Strange Pleasures: Planting veggies I’ll never eat

In early February Joan and I unpacked our bags in the small 50-year-old house my parents own in Los Altos, California, about 30 miles south of San Francisco. It was going to be a six-week stay, so I’d brought a couple of editing jobs with me. But the primary purpose for the visit was to hang out with my 90-year-old parents, and, as needed, help to lighten the burden of old age for them.

This modest house sits on a small lot in a neighborhood of mostly similar houses about a half a mile from the center of town. My parents live a few miles away in the hills in a place they built in 1965 on an acre of what was a walnut orchard in the 1930s. The neighborhood is slowly changing, as neighborhoods do, but the change that happens when one of these older houses is sold in Los Altos takes your breath away about as quickly as the bulldozers move in to scrape the lot clean.

…There is not room here to explore the source, and depth, and twisted history of the compulsion I was feeling at that moment to dig…

In February the rains settle in across the San Francisco Bay Area, and night frosts are not uncommon. The grass on the hills bulks up from pale green to emerald week by week. The iris begins to bloom, as do some of the early fruit and nut trees, plum and almond. By late February, daytime temperatures are reliably in the low 60s, and the frosts have pretty much ended.

And so on the last day of February I found myself standing in this tiny back yard by the persimmon tree and the apple tree and the bloomed-out plum tree my mother tells me was a volunteer, listening to a mockingbird and thinking about dirt – not the stuff you try to keep out of your house, but the healthy mega-city of bugs, micro-organisms, organic matter and minerals which is the foundation of our lives as people who live by eating. You gotta grow good dirt to grow good food for the long run. And lest you missed it, “for the long run” is the key phrase here. (Download this free 250 page PDF if you want to dig deeper: “Building Better Soils for Better Crops” )

I was stepping hard on a shovel to try to get its point into the compacted clay that’s never nurtured a carrot or a pea plant or a potato, though it does pretty well with California poppies and miners’ lettuce. And I was looking at a relatively narrow window between tall trees to the south, which, if my guess is good, might let about 6-7 hours of sunlight reach the only place in the backyard where my garden could go.

In three weeks, March 21, I’d be on the road again, heading east, home to New Hampshire. Somewhere there may be a GM radish which will sprout and mature in 21 days, but I doubted I’d find seeds for it at Common Ground in Palo Alto, the great organic gardening supply store where I would buy what I needed to make this garden go.

This would be a garden I’d plant but never eat. That pleasure was one I’d have to hand off to Michelle and Jimmy, the young couple who would occupy the house during the summer and fall..

There is not room in this small essay to explore the source, and depth, and twisted history of the compulsion I was feeling at that moment to dig up a couple of five foot raised beds and plant some seeds. But if you’ve ever headed off on a road trip and had to go back to your house three or four times to make sure the stove is turned off, and then a day later had to wrestle down the urge to call your neighbor, and then two days later felt so sick from junk road food that you start a fast which you break by the next exit, you’re not far from understanding.

So I began to dig on that cool afternoon, expecting to finish by dinner-time. I knew I would need to add a shovel full of compost to each shovel of I dug up of this hard-pan clay, but I figured I could liberate enough compost from a old pile at my parents’ house (as it turned out, I ended up needing about a cubic yard of compost to leaven the clay in this 20 square foot garden). What wasn’t in my plans was the roots of the pine tree which had been cut down years before, roots which, of course, were tangled six inches below ground across the only place in the yard suitable for my garden.

Over the next several days, as time allowed, I cut pine roots and double dug the garden. Double-digging is a labor-intensive prep for a new garden, but there is no better way to make love to your soil than digging it down a foot and a half. (Take a look at growbiointensive.org for more info).

Then I folded in that yard of compost and added some alfalfa meal for a slow dose of nitrogen. I whispered a little prayer of invitation in English and Worm to the two big but discouraged worms I’d found sound asleep deep in the ground below the garden. I bought carrots, snap peas, rainbow chard, radishes, Japanese spinach and a small, early maturing turnip. I shaped the beds which, with the double-digging and added compost, were now fluffed up a good eight inches above ground level. I didn’t get the last of the seeds, the peas, planted until the end of the first week of March, but by that time the radishes were up.

And two weeks later when we got in the car and headed east, everything was up.

This little garden is now pretty much left to its own devices. Michelle and Jimmy haven’t done much, if any, gardening, and they may, or may not, have the time to weed it, give it water when it needs it, and pick and eat what the garden offers up to them. And that’s OK with me, whichever way it all goes. What I know is that I’m growing soil there, 20 square feet of soil that will get healthier and healthier over this summer, fall and winter. And when I visit it again, I’ll put my hands into it, ask it how it feels, what it needs, and then do the best I can to make it a little better, and next March plant seeds again.

As a postscript, this week Joan and I are in Indiana, at her father’s place. He always plants a few tomatoes by the porch. Before I leave this weekend, I’ll double-dig up a bed next to the tomatoes and plant some of the seeds I’ve carried with me from California. If you live between Indiana and NH, email me. I’d be happy to trade a little new garden bed for a night’s lodging.

~~George P., April 4, 2011