Holly Korbey - Outside/In

My Texas Bluebonnets

 

I can’t get enough of saying My Texas Bluebonnets - which is the Texas state flower, by the way. I’ve said it over and over in my head, giggling, and I’m thinking about dragging out my dusty podcasting equipment just to be able to say it into a gigantic microphone as well, recording it for posterity. My Texas Bluebonnets. Texas Bluebonnets. So, Two Texas Bluebonnets walk into a bar… No doubt, it has a ring. I even like looking at the shape of the letters all lined up together, the tall and stately T and x mixed with the round bs and double nns… There is definitely something about those words, something kind of … suggestive, isn’t it? Something that might be a euphemism for something unutterable on a cute garden blog such as mine? I can’t put my finger on what it is exactly, and my entire family is reading so I wouldn’t even want to, but that does not deny its existence. Just try saying it yourself a few times. My Texas Bluebonnets. My Texas Bluebonnets.

Okay, I’ll stop.

Questionable as their name may sound, it’s the Texas Bluebonnets that have given me a bright spot of joy on this dreary Monday morning, because they have exploded these gorgeous, deep periwinkle flowers – overnight! - after nearly two weeks of rain. We woke up this morning to seven or eight sprouted purple towers with gobs of little blooms on each stem, waving faintly in the short March breeze like dainty Southern Belles.

Whether or not they are aware, the Bluebonnets have bloomed at exactly the right time. I have spent the weekend awash in anxiety, tiptoeing out to the veggie box every hour and staring at my soggy, sodden, almost frozen pale yellow seedlings, each time confirming my own deepest insecurities that this was a horrible idea, and starting a blog about it an even worse idea, and soon the little bugs with the big teeth will come and eat up all the leaves and the sun will stop shining and then after that there will just be a big box of dirt and the wasted, dried up old stems of what I wished to be a life-fulfilling dream, a promise of feeding my family from my own hands, but now will be left with a blog about watching a big box of dirt that may or may not be positioned in a spot to receive enough sun to sustain vegetation but that doesn’t matter now, because the plants are dead, and I’m beginning to not feel so good myself.

If only it would have been possible for me to become something more solid, like a nurse, or a doctor, or a lawyer. Or even a marketing manager, or a clerk of some kind, anything but a writer, anything but an actor. If you had any clue as to my other, more practical skills (which are very thin and whispy, indeed), you would understand that this would be an impossibility. I have no other skills but these. And that, if you must know, in moments of anxiety like the ones mentioned above, comes as a shock to the system that must feel something close to a heart attack, although to my knowledge I’ve never had one. My throat completely closes when I think of the fact that I have no other skills, these are the only ones I’ve got, and I’ve GOT to make this garden work, how will I have a great gardening blog if I’m a terrible gardener? I have to say, if I were reading right now, I’m not so sure I’d trust myself. I mean, look: I’ve been taking photos of a big brown tarp for days, and seedlings so weak and so lifeless that if I saw them and thought to myself, well, this is gardening?, it doesn’t look that interesting and not that much fun, then I’d have to maybe take up sewing instead.

Do you see what I mean about the Bluebonnets? My Lord, they could not have bloomed at a better time.

If you are tired of reading about me, and would much rather read more about Bluebonnets, the Texas state flower, Lady Bird Johnson's favorite and planted on state highways by the thousands, please go here or here or here. You will get your Bluebonnet fix (they are really beautiful, especially when seen in multitude), and I will feel less like a self-pitying schmo.

My Own TARP Rescue Plan

Are you wondering when the garden-porn-style, super-luscious sunshiney and dripping green garden shots of delicate flowers and pregnant vegetables will begin to be taken? Good Lord, soon, I hope. March has been nothing but a drenched mess. After nearly four days of hard rain, tonight the temperature will be hovering near freezing, and I was so worried about all those little plants (so tiny to represent so much hard work), that I took extra precautions. See my tarp rescue plan, above.

I will sleep better knowing they are under there. I definitely felt more farmer than glamorous garden blogger out there tonight, slogging the tarp around the soggy, sad-looking little seedlings, my cute garden clogs drenched in grey, clayish mud.

I promise, all this work (and all your hanging with me) will pay off. I can feel the sun coming. I can feel it.

Let's Play Catch Up

Sassy little red pepper plants. They're taking a beating from the rain, but hanging on.

It's Thursday night, and rain has fallen, nearly non-stop, for three days in Dallas. I have been unable to get out to the garden at all, except for a few stolen moments in between downpours. As far as the seedlings are concerned, if you've been worried - so far, so good. They're drenched, for sure, and their little bodies look a tad wrecked from all the rain, but the leaves are turning greener (!!!!) and the squash and zucchini appear to have little buds, perhaps the beginning of blooms?, dripping down like little bonnets from the centers of the stems. All in all, I'm definitely feeling more positive about putting them in the ground.

My lovely sarcastic friend Annie, who lives next door to a master gardener (no, really, the lady apparently has a certificate and everything) from whom I receive, third-hand, all my gardening advice, reminded me today that I should not have planted them until April. "Holly, I TOLD you!" were about her exact words. I blushed. The reason for the reminder: tomorrow night the temperature will drop to a freakish 34 degrees. "The master gardener said DON'T PLANT UNTIL APRIL."

Shit.

So, tonight, I will be building a contraption to pull over the seedlings, a big blanket of sorts, I think it will be a painters' tarp with some dowel rods to prop it up, all to protect my little babies (also in the forecast: heavy winds). Instead of rhapsodizing to you about some new aspect of gardening that I discovered and laying on the metaphors nice and thick, like I so enjoy, tonight I will be out in the garage, pulling together some tarp for a carrot-tent.

In lieu of content, I bring you today's best from the web:

* "Slow, Easy, Cheap and Green," from today's New York Times, features a profile on Felder Rushing of Jackson, Mississippi, local public-radio host of "The Gestalt Gardener" and advocate of "slow gardening." His ideas and advice are worth reading - a notable bit describes how he drives a pick-up filled with dirt where he plants basil and rosemary - especially if you're in an apartment, or a total novice, like some people around here.

* My sister-in-law, Jessy, sent me these links for coupons and bargains for gardening supplies featured on About.com, which totally goes with my veggie-gardening-as-economic-safehaven dogma.

* Finally, I found this TEDTalks (Technology, Entertainment, Design) video, "A different way to think about creative genius," with Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Eat, Pray, Love), through a friend on Facebook, and have watched it two times already, and I believe that my third is coming sometime around 11 pm tonight. Check it out.

Back to the garden tomorrow, I hear the sun is supposed to shine.

Shoving Some Seedlings Into the Ground

Look at this - I'm no expert, and I am sure you well know that by now, but something tells me these little veggies do not look so good.

I’m officially worried.

Okay, so I left for Nashville last week with specific instructions to my husband on how to water the seedlings, and as far as I can tell, he followed them, to the letter. But then, he decided to hop on a plane and join us in Music City, and spent four days away, leaving the seedlings to themselves. It must have been during this time that they became too big for their little studio-size compartments, and too parched from not being watered for four days.

Things do not look good: the babies are weak, yellowish, and more than a few leaves may have turned the palest shade of brown.

As I have previously mentioned, I am notoriously impatient. I have had, upon graduating college in 1995, 4 different careers. I decided to marry my husband after knowing him for five weeks (yes, the impatience is grating, but the intuition! I’m teeming with it. I just knew he was the one. I’ll praise myself for intuition in another post… for now, I’ll continue flogging myself for impatience). The list of impetuous decisions could go on and on. So, what does in impatient person do in these circumstances?

Plant the seedlings the moment one gets home.

I nearly ripped the poor babies out of their little studios trying to get them into the dirt. The seed-caves where they’d been staying were piled full of twisted roots, taking up most of the space. I am so inexperienced, I could not tell if they were weak because I waited too long to plant them, or because they had not been watered for four days, or most horribly some third mysterious cause that I could not guess in my wildest dreams, like being ravaged by near-invisible, horrible Texan bugs, or sitting too close to where my sons play Star Wars.

First thing the next morning after arriving home, I yanked on some gardening pants and ran outside. Here is what I did: I dumped half soil, half compost/peat/hummus into the smaller raised bed, the 4’x 4’ bed, and mixed it around, quite haphazardly, with a giant shovel. Then, I made evenly spaced holes with my finger in square foot increments (a space-saving measure I learned from the Square-Foot Gardener), filled them with water, and shoved the contents of each little pocket seedling into the holes. I then covered the gaping holes holding my very tender seedlings gently with dirt.

I don’t know about you, but looking back on it a little bit, my planting method does not appear to be extremely scientific. Actually, I didn’t even read up on how to plant them in the beds, or what methods to use, or what kind of soil to use. I didn’t even test the soil. I just went up to Albertson’s, bought all the organic soil they had (it was a sale, for God’s sake), and dumped it into the big wooden boxes.

The carrots went into the ground and have not been thinned. I read something about singing while you thin carrots, which leads me to believe that it is a tedious chore, and they should be thinned three to one inch or five to one inch, I cannot remember which, or else the carrots will all be a giant knotted mess when they begin to grow. I haven’t thinned my carrots at all; using an eyeball guess as to where things stand now, I think I’m at about 150 plants per inch. The shoots are so tender and weak-looking, however, that I’d be terrified to thin them; if anyone has any idea on what I’m supposed to do about this, I’d love nothing more than to hear from you.

The zucchini and the squash were the two vegetables that shot out of their seed-caves heartily and with strong stems and large leaves. I was confident they would be no-brainers, guaranteed to grow. In our present situation, they look ill. The leaves have paled to a kind of butter yellow, and a couple of the leaves have shriveled up and fallen off. I shoved them into the dirt, too, just hoping that strong sunshine and really, really nutritious dirt – dirt that I have no idea is the right set of nutrients for my plants, actually – will do the trick.

The radishes look like they might be the best off of the whole group, they’re bent over quite a bit from lack of water I’m guessing, but the stems are a bright, healthy red and the leaves are a stunning, almost neon, light green.

The green and red peppers are suffering from something, but I do not know what. Their leaves are strong and pointy, but in the middles of each they are pale yellow and the yellow looks to be spreading to the outer corner of each leaf. I think I vaguely remember from previous (and hasty) late-night readings that this has either to do with lack of iron or lack of soil acidity, but I will need to look this up again and get back to you.

The green onions are still bent over, like little dead hairs, lying straight on into the dirt like they’re just waiting for someone to bring them a drink of ice-cold water to revive them. I wish I had some idea what that was about.

The great thing about being hopelessly impatient and relying almost solely on intuition is that I make don’t-look-back decisions quickly; in their little dying leaves I saw disaster pending, and decided, like a melodramatic doctor on “ER”, there’s no time to waste, let’s get these babies in the ground and hope for the best (I used to be an actress, and have more than once imagined myself a Dr. Quinn for the flora set). I do a lot of that, hoping for the best. I’m not sure how many vegetable farmers use this reliable method. It might be a fine idea to bone up on a little more growing information before starting on the larger bed.

I got them all the in ground, watered them thoroughly. And now, I wait. I wait for some kind of sign that they’ll be all right. I feel guilty, and neglectful, for running away from them for a whole week! They can’t survive without me. I thought that organic gardening would be a bit like doing the laundry, only with more fresh air; I feel now that this might be a lot more like solving a puzzle, a big one, and constantly having to move and re-move all the pieces.

Like a nervous mother hovering over her newborn with her hand on his back, checking his breathing, I sit in the sunshine by the small bed box and wait, watching every flutter of leaf, every bend toward the light, every stray bug that wanders into the box (I know nothing of the bugs, either, and right now consider every single one the enemy).

I am waiting for some sign that they will continue to grow and be beautiful, that they will bear fruit. They are showing no immediate signs. So for now, I wait.

Michelle Obama Takes My Advice. Finally.

I have just returned from Nashville, and lookie what I see here, all those emails to the White House have finally paid off: Michelle Obama is planting a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. Apparently, she is concerned (like me) about the economy and healthy food choices, and wants to spread the word about organic gardening (also curiously like me). I am so proud. In all seriousness, I really do admire the woman greatly and am beginning to wonder, veggie garden or no, as is Maureen Dowd, if she is the Obama who should be calling the shots from the Oval Office.

I have just gotten home from a tedious car ride with two restless children, and my nerves are shot from arguing over the DVD player and my stomach in tumult from three fast-food meals in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Texas, respectively (all equally as horrible). As I squint my blurry eyes to the computer screen (oh, how I've MISSED you, computer!), I am refusing to become nervous that the White House seedlings  in the NYT photo look quite a bit greener and perkier than mine, and I promise that Michelle's professionals giving her a hand did not hop up and drive to Nashville a week before they were set to plant, leaving their seedlings outdoors in harsh Texas sun for a week without water.

Ooops.

I am tired, and the leaves on the zucchini are wilting, and the stems on the squash are pale and flaccid, and the tiny little shoots of the carrots are bending completely over like they're fainting, and I, like Scarlett O'Hara before me, will choose to not deal with the seedlings tonight, instead I will take a bath and choose not to look at the zucchini, and not to look at the squash, and assume that tomorrow is indeed another day.

I will deal with the zucchini tomorrow.

Hope Makes a Garden Grow, by Alisha McKinney

(Since I'm out of town this week, I asked my friend Alisha to comment on her growing experience in New York City. Here is her take on city gardening!)

When it comes to gardening, I have managed to keep exactly two things alive – a ficus tree sold to me by a distractingly attractive hipster farmer on the basis that it was virtually indestructible (“we genetically modified it to withstand idiocy”), and a jade plant that manages to thrive regardless of the fact that I only remember to water it once a year. That said, I love plants. Long for them. I go nutballs for gardens. I crave a lawn. Unfortunately, I live two inches from Times Square, which means no nature of any kind, unless you count rodents and the occasional wayward pigeon. (My cats certainly do.) But unlike most New Yorkers, I do have a tiny slice of outdoor space – a small but highly coveted terrace. Most of the year it acts as a makeshift storage space, housing bulky furniture pieces that I’m too sentimental (read: lazy) to part with. But come Spring, that grim little patch of concrete offers something money can’t buy:

Hope.

There’s a lot to be said about hope. It’s what drives people to fall in love and invent things and elect a really awesome President. It is also what makes people like me spend inordinate amounts of money on things like tomato plants. I know it’s fruitless. Living 12 stories in the air leads to A) excessive wind conditions, and B) inadequate sunlight, which might great for parasailing but it sure wreaks havoc on hydrangeas. Combine that with my compulsive need to overwater (with the exception of the poor jade) and a stubborn refusal to fertilize (I can never figure out when to use it) and you’ve got a recipe for some serious shrivel.

Not that this stops me.

Like Dr. King, I have a dream. A dream of a world where all people have the freedom to grow things, regardless of the color of their thumbs. A world where attractive hipster farmers join with perplexed urban mommies to fight urban sprawl and explain the intricacies of fertilizer application. A world where I can finally, maybe, have something resembling a yard.

This year it’ll happen, I just know it. I hope.

Alisha McKinney writes and acts and raises a baby. She can also tell you everything you need to know about B-list celebrities. Read her at FlabbyPants.

Friday

These are eco-pots made of peat; you just peel off that plastic tag and stick them in the ground. I did that in haste with a bunch of herbs right before it turned 40 degrees and raining. We'll see how long they last.

I have no gardening news to report, except maybe the washing away of wonderful, easy-to-plant, "Guaranteed to Grow" wildflowers down the front sidewalk and out into the street, swept into the sewer by the three-day, three-night continuous downpour we've been having. The rain shows no signs of stopping, even though the weatherpeople swear, with innocent eyes and fingers pointing at maps, that it will. At this point, I am not believing them.

I am off to Nashville this weekend to visit my family. I have large doubts there will be any gardening news to report from there, since their spring will have just begun to sprung once we arrive, and my lonely vegetable boxes and little seedlings will be in a temporary holding pattern while I drive nine hours with two restless children through the downpours in order to get some love from my large and supportive family.

And yet, I will not be the gardener with a chip on her shoulder who lets you down: next week I have planned some great content in spite of my being away, from a wonderful guest blogger on gardening in New York City, to important pieces on organic gardening and even how I bought that crazy book Sneaky Chef that's not the Jessica Seinfeld book but the one that she apparently ripped off, and as you might have guessed I'm a fairly desperate person when it comes to vegetables in that I love them so much, and I get very impatient that my children have not taken to them as well as I. Well, let's be honest, they haven't taken to them at all. Yep, I'm hiding vegetables in my children's food, and it's working like gangbusters so far.

There is all that to look forward to next week. Hope to see you here.
Holly

The Day the Flowers Came in from the Rain

It has been raining very hard all day. The windows are streaked with millions of rolling ribbons of water, and the sky has retained its’ nighttime shadow all day long.

I have nothing to say about gardening today, because it’s a swooshing pile of cakey mud right now. The weather has turned very windy and cold, at least cold for Texas. I dragged in all my pots of flowers that I just had to plant, although the “experts” said it was too early.

Okay, maybe it was too early.

I’m going to stay in and wait out the rain. Outside my house, out in the world, a palpable sense of anxiety is floating around, do you feel it? I feel it. It’s a snug fit around the throat, a kind of squeezing uncertainty that makes you want to do something rash, like scream or kick or pull your hair. Or pull someone else’s hair.

I mentioned to you the other day that I couldn’t bear to watch the news any longer, and that is getting more and more true every day. It’s very hard to watch our government argue over - and I think I quote Kathleen Sebelius when I say this - what color the fire engine will be while the building’s aflame. My husband and I know many, many people who are out of work and do not know what they are going to do. We know even more people who do have work, but are not at all sure that the work they have will last long. Yesterday, I talked to a photographer friend at my son’s school who broke her toe on a coffee table and subsequently had a complete meltdown, with her husband’s broken job search and Cobra running out and two little mouths to feed closing in on her, choking her. She was standing in the pouring rain while she told me all this with no raincoat on, her short hair dangling over her eyes in clumpy chunks. I looked down at her freezing feet in flip-flops, her toe lonely and unbandaged in fluorescent purple and green. She could not afford to bring the toe to the hospital. She decided to treat it herself.

I find myself quivering, wavering, should we have left New York – the land of opportunity? Is that so true now? Many of the people we know in NY are worse off than here. I am embarrassed to admit that I’m glad we sold our Brooklyn co-op before the bubble burst. That piece of crap was most likely not worth half of what we sold it for. I’m so sorry, people who bought our co-op, but I guess I don’t have to tell you this now. You probably already know.

My impatience with how the world is going to right itself is wearing thin. Can’t we all get on the bandwagon and find some common ground? We can all agree that a lot of people are hurting, why don’t we just start there? Maybe we could all agree that we need to do something together? Maybe we could start there.

Impatience is one of those qualities that is difficult to shake, it has strong and heavy roots in narcissism, the idea that the world needs to get up and hurry for me. I am big enough to admit that. (So are my sons, especially the astute older one.) Under that, though, lies an electric-shock-like fear, which I cover discreetly by tapping my foot like a petulant child, tired of waiting for the answers to arrive, because the entire time I am wondering if I’ll be next. If I am the one the world wants to swallow up next.

That’s why I like going down to the sunroom, where I’ve got my big terracotta pots of flowers shacking up inside from the pouring cold rain. They are beautiful, but jeez, do they grow so slow! The purple and yellow pansies and the bluebells are showing one bloom apiece, and I swear, the succulents haven’t moved an inch since I planted them three weeks ago. I’ve been watering them like mad, too – oooh, am I supposed to do that? They are desert plants, after all. Hmm. I’ll get back to you.

Who wants to plant a garden with me? I like how it feels, planting a garden. I’m doing something about it; I’m waiting for the ship to come in. While the world falls apart, I’m digging in the dirt. I’m making something grow. I’m trying to wait, patiently, to see a really ripe zucchini.

No, really, I am.

The Veggie Bed Boxes Are In!

Aren't they cute? We made them! We're so handy! 

Okay, now I’m getting excited. We took all of Saturday afternoon and put together the vegetable beds, which we made from combination inspirations of our friends Andrea and Scott in Austin (Scott’s an architect, and we do not pretend for a minute that our boxes look as good as theirs) and the Square Foot Gardener. We took the best of their ideas and combined them to fit our particular patch of yard.

The other night I was reading one of my favorite blogs, this cooking blog called Orangette, by Molly Wizenberg, and she was saying in her FAQ page, as advice to aspiring writers, that one should write what one is passionate about. Six months ago I could not have predicted that I would be so passionate about my vegetable garden, but now I feel the passion beginning to surge. Against all my city-girl instincts, I wake up each morning and run out to our sunroom to survey the seedlings, the succulents, and the herbs I planted a little too early, according to my friend’s neighbor who is a professional gardener (we will deal with this in another post, one about how almost unerringly impatient I am, I got engaged after I’d known my husband 5 weeks, etc. etc.). I can’t wait to get out in the yard every day, to put plants in the ground and spread the salty, earthy-smelling compost - and I actually don’t mind that my hands look a little bit worse for the wear.

I told a friend a couple of weeks ago that I wanted this blog to be more about life than about gardening. But at this point in the process, I’ve changed my idea slightly yet again: I want this blog to be about growing something. I feel at times like the whole world has gone completely nuts, and is kind of collapsing around us. My husband and I are low on work, and we can barely stand to read/see the news, we’re feeling uncertain about the future (anybody else feeling that pinch?). But, within the feeling of lack, there’s a bright little spot, a little pinpoint of light. Inside the black hole of economic collapse, something’s growing. Growing: it’s the same reason I had children, started my own business, learned to be an expert baker, and began to write. I really like to see ideas and thoughts become something concrete, something to hold: I like to watch things grow. Does this mean I’m some sort of control-freak, wanting to be the mother over everybody, oversee their growth under my expert eye? Oh, probably. But, my spiritual self would say that I probably wouldn’t feel that way if I weren’t any good at it. All this is a very long-winded way to say that sometimes, hidden in the unlikeliest of places, is the desire – perhaps the need – to watch something grow.

ANYWAY, back to the amazing, and amazingly easy, vegetable bed boxes. If you are ready to grow your own food, or at least to try, like me, here’s how we made them.

To make one 4’x8’ box, and one 4’x4’ box, you will need:

Ingredients: 5 2”x12”, 8 ft. untreated boards
Nails and hammer
Power saw
2 people with competent core muscles
spade

Time: 2 hours
Basic carpentry knowledge, on a scale of 1-10, 10 being the highest: 4

We had to sit out in the yard for a few days, or I should say I had to, to figure out the location of the sunniest patch. Vegetables need 6-8 hours of full sunlight, so where we put the boxes was important. We chose an empty back corner, free from shade trees and nicely nestled against the fence.

Then, my husband cut three eight-foot boards in half using that monstrous, loud, angry power saw. If you do not know how to use one of these, please don’t use my project to start: just have Home Depot do it for you. Please.

We set up the 8’x4’ bed first. Our land is a little crooked and not quite level, so we dug little trenches for the beds and snuggled them in before nailing them together to be sure they were level (we are positive this is not the absolute best way to do this, there should be a level present, and lots of digging, but we have two screaming children and a schnauzer who loves to eat crayons, and we definitely took the short cut on a lot of this stuff simply to save time). We hammered them together using long nails. Hello, veggie box!

We did the same with the 4’x4’, digging the little trenches around where it needed it so the box stays relatively level.

Since our soil in our yard, as I have mentioned before, is clayish and yucky, and I really, really, want my veggies to grow, we have trucked in some soil and compost. Since the bottom of the boxes are empty and face the ground, I got a great tip from my bible, the Mother Earth News, about how to keep weeds out, at least to start: put the bags of dirt right in the box, and cut the top off the plastic bag, leaving the bottom of the bag at the bottom of your box, next to your original yard dirt. This will provide a layer between your soil and your dirt, making it much harder for weeds to get their snarly hands on your plants. See here:

It was quite a lot of work, and today our backs are pretty sore, the 40-lb. bags of dirt are heavy, and the boards are, too. But, we felt so good when they were completed! Now, I’m going to try, try to be patient and let my winners, the little seedlings who won survival of the fittest, have about two more weeks in their little seed-starter until the weatherman promises there will be no chance of frost. At that moment, and not a moment sooner (even though it’s killing me), will the vegetable seedlings go into the ground, in their brand-new boxes.

Holly's Choice: The "natural selection" of the seedlings

Dense, overcrowded and competing for space: sounds just like home.

Look, I’m going to be honest. I’ve been distracting you with the circus parade of woody yard art and easy-to-grow wildflowers to hide my nervousness. You see, I am getting dangerously close to the time of planting the vegetables in the backyard garden. With the planting of the garden, there come several issues.

One. We have nowhere to plant them. We have a plan to go get wood this weekend and build a raised bed box for the veggies like the one shown here, but I know how this goes. My husband is running his own photography business and he works a lot. A lot. So, this might get pushed back, or maybe even worse, pushed off to me. While I consider myself kind of rugged and Amish-on-loan in my mind, put a hammer in my hand for real and the only word that will come to mind starts with N and ends with “erd.” Also “hospital.” According to my guide, the Mother Earth News, it is very easy to just dump a bunch of soil on the ground and let nature take care of itself, but I’m not up for this. I’m very tidy. I’d like my dirt in a box. Also, the dog is always hungry, and indiscriminate.

Two. I’ve been putting off the natural selection of my plants. We stuffed several seeds into each germination cell (sounds kind of prison-like) for a kind of insurance policy and now they’re all overcrowded, and, according to the Burpee guide that came with my seed-starter, in danger of suffocating themselves. I find myself with a kind of Sophie’s Choice-style dilemma, having to pick which one looks the strongest, and pluck the rest out of each cell. My good friend Annie, not my sister Annie but a friend who is a doctor as well as a gardener, assures me that this is the way nature must go, circle of life, yadda yadda, and she seems completely confident in doing the selection, so perhaps I should just have her come over and do it.

It’s not a sappy, sorry-for-all-living things feeling that I’m having about yanking out all those perfectly healthy little seedlings so each plant can be alone in its own cell - well, it is a bit - but mostly it’s putting the responsibility of choosing the strongest all on me. I don’t feel I have the expertise, and I’ve been procrastinating like crazy. I walk by the little seedlings, and take a look. Which ones have the greenest leaves? Or have grown the tallest? Is that the right criteria to judge? Or is it a spunkiness factor, something more intuitive? I have no idea. I’m calling Annie.

Now that I think about it, those little seedlings look just like the apartments up and down Ocean Parkway, my old street in Brooklyn. They are stuffed into each cell just like dozens of families crowded into the massive, high-rise apartment buildings that lined the street, block after block. Those whispy little onions look exactly like the Bangladeshi womens’ wildly colored scarves whipping out the windows as they yelled to other women on the street. The zucchini and the squash are standing as straight and stalwart as the Hasidic men tramping down OP on Friday night wearing their big, black hats.

Maybe I don’t have anxiety about the plants. Maybe I like them being crowded, maybe that’s what I’m used to. They all look so cozy in there. If I strip them all away, one to a cell, it will feel so lonely. The lonely American dream.

Three. I have so far been an excellent steward of my little seedlings, giving them exactly what they need: water and sunlight. Now that we’re nearly ready to put them in the ground, things get much more complicated. Out there in the backyard is a world of fierce antagonists – bugs, heat, draught, squirrels. Last year, they got together and defeated me. What do I know this year that I didn’t last year? Not much. I have to admit to a tad bit of anxiety, this would not be much of a blog if what happened last year (ie, certain death for 95% of my plants) happens again in a few short months, then my metaphorical, literary transition from Brooklyn to Dallas taking place in my garden would end with, “Well guys, they all up and died. Time for everyone to go home.”

Then I’d have to go into hiding, remake myself and start a food blog, like every other woman in the free world.