point that I wondered what I had gotten myself into. As near as I could figure it, that meant he thought we probably had, at bare minimum, four hours worth of planting to do.

But hey…I had not yet seen their house, nor their yard. I knew they had trees in the yard, because I had seen pictures of the makrut lime, the bergamot, and other citrus. And trees, to me, mean space. A lot of space.

The afternoon in store
And so…on Saturday morning, I set off, gloves and a change of clothes in my bag, envisioning that, perhaps, Cameron had not yet put the dirt in the raised beds, or maybe had more raised beds that I did not, indeed know about. It occurred to me, as I walked to BART, that I might be in for a back-breaking afternoon.

When I arrived, I followed Cameron out to the back yard, where I peered at the two beds, each approximately 32 feet square, and already filled with dirt. And driplines. Around the edge? The very beautiful, but compared-to-my-imagination-very-small trees.

Then he pointed out the stack of seed packets and the bag of onion sets we would be putting in.

This is the point at which I became quite certain we were not going to need all afternoon to put in 14 rows of seeds.

When he pulled out the Moleskine with a chart mapping out the plan for planting, I began openly laughing. And trust me, this was not the laughter of mockery. (Well, maybe it was a hint of mockery, but in the kindest of ways.) This was the laughter of terror. Because the way I plan and plant gardens? Not at all (planning) and ever-so-haphazardly (planting).

It’s one thing to kill one’s own plants. But to kill a fellow gardener’s crop before it even sprouts? That seems, somewhat, unforgivable.

But then, as I was standing there feeling highly inadequate, Cameron said, “Do you think I need to get a tape measure?”

“Um, no,” I said. “No, I do not.” And, I must say, I said that with great confidence, even while thinking about the time that I planted seeds that like 1/4” depth at something more like a 2” depth, and then wondered why they didn’t come up.

We set to work, and I put in leeks (which I’d only planted from starts in the past), beets, two kinds of radishes, and Cameron put in peas, mixed lettuce, and onions. We were done in less than an hour.

“Are you going to come back tomorrow?” Cameron asked. “We ought to have something ready to harvest by then.”

“Boiling onions,” said Anita, who had come out to survey our progress and tell us sandwiches were almost ready. “We’ll have an excellent crop of boiling onions.”

The part that did, indeed, involve sitting around,
although not under a blanket
All that planning? Paid off, as far as I’m concerned. It just meant we had more time to tell each other stories, and to relax on the upper deck eating the incredible Reubens Anita made us, and to sit around in the living room with their dog Angus napping across the way and their dog Bella licking the air around my face, and to drink the beers we barely earned for our effort.

And then, it was off to SPQR, where Anita and Cameron introduced me to a restaurant to which I plan to return often, and not just because of the sandwich that uses five to six different forms of pork to make itself delicious. So maybe we didn’t spend more than an hour on the planting of the garden, but really, what’s more important is cultivating new friendships.

At one point during dinner, I talked about how I’d applied for jobs in the South Bay when I was trying to move out here, and said I’d dodged a hell of a bullet by landing a job and an apartment in Oakland.

“Can you imagine?” I said. “If I’d moved to Mountain View, I wouldn’t have known ANYbody.”

“Well,” said Anita. “You would have known somebody. Different somebodies, perhaps, but somebodies nonetheless.”

But here’s the thing about my gardens: I don’t really plan them out, but I am always thrilled with what I harvest. And so it is with all my Bay Area friends. They’re exactly the kind of somebodies I want to know. That’s why I can already feel myself growing roots, happily.

To read the other side of the story, please head over to Cam’s wonderful rendition.

• From seed to seedlings
• Bay-Friendly Garden Tour Highlights: Raised Beds
• Unmatched bookends
• Situation: untenable
• Interesting choices

I dismissed this behavior as a figment of my imagination, and turned my attention back to the lecture at hand.

A few minutes later, a man in a black leather jacket strode forcefully past the garden, heading toward UN Plaza.

“Want me to come plant some weed?” he yelled.

None of us were quite clear about what he said at first, so I yelled back, “What did you say?” I can hear the collective groan of anyone and everyone who has told me not to engage crazy people in the street. But I cannot help it. I simply have to be polite.

“Some weed!” he yelled back, never breaking stride. “I’ll come in there and plant some weed. It’s a community garden, right?”

“I guess that’s why they have 24-hour guards,” Lauren said.

“Oh my gosh,” I said. “I never thought of THAT kind of vandalism. That’s kind of subversive and brilliant.”

“I think that guy’s having his own kind of day,” said the man who we’d been talking to. Lauren and I turned, and I realized that the prospective weed planter was the same guy who had been slapping the statue down at the other end of the garden. There he was, his arms wrapped around the narrower sibling to the first statue, lifting his body up so his legs stuck out horizontal to the ground. Then he dismounted the second statue and strode toward the street.

“I think,” said the grocery store lecturer, “that’s what happens when you start your day with a breakfast of vodka.”

“Or weed,” I said.

• The most noxious weed of all
• Hot, hot ladybug action
• First day at the Victory Garden
• A little fear of change
• Where it’s at: June 24

Don’t worry, Master Gardeners. I’ll pick more out in the next couple of days.

Besides the twigs, I needed to remove the clumps of grass that had infiltrated the plot over the winter, which is miraculous, because how the grass was able to be all sneaky like that underneath 20 inches of snow baffles me considerably. I also yanked any dead plants that would have come out if said snow hadn’t snuck up on me itself before I had time to clean much up last year.

But there were signs of life. Besides the garlic and the aforementioned baby spinach that is just coming up all on its own, it appears that one of my sage plants is resurrecting itself. There were some green baby leaves that are destined to become tasty treats sooner rather than later.

I yanked the rest of the sage plants as carefully as I could so I wouldn’t disturb the newcomers, and took all the dead plants over to the compost pile. Then I set about turning over the soil, unearthing all manner of worms who were not particularly thrilled to see me hanging out. Then I got moving on dropping in seeds in my normal, laissez faire manner, starting with the chard, which has bony little seeds that I loved from the moment I saw them.

After the chard, I moved on to the rest: spinach, rosemary, sage, Italian parsley and some green beans. Once I had put far too many seeds in, as usual, ignoring the wise advice of the back of the seed packet, I covered everything up. Then I stepped back from the garden plot, the sun setting behind me, and nodded. Oh, tasty spinach. Oh, tasty chard. Oh, delicious herbs. I hope some of you come up soon, despite my best efforts to plant you incorrectly.

• Starting, with seeds
• Seed cuisine
• State of the greens
• The tomatoes. I planted them.
• Slow-cooked roast beef with fresh sage and dried tomatoes

I never even put in a seed order. How ridiculous is that? Every other gardener I know spent the miserable winter ordering seeds willy-nilly, but I couldn’t even get myself to imagine that far in advance, so I skipped that whole process. I mean, yeah, I did buy those Italian seeds back in February, but that doesn’t possibly compete with all those gardeners who spend time plotting out their gardens on graph paper long before winter winds to a close.

On Sunday afternoon, though, after reading the Michael Pollan article I mentioned on Monday, I couldn’t hold out any longer. I took a walk over to the co-op to get a few things, and availed myself of their rack of Seed Savers seed packets. Thank you, New Pioneer Co-op, for not only providing me with a source for my favorite single source honey and a prodigious amount of wine, but for also allowing me to be utterly lazy about planning my garden yet still buy really quality seeds from a cool source.

I went for things I could plant this early in the season, because it looks like we still have some fairly chilly nights ahead. In other words, I did not pick out basil, but I did grab spinach, chard, green beans, rosemary, sage and Italian parsley.

I headed home again, seeds in my Inadvertent Gardener tote bag, glad that even though I’d procrastinated into the late afternoon, there was still plenty of light out in the garden. As I walked down Washington Street toward home, imagining how I’d lay out the seeds I just bought. Who needs graph paper, anyway?

• I am more compulsive in other areas of my life
• Death to the dead plant
• The tomatoes. I planted them.
• Seed cuisine
• Where it’s at: July 15

I mean, the cherry trees? To me, they symbolized the hurray of Spring, and they symbolized that the traffic around the Tidal Basin was about to grind to a halt, and they usually symbolized we were about to get a raw, wet, nasty day, generally timed to directly coincide with the National Cherry Blossom Festival’s long-planned parade, that would knock all the delicate blossoms to the ground as if they were snowflakes.

So I perked up, last May during my visit to the San Francisco Botanical Garden, when Gordon Wilson, the docent leading my walking tour, started explaining what the cherry blossoms meant to the Japanese.

“They used them to indicate when to start the rice seed,” he said. “When the trees bloomed, it meant a period of warm weather was coming.”

According to Gordon, the next step in the process came after a specific iris (and although I was taking notes, I didn’t get the name of this one) bloomed as well. That indicated a period of wet weather would be coming soon, so that’s when the rice farmers would plant their crop.

See, this is the kind of gardening marker I can get behind. When this very visible thing happens, start the seed. When this very visible thing happens, plant the seedling. This doesn’t require hoping that the almanac is going to hit the last frost date accurately this year, or require searching old blog posts and weather.com for indicators of when the weather might turn.

Just blossom: start. Blossom: plant. Very simple, and beautiful, to boot.

• Springtime in Washington
• Farewell, February
• No shortage of apples in Pennsylvania
• Seed Savers’ Fall Harvest Celebration
• Patience is a virtue