unrelenting ambiguity

Nothing gets published lately, but draft after draft gets written, and abandoned. It could be a pretty good metaphor for parts of my life. And I suppose that is how it should be. We get only one chance, each moment, to live that moment. There are no rewrites, no final drafts, no polished end results. Our first drafts are all we ever have, we can only do our best.

My garden this year has been a wild proliferation of volunteer plants from last year’s garden. I was late in starting my seeds, when it comes to gardening I seem to always be later than recommended. But I always figure that I have nothing to lose by trying. It usually works out okay, in the garden.

At the end of the season last year I was a bit fatigued, perhaps, or struggling with one of the many things I seem to always struggle with, which is neither worth remembering nor writing about. And so the end of season produce produced in my garden was just…left. I didn’t pick it, I didn’t do anything with it. It eventually fell to the ground, the plants eventually froze, along with anything that had been lingering on them. I brought my bike in and out of my condo through that garden every day, and every day I felt guilty for my neglect, knowing that others would have done the end-of-gardening-year tasks.

I finally did those this spring, because I had to pull out the old dead plants in order to plant new.

I planted some corn, going along with my gardening philosophy of “why not, what do I have to lose?”, and some bush beans and some carrots and sunflowers and parsnips and fennel and parsley and chives and epazote and strawberries, most by seed but some by starter plants at the local organic market. I started peppers and cucumbers and tomatoes indoors, from seed. Some has done well, others have done nothing at all.

The corn is already 5 to 6 feet tall. A coworker has wondered that my homeowners association doesn’t have rules against growing crops, and truly if they do I have not bothered to look up and read them.

It wouldn’t surprise me if they did have such bizarre rules, governing what food we can grow, while they baby the expanses of lawns that they value over food. I hate homeowners associations, but this area has insane housing prices. This was the best I could do – a condo with a patio. I’m extremely lucky and grateful for the patio.

Not long after I planted my seeds, I realized one day while I weeded the patio that some of the weeds were not weeds at all. They were tomatoes and cucumbers! Not ones I had planted this year, since those were all inside still, and these were coming up mostly in areas I hadn’t cleared of annoying white rocks and wasn’t planning on planting this year.

Most gardeners will advise you to pull up the volunteers ruthlessly. You don’t know what they are (hybrids, perhaps) and you don’t know if they’ll be good varieties. They might not produce fruit, or not much, or maybe just not good fruit. They’re taking up room.

But I looked at those tender little seedlings, those amazing resilient little seedlings that manifested my neglect and turned it into something beautiful and worthwhile, and I just couldn’t pull them and throw them away. I did take a few of them and gave them to some neighbors and a coworker, but mostly I just let them grow. What could it hurt? What do I have to lose? They weren’t anywhere I was going to plant anyway….

And so I have a wildly vibrant patio this year, with cucumbers and tomatoes growing like weeds. The volunteer tomatoes and cucumbers are producing fruit, while the little seedlings I started from seed, the proper way, are still babies, still trying to settle in and are far from producing flowers let alone fruit.

I’m sure my garden is a metaphor for something in my life.

If so, I’ll choose to think it is a positive joyful metaphor. Things are growing, and I’m enjoying it. If the tomatoes aren’t the best in the world, I can’t work up a care about that. These volunteers are doing their thing, and I’m letting them. That feels good, and that feels right. We try to control so much, and in the end there is very little we have real control over. There’s something immensely satisfying about a wild garden, where the plants themselves have decided where a good place to grow would be.

I find myself fascinated by night photography. There’s a class in April that I think I’ll take, as it will help me figure out how and what and it will get me out doing.

In the meantime, I just jam the iso as high as it can go to get a handheld pic (since I’m too lazy about tripods) that captures a bit of what I was looking for. And while I know that I am not coming up with anything special, the point of trying (especially trying something new) is to learn. To some degree, it is simply learning to see. I’ve found this blog on night photography to feed my fascination, and to open my eyes as to just how much there is to see at night.

Good timing, in terms of the season, as I feel I hardly have a chance to see the sun anymore, when I’m not on my bike. By the time I get home, the sun is setting!

Though the early dark and falling leaves make me feel like it is time to start planning next year’s garden, and to remind myself that it will be time to start certain seedlings in just a few months…my garden is still producing like mad. Tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers. I am still harvesting quite a bit every week.

It was the first tomato plant I’d planted this year, and though it looked like it was doing well at first, it ended up dropping all of its flowers. No pests that I could see, no obvious disease on the leaves or anything like that. I don’t know much about gardening, so I still don’t know much of what was going wrong with it.

I gave up on it producing any tomatoes. I trimmed some of the old and weary looking parts of the plant.

And a couple days ago I saw the first little tomato on it. Was it the trimming? Was it something else, nothing to do with me? Was it the conditions were finally just right for it?

I will likely never know, but I’m so pleased to see those four little tomatoes!

Life is change. We know that, but we don’t always feel it.

I’ve been feeling it lately. Raindrops on my life’s pond. I’m watching their ripples with awe, and happiness.

I’m going to become a bike commuter.

This shocks me, it was never in my head before in my life, but it is large and sparkling now. I feel like a little kid unwrapping the best and most perfectly unexpected gift. My bike is in the shop getting a tune up. I’ve been arming myself with maps and obsessively reading blog posts, collecting bike blogs. I know I’ll need to get a commuter bike, my road bike won’t really cut it for commuting. I am excited about the possibilities.

It is like suddenly seeing a whole new world. A world that was always there, waiting for me to see clearly.

Today started with an appointment to look at a desk I’d seen on craigslist. I’m a big fan of the CL, partially because who doesn’t like to save a buck? But more than saving a buck, my primary motivation is simply to not buy new things as much as possible. There is so much extraction from the earth, and buying new things just contributes to that. I know it is not sustainable. This isn’t even an opinion, it is the simple reality – we’ve got a closed system that we’re living in, and a closed system means that there are limits to every resource out there. There are bigger limits on things that are either less abundant by nature, or which take longer to grow and develop, but very real limits apply to everything we “consume” (which is not a term to apply only to food).

Regardless, I try to avoid being part of the buy-new lifestyle as much as I can. I know it is not always feasable. I simply make change where I can, which isn’t to say that I have made drastic changes all at once. It was about 3 years ago that I stopped buying paper towels and switched to using cloth towels for all cleaning. It works great, and I can no longer remember what I used paper towels for, let alone why.

Step by step I make changes that get me closer to where I want to be in this life. And so today, I bought a used desk. Gorgeous, as it happens, and I unexpectedly had a fantastic conversation with the seller of the desk. He is into environmental issues, especially sustainability, and so we happily chatted about how wonderful craigslist is, how good it is to avoid buying new.

It simply wasn’t a conversation I expected to have while buying a desk from someone in Georgetown, I admit!

And then at the farmers market, where I bought yet another tomato plant (brandywine this time), I had another interesting conversation. The farm I bought this plant (and some produce) from is apparently a collective. A spiritual collective, and a lot of the ideas sounded good. They all work, but they don’t have to worry about many of the things that we do when we’re locked into working jobs we might not like and which might not be fulfilling, but which we can’t get out of because we have to pay th erent, the utilities, the everything else just to keep our lives running.

Collectives are interesting, and the cooperative effort is very appealing to me. The spiritual aspect of this particular one is not. But they say they’re open to visitors, and I might just take a day and volunteer my time, see what I can learn, both about organic farming, as well as about collective living.

I’d love someday to be part of a vegan collective. A co-housing growing cooperative maybe. Someday.

And finally, I had an interesting conversation with my favorite barrista. This was not unexpected, since he’s an interesting person, and we always manage to have short but interesting conversations. Today was a bit about him becoming car-less. It was odd, in the way of random coincidences, because I’d just recently read someone’s story on them going car-less, and I found it very inspiring. For my barrista, it was a story of his car being towed, and him getting a notice a month later that he owed a whopping sum of money to get it out of their impound. He was surprised to get the letter, since he hadn’t noticed that his car wasn’t there. (This tells you how often he drives! I was more surprised to learn that he had a car at all.) So, since he didn’t want to pay a big sum of money, and since he had wanted to stop being a car owner anyway, he gave them the car in exchange for not owing them the big sum of money.

And so now he is officially car free. We talked about the blog I’d been reading recently about the person who went car-free two years ago, which has included a really long bike commute. I have been thinking more and more seriously about making that kind of committment.

Not to go completely car-free – I have a ridiculously cheap vehicle on which the insurance is hardly any amount at all, and I have one long trip to make every Saturday in a place where there just isn’t public transportation. They don’t even have taxis! I could likely find a way to make it work anyway (I’m not the only one going to the sanctuary, after all) but for now, I might as well keep my old truck for that trip every week.

But I did put in my name to be on the list of people moving to the other office location…the one that is not any closer, but which is a reasonable public transit commute. And in pouring over some online bike maps that people have made of the area, I was stunned to realize that if I was to try to bike to that area, 90% of it (a wild guess, but anyway a really large percentage) would be on a bike trail.

Not even a quietish road on which I’d be more comfortable, but an actual trail!

Of course the actual office location is in a really horrible area for bikes, but…but I still feel like there are some possibilities here.

Though it is doubtful that I would have any way of, say, showering once I got to work, and I also know that I’m a real wimp when it comes to cold and nasty weather.

Still, biking might just be an option for more of my life in the future.

I’m really excited by the possibilities.

My eggplant has two blossoms in various stages, not ready to bust out into full bloom quite yet, but hanging in there. I now obsessively watch the weather predictions as much as I do the garden itself – looks like we’re clear of 95 degrees through most of this coming week, at least. I just don’t quite see how that will hold out until my wee eggplant can manage to give me some fruit, but we’ll see!

The tomatoes are coming along, they seem to grow in visible increments every day. I’m very impatient, given that I have likely about 6 weeks to wait until they’re actually ripe. I planted a plum tomato plant last weekend, which at the very least will have a quicker time per tomato!

I also bought a basil plant at the farmers market last weekend, and it also seems to be doing well. There’s all kinds of new growth on the plant, which is fantastic, because I love growing fresh herbs! That one went into a pot so I can bring it inside when the weather gets cold. I’m going to slowly add to that collection of fresh growing herbs.

The newest news though is that my cucumber plants have blossomed. I have one fully opened bloom on each of the four plants. I’d been keeping an eye on the star shaped pre-blooms, but I missed the beginnings of the blooming itself, because what I saw was as if there was nothing one day, and a fully opened blossom the next! Now that I’m looking closer, I see others getting ready to open on each plant, with the pale yellow color showing through. I hope the cucumbers do well! The only plant left that hasn’t displayed a bloom are the peppers. The buds are there, though, they’re just taking their time.

So, the garden goes well. I am content. If not exactly patient!

My eggplant had been doing great, with a gorgeous fully opened flower, and then suddenly when I checked on it on Sunday, the flower was on the ground. Sara commented, saying that she found my blog when looking for answers as to why her eggplant had dropped its flower, which spurred me to do some more research.

Oddly some sites said that eggplants required both male and female flowers, and if a fruit wasn’t fertilized, it would drop…yet other sites said that eggplants were self-pollenators. It was confusing to me, but I found a site that not only has some extremely interesting information on the history of the eggplant, it has a very simple and logical reason for why my eggplant dropped its flower:

When temperatures rise above 95°F, eggplant ceases to set fruit and may drop flowers or abort immature fruit.

Well, there you go. It got up to 95 and beyond on Saturday, during our first heat wave of the season, and Sunday morning the flower had dropped. Now I just have to hope that the next heat wave waits until August! Somehow I have a feeling that my poor eggplant isn’t going to do too well, though it already has a couple flowers in various stages of development. What is somewhat confusing to me is that the information also says that eggplants do well in the desert Southwest. As in, Arizona. (The site I linked in is actually for the U. of Arizona, which is in Tucson. And which I know, from personal experience, has many days over 95 in the summer. Yet the eggplant needs 5 months of soil warmth to produce fruit! Some additional information:

Eggplants prefer consistent soil moisture, but once established can tolerate dry spells. Although the majority of water- and nutrient-absorbing roots are found in the top 18 inches of soil, roots can reach a depth of 4 feet. To avoid flower and fruit drop, water deeply and regularly, especially during long, dry periods.

To conserve soil moisture, try planting in waffle beds or applying a 2- to 3-inch layer of mulch around the base of each plant. To minimize sun scald during the hot, intense days of summer, provide a bit of midday sun protection. Depending on your garden’s location and layout, shade can be provided by tall, nearby plants or by shade cloth. Eggplant can be grown successfully in containers. Choose smaller plant varieties and large containers with good drainage. Be prepared to water more often, since the soil tends to dry out more quickly.

The history made me chuckle a bit:

In China, as part of her “bride price,” a woman must have at least 12 eggplant recipes prior to her wedding day. In Turkey, “imam bayeldi,” a tasty treat of stuffed eggplant simmered in olive oil is said to have made a religious leader swoon in ecstasy. When first introduced in Italy, people believed that anyone who ate the “mad apple” was sure to go insane.

I guess it explains why eggplant recipes are so common in Chinese cuisine, and much less so in Italian! I’d love to know how the idea that eggplants made people insane came about in Italy though.

A few weeks ago at the farmers market down the street, I picked up an heirloom tomato plant. I didn’t go with the purpose of getting an heirloom tomato plant, but it is a small market, it was the only organic stall selling plants, and I don’t know what I’m doing regardless, so heirloom or not, I was getting one of their plants.

They had several varieties, and I was clueless about them all. I asked her to describe them, and the variety is really fascinating. That’s the point of seed swaps and heirloom varieties, really – doing a small piece of biodiversity maintenance! And the earth needs all the help she can get, after the large scale farming, and especially after the issues GMO companies like Monsanto have created.

So I was happy to get an heirloom plant, even though I would never have expected it to be as easy as walking down the street to the farmers market. I chose the “cherokee purple” almost entirely because it already had a couple little blossoms, and that seemed like a good sign to me!

And wow, it seems to really be producing.

In addition to the 3 obvious baby tomatoes (I only noticed two of them yesterday), there are 2 partially hidden babies, and 1 fully hidden one. That’s 6 tomatoes on the plant right now!

The other exciting thing about this plant, for me, is that it seems really sturdy. It is growing strong without any kind of stake or cage to prop it up. As it gets heavier with fruit, I might need to put a cage around it (I’m too inexperienced at this point to know for sure) but the other (non-heirloom variety) tomato plant I have not only has just a few much smaller blossoms, but it needs a stake to stay upright.

When I was purchasing the Cherokee Purple, another woman was asking about Brandywines, but the stall had sold their Brandywine plant earlier that morning. The woman asking seemed very disappointed and absolutely uninterested in any other variety. I finally looked up some information on the Cherokee Purple, and was interested to see that it was described as having a similar taste as the Brandywine! Good or bad, I suppose I’ll find out soon enough. It is supposed to be a very sweet tomato. I have no idea what to expect. did find a nice blog of someone dedicated to writing about her Cherokee Purple experience! And some gorgeous photos on there of the end result, sadly not her own as the weather in her home state doesn’t sound friendly towards these tomatoes.

Doing even the smallest bit of research on the Cherokee Purples and Brandywines has me excited about heirloom plants. I might try saving the seeds and participating in a seed swap next January, or even casually with friends. It is really interesting to read about the history of particular varities and to realize that they can be traced back to specific people, and that the were sometimes in someone’s family for 100 years!

I was also surprised to see a big change in that eggplant blossom between today and yesterday. It amazes me how fast things change!

I read some really interesting articles in various photoblogs today. The summary:

• photography isn’t really art…and that’s a good thing
• art is a verb!
• daily practice is important, and for reasons that relate to a book called Blink.

Well, that seems good enough for a recap. Those are the three thoughts that were important enough to me to stick, anyway.

Daily practice is hard for me. I’m away from the house for 10 hours a day, and while that sounds like it would leave plenty of time for some photos, it doesn’t leave much room for inspiration. However, to practice the technical skills (so that when we’re inspired, we’re not thinking about the hows) doesn’t necessarily require inspiration.

Luckily it has gotten a bit easier in the past few days, coinciding neatly with my excitement over my garden. things are growing! The blossom on the eggplant plant went from looking tired and already done to suddenly being a pale purple, and then today it was spread open. A lot of change in two days!

My heirloom tomato plant has been blossoming like mad ever since I brought it home. Today I noticed two tomatoes started on it!

And even the stuff I planted by seed (way too late in the season, but it seemed worth a try anyway) is starting to show some real progress. A wee tomato plant!

I find myself going out to my little patio as soon as I get home from work to take a look at the green things growing. The weeds need some attention of course, they grow faster than anything else.

One of the things that I love about my newfound obsession with gardening and with taking pictures of the things growing in my garden is that it makes me feel really connected to … well, a lot of things. To the “art is a verb!” statement. Taking pictures of my growing garden is a two-dimensional verb!

And it makes me very happy to have nourishing things growing right outside my door. To connect myself to that aspect of life, to gain those skills, experience, knowledge.  Gardening gives me a feeling of peace.

Round 2 of Stormy Weather Night is kicking into high gear now.  A tornado supposedly touched down about 10 miles from me earlier this afternoon, but now we just have a lot of rain and thunder and lightening.  Rainy days bothered me so much more before I had a garden to nurture.  Now I’ll press my ear against the glass of the window, and just listen.