Earth Mother

Growing up in San Francisco, I did not come from a tradition of the "harvest."  My mother, having been raised on a ranch, lived for planting and harvesting and in our teeny little plot of land in San Francisco, in a raised bed (mayber 3' by 6') she optimistically planted carrots, parsley and lettuce and probably other things.  I remember harvesting carrots a good 3" long and thin as a pencil.   Not enough to build a great interest in future harvests.

The first "harvesting" that I actually did was visiting my grandparents' farm.  There was a corn field, but I don't remember ever going into it, but I do remember the blackberry wall and going with my sister and cousins and picking berries, our fingers stained purple and our bellies filling up faster than the buckets we carried. We swatted away a lot of bees (amazingly I don't think I was ever stung), but it was worth it for our crop. When we had finished we took the berries into the kitchen, where Grandma would turn them into delicious pies or cobblers and where I would make my own berry shortcakes by smashing a berry between two of the Lorna Doone shortbread cookies Grandma kept in the laundry room on a shelf over the washing machine.

Before there were blackberries, there was Grandma's strawberry patch, but I was too young to really remember doing anything in it.  I only have photographic evidence that I enjoyed tasting the berries there.

I also remember going to a farm once, that friends of my parents owned, where Karen and I got to climb Bing Cherry trees and harvest cherries to bring home with us.

When Walt and I were living in Oakland, after all the kids were old enough, I went through my "earth mother" period.  I made all of our bread, for one thing.  Char and I would go to the local grain store (I think it was next to the East Bay Vivarium, where they sold snakes and lizards and other creepy crawlies.  I checked their web site today and I see that there is a Boa Price List, a Lizard Price List, a Feeder Price list, and a Boarding Price list.  I hope they don't mix up their sale items with their boarding items.

But I digress.

In the grain store I learned to experiment with all sorts of different flours. I made white bread and wheat bread and cracked wheat bread (my favorite), and rye bread.  The house was always filled with the aroma of rising dough and baking bread.  I even made sourdough bread from a starter I kept for years and years until one day, in Davis, our then-foreign student boarder decided to help me by cleaning out my refrigerator one day while I was out and proudly told me she had tossed out this terribly smelling thing in a bowl in the back of the fridge.  Sigh.

We also took the kids out to Brentwood once or twice a year.  Brentwood was a great place at that time--out in Contra Costa county, where there were wonderful orchards and you could harvest your own fruit.  Now I suspect all those orchards are high end housing developments (the city of Brentwood grew by 221% between 2000 and 2010, for example), but in the 1970s you could pick apricots and peaches and one glorious year we picked cherries.

All of us climbed trees and loaded up containers and brought them home, where I would turn them into jams, preserves, pies, and canned fruit.   If we'd had a juicer in those years, what wonderful juices I could have created.

When we moved to Davis, the lot on which we built our house already had an apricot tree and we planted peaches, plums, apples and nectarines.  In the early years we had good yields, but most of the trees eventually died and we never replanted.  We still get a few apples and sometimes a few nectarines (tiny ones) if the birds don't get to them first.  The last year before our peach tree got peach blight the tree exploded and I have a photo somewhere of David surrounded by about 6 overflowing buckets of beautiful ripe peaches.  The next year, we had to cut the tree down.

We also tried raising vegetables and that was fun for a year or two, but the tomato horn worms kept me from raising the tomatoes I loved, the corn was delicious, but didn't yield enough for the 7 of us to have a meal out of, and the biggest thriving crop was zucchini, which nobody liked.  

So my farm days died aborning.

I have no desire to return to my shallow earth mother roots, but it is fun to remember the days when we worked together to gather various foods and my working to create various things out of our harvest.

Smuckers does it better, but there's no romance or adventure in that.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

Phil sent this photo around to the family this morning.

They are harvesting their garden before the winter weather sets in in Boston.  I was very impressed.

I have such a pathetic history of gardening.  

We grew up in San Francisco, where we had a concrete back yard with one little rectangular cement "box" which was maybe 3 feet by 6 feet.  My mother was determined we were going to grow things there.

She had been raised on a ranch and, as this was during the Depression, growing your own food was a real necessity.  She grew up loving the soil, loving eating vegetables fresh out of the garden.

So we tried gardening in our little concrete plot.  I don't know if we did it more than one year, but all I remember is pulling up some sad looking carrots, thin as a pencil and about 6" long.  Our fresh vegetable crop.  It did not make a fresh vegetable lover out of me.

I never had a place with a real garden area until after Jeri was born and we rented a house with a huge back yard, but I was busy with a baby and being pregnant, hanging diapers on the clothesline and re-washing them when the dog pulled them down.  I never had time for a garden and never planted anything there, nor do I remember planting anything in the small yard of our first house, when busy chasing 5 children around the house and making all of our own bread.  We moved in and there was a huge Myer lemon tree in the back yard, which I harvested regularly and enjoyed the fruits of, but I don't think we ever actually planted anything of our own there.

When we moved here to Davis, though, the kids were now old enough to help with a garden and we had lots of space and I decided I would become Mother Earth.   I bought gardening books and seeds and small plants and we spent time loosening the hard clay soil that runs through our yard.  I remember that we planted tomatoes (I was absolutely in heaven eating real home grown tomatoes, until I encountered tomato horn worms, possibly the most disgusting garden pest.  After cutting one in half, I discovered I couldn't bring myself to go into the tomato patch any more!)

I also remember that we planted corn and we got real corn stalks and a few small, but tasty corn on the cob, the first time I learned how you don't need cooking, butter or salt to have a really delicious "thing."  Loved that corn, but I think we only planted corn one year and then installed a jungle gym in the space where our corn "field" had been.

I had the biggest success with zucchini, which grows like weeds here and which nobody liked.  My famous threat to the kids, turning up their noses at a big succulent bowl of cooked zucchini:  "You better eat it because the longer it takes to eat this one, the bigger the one in the garden is going to get." (They grew to be the size of small watermelons.)  I remember making a lot of zucchini bread, which I think may negate the whole health purpose of growing your own vegetables.

We had better luck with fruit trees and had a peach tree that produced prodigiously until one year it literally exploded and gave us buckets and buckets of peaches and then promptly died.  We also had great plums for several years until it developed some sort of disease and had to be cut down.  We also picked apricots off of the tree  that was on the property when we bought it.  We may still have apricots on that tree, but the tree grows up into the telephone wires and it is impossible to reach any fruit which may be growing on it.  We still have apples on the apple tree we planted, but they are  tiny and usually die before they ripen, though once in awhile if I remember to check the tree, I may be able to harvest a bowl of them, enough to make applesauce.

I had to admit that I was definitely not a gardener, but by God Jeri and Phil are great gardeners on their little patch of land (not unlike the yard I had as a kid in San Francisco).  I am amazed at the things they harvest.  Laurel and the girls are also starting to grow small patches of vegetables, enough to have the thrill of picking something that you grew, but not enough to feed the family for a dinner.  Ned and Marta may have planted stuff, but not that I knew of.

Now even if I wanted to try growing something, I can't kneel any more, which puts a crimp in any prospect.  I suggested that Walt build a box around the patio that I could try growing stuff in, but I think he realized that it would probably be a waste of his time and money and that I would not follow through on it, so the box never got built.  

I did try a basil plant this year, though.  I saw nice healthy looking plants at Trader Joe's and bought one, figuring that it was cheap enough that even if I only got one batch of pesto out of it, it was comparable to the price of buying a bunch of basil.  I actually got, I think, four batches of pesto out of it, so I was ahead money.  Each time I harvested, to my amazement, new leaves sprouted.  Each new leaf batch was a bit more pathetic than the last one until I finally had tiny leaves that reached their maturity at about the size of mint leaves, but they were tasty.

I really envy those who have green thumbs.  My thumb used to be black, I would tell people, but it's actually kind of an anemic chartreuse these days, meaning I can keep things alive for a few weeks, but never "alive" is the operative word here.  They never thrive.  

I am fortunate that we live in a farming area and that we have a farmers market and produce stands all over the place where I can, if I want to, find farm-fresh produce that is better than what you find at the supermarkets.  Of course, not being a lover of vegetables, I rarely take advantage of that perk of living here either. 

Spring

It's spring! Spring...heck, it's halfway to summer already.

I noticed this morning that the roses on one of our rose bushes in front of the house is blooming. I love that rose bush--they are nice deep salmon colored roses.

Across the driveway my aunt Marge's irises have come up for another year. She had a lot of them and when she died, several of us took bulbs. I smile every year when I see them popping up because I remember Marge every year.

When I talk about roses blooming in my front yard, and irises popping up, it sounds like I'm a gardener.

I lie.

I look outside at the jungle that is our back yard, the wannabe grass that we gave up on years ago--oh, it gets green, but it's hard to know how much is grass and how much is weed and you wouldn't want to lie out on it; it would scratch your back through your clothes, it's so coarse.

But it's great for the dogs chasing each other around, and really--isn't that what we want? We aren't the kind of people to invite others over to relax by the non-existent pool or have a BBQ. We're the kind of people who fill the house with dogs and then watch them race around chasing each other outside. The non-grass is perfect for that.

There was a time when we moved here that I had great hopes of turning the dirt yard into a wonderful back yard for the kids. Walt took a landscaping class and we planted fruit trees that bloomed for a few years and gave us lots of fruit, but they eventually died--all except the apple tree which produces hundreds of tiny apples each year. They fall off the branches and the dogs chase them around as oddly flavored balls.

I tried doing the earth mother thing for a couple of years when the kids were younger and we planted things. I gave up on tomatoes because I was so grossed out by the tomato horn worms that fourished on the tomato vines. The zucchini grew to watermelon size and we learned I was the only person in the house who actually liked zucchini, and there are only so many zucchini breads that you can make.

We did have corn on the cob one year, a few tiny ears. They were delicious, but I don't think we tried the second year. I know people who are always harvesting wonderful things from their gardens, but I am not one of them.

My mother grew up on a ranch. She has soil in her veins. Sick plants revive under her care. She can grow anything, can bring almost anything back to life again.

I grew up with a cement back yard with clothes lines strung across it. We had a minuscule plot of land in a cement box, which you can barely make out on the right behind that adorable little girl in the chair.

When my sister was born, it was filled with weeds, but as we got older, my mother tried to teach us about planting a garden, but it never took. I remember pulling carrots out of the earth--but I never liked carrots as a kid, so there was little thrill there. I think we also may have planted beets. I hate beets, so obviously the reward of growing my own did not match the work that went into it.

I did house plants for a few years and they actually didn't die. But like most hobbies I start, it ran its course. It's not easy to grow houseplants in Davis because you can't just turn on the tap water and water them; you have to get it from some source that isn't softened. I still remember the moment when I was standing in the living room, looking at all the plants around me and I announced to them that I was tired of taking care of them, and they could all just die.

So they did.

Our yard has grapes that God takes care of, bushes that have grown so tall and thick that they are beyond trimming and will have to be chopped down. You have to be careful walking across the ground because it is so full of depressions, especially where the "graveyard" is. And there is still a huge hole that the kids dug when they filmed "Star Warts" when they were in junior high.

But...it works for us. It works for the dogs. But I'm never going to have a beautifully manicured lawn, a rainbow of flowers, butterflies flitting from plant to plant and birds visiting a birdfeeder where I can watch them.

Sometimes you make trade-offs. I like watching the puppies cavorting in grass that is taller than their heads and hiding behind the grapes leaves.