The Inadvertent Gardener

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

The Academy Award-nominated short films always intrigue me. Perhaps it’s because I particularly like playing with economy of language, I also like watching others play with the economy of storytelling in short films (whether live action, animated, or documentary).

In honor of the Academy Awards on Sunday, this months dip in to the Edible Movie pool features “Fresh Guacamole” by PES, one of the Oscar-nominated animated shorts. It’s a whimsical look at making guacamole, featuring creative representations of the main ingredients. And you don’t even have to go to a theater to see it:

I adore its stop-motion magic, and chuckled aloud a couple of times at the choice of objects to stand in for lime, jalapeño, tomato, and avocado. Give it a watch, then make your own rendition at home. I encourage you to eat it, however, with something other than poker chips.

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

Though many might say half the fun of a farmers market is getting to see, touch, and sometimes even sample the fresh produce, fruit, and other food available, sometimes getting to the market just isn’t convenient. Since The Internets can fix everything else, why shouldn’t it be able to fix this issue, too?

I explore the concept of virtual farmers markets over at BlogHer this week. Go check it out and let me know what you think of this concept!

Just in case you needed some evidence that home gardening is a good investment of your time and money, this infographic from the Mother Nature Network has some excellent data, even though the numbers come from mostly 2008 and 2009:

Of course, I’m biased, but I am delighted to see that I’m not the only home gardener obsessed with tomatoes. I’m surprised, however, that lettuce isn’t a more popular option, since you really can’t beat the taste of baby lettuce leaves cut that morning from your own garden, but hey … I’m just glad people are growing some of their own food.

I will admit disappointment with the statistics about age and education of home gardeners. Really? Nearly 70 percent of gardeners are 45 and older? That screams to me that it’s time for us all to cultivate more young gardeners, so the older generation isn’t the only one that knows the pleasure of food grown by one’s self.

I’m also concerned to see such high numbers of fairly-educated gardeners. Perhaps it’s because I live in Oakland, which is a city rife with substantially-sized food deserts. There are so many communities that need better access to healthy food, and the easiest way to increase that access is to grow that food in one’s own yard.

(Of course, in West Oakland and many other marginalized commuities, that’s a complicated matter, since much of the dirt is contaminated by industrial waste, so gardening at home requires raised beds with liners, or other planter options.)

Regardless, these are good numbers, particularly the growth in numbers of gardening households from one year to the next. Here’s to this year’s planting season—if you’re not a gardener yet, I encourage you to join the ranks of the at-home gardening crew!

Is it a sweet lime? Is it an orange hybrid? I’m still trying to figure this out.

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

At the moment, I am not in possession of large amounts of free time. We’re still unpacking (slowly) our new place. We’re in a particularly high-gear phase of wedding planning. Plus, it’s a busy time of year at work, so I’m juggling a lot of competing priorities.

But now that we have outdoor space, it has been gnawing at me that I really want to plant something. I make mental lists of what pots I need, how much potting soil to buy, and what vegetables and herbs make sense to grow.

But actually going to the garden store and getting what I need isn’t at the top of the priority list right now. And coming up with a plan that requires a lot of attention and an interminable wait for things to pop out of the ground also isn’t where I can expend my energy. Luckily, a bit of inspiration crossed my path last week, by way of a new book that I’m very much enjoying.

In The Speedy Vegetable Garden, recently published by Timber Press, Mark Diacono and Lia Leendertz focus on ways to get garden-fresh flavor in record time, which is incredibly appealing to impatient gardeners everywhere, whether they’re inadvertently so or not.

The book isn’t just about gardening. In fact, it starts with information on soaks (example: almonds, apparently, are delicious when soaked in water for 12 hours) and sprouts, which, let’s be clear, is only related in that you’re working with seeds and legumes that you might otherwise plant in the ground. But these concepts—and their quick turnaround results—intrigued me.

I’ll admit that making my own sprouts seems like the kind of thing I’d have done if I’d been my current age in, say, 1971, or if I lived in Berkeley instead of Oakland, but this book piqued my interest enough that I (gasp) ordered a sprouting bag. Made out of hemp. I will only be allowed to approach it in Birkenstocks and with (edible) flowers in my hair, but damned if this book didn’t make me curious about making sprouted chickpea hummus.

The book moves past sprouts quickly, though, into microgreens, which I’ve certainly bought, eaten, and even grown without realizing it. If only I’d known those radish sprouts planted nearly seven (!) years ago would have made a tasty salad, I probably would have just harvested and eaten them at that micro stage, ’cause they sure didn’t end up maturing the way I’d hoped.

Growing microgreens at home, though, strikes me as particularly useful for a lifestyle like ours, where having the ingredients at the ready for a lovely little salad on the fly (rather than letting already-cut greens die in the crisper) would be so convenient. And until reading this book, it had never occurred to me to put greens like fennel, coriander, and even basil (in its tiniest form) in that category.

The balance of the book focuses on more traditional gardening, but in unique ways. Edible flowers, including, again, some that I had never realized were something one might want to put in one’s mouth. Did you know daylilies were edible? Because I sure didn’t before reading this. True baby vegetables (not baby-cut carrots…you all know the secret behind baby-cut carrots, right?), which certainly make more sense to grow in a home garden than to buy at a store or even a farmers market. And lettuce that can be cut so it regrows and regrows and regrows at about the pace you need it to.

Even though I feel like I know my way around some dirt and some seeds, I liked that this book made the information new by offering me plenty of inspiration to get out there in the garden without spending a ton of time—and that’s the one commodity I don’t have a lot of right now. Those lists I’ve been making in my head have been changing ever since I first flipped through the pages of Diacono and Leendertz’s book. They’re longer lists…of shorter, smaller ideas that will still pack a home-grown punch.

Disclaimer/Disclosure: Timber Press provided me a copy of this book to review, but I was not financially compensated in any way. The opinions expressed here are my own.

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

For those of you scoring at home (and even if you’re alone), one of the myriad reasons I fled Iowa for California was my most-hated, six-letter word:

After four years in Iowa City, I wanted nothing more to do with scraping ice off windshields, shoveling snow out of my driveway, shoveling more snow out of my driveway, scraping ice off the inside of my windows while hurtling up the highway to Cedar Rapids…you get the picture.

Don’t worry. This is not a tale of woe about how the temperatures in Oakland dropped below 68 degrees, and I had to put on a puffy vest, and waah, waah, waah. No. This is a totally different tale of woe.

See, I’ve recently (as in, a a few weeks ago) moved into a house with The Unicorn. Among the selling (or, well, renting) points about this house, besides the fact that it does not have any shared walls with any other dwelling places, was that is has fruit trees in the back yard. There’s definitely a giant Eureka lemon tree, and then there are two other trees bearing some sort of citrus that may be limes, may be Meyer lemons, who knows. Regardless, this sparked a vision for me. A vision of many varieties of -ades served over ice (with or without gin and/or vodka) on our back patio. A vision of endless variations of citrus vinaigrettes over salads made from baby lettuces purchased at the local farmers market. A vision of jar after jar of preserved lemons (despite the fact that I haven’t even used all the ones I made from lemons gleaned from a friend in a prior year). Lemon curd. Lemon bars. Lemon meringue pie.

I had a dream.

Then, as we were moving into the house, a cold snap hit California. Those of you in the middle of the country, or in Alaska, or in, well, almost everywhere else would scoff at our frosty blast. We were getting down to freezing at the coldest part of the night. It’s a California-world problem, but it led me to fear for the health of our citrus.

I asked friends for advice, and got plenty of ideas. Wrap the trees in sheets! String old-school Christmas lights up the trunks and leave them on all night!

“You know,” my father said on the phone, “orchard farmers who are concerned about frozen trees spray them with water so the water freezes and protects the fruit inside the ice casing.”

I did know this, actually, because in a prior life, as a reporter for the Frederick News-Post, I was assigned a story about an unexpected freeze threatening the area’s apple farmers. I needed art for the story, so I assigned a photographer to go shoot photos of the ice-encased apple blossoms and branches right at dawn. Farmers generally do the spraying as close to the freezing point of the night so the water freezes up instantly as possible, so they’re often out all night with hoses and sprayers and fans, and the ice melts off once the sun warms up the air again.

The photographer stormed into the newsroom waving the assignment slip. “Genie Gratto! What the hell is this assignment? Why do I have to be somewhere at 5:30 in the morning?”

He got a beautiful shot, but I owed him a hell of a lot of beer afterward.

“Dad, I’m not getting up in the middle of the night to stand out in the freezing cold spraying water on my citrus trees,” I said. “I have my limits.”

The cold snap, it passed. We’re back to balmy days and nights in the 40s. The citrus is out of harm’s way. And I’m ready to make some lemonade.

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