Lessons Learned from the Garden

Sunflowers make me happy and they are so easy to grow. Just add water. Literally, just add water. Nine feet tall with beaming faces twelve inches across. As they mature the sunflower “face” keeps getting bigger and the petals look smaller until the end result is somehow alien. When the giant heads began to droop we cut them off and left them for the birds who picked them clean of seeds with fierce efficiency.

We don’t really care for yellow squash. Our most abundant crop? Yellow squash. Eric did make a delicious squash au gratin which I couldn’t get enough of, but mostly because it was saturated with cheese and buttered bread crumbs. Yellow squash is not like zucchini which you can just slice and cook. It’s more like a pumpkin or a butternut squash with seeds that need scraping. In other words - labor intensive.

Spinach regenerates. Our first crop of spinach was abundant and within a few weeks we’d eaten the whole row. I yanked the plants out by the roots. Wrong, wrong, wrong I was told by a friend. If you just snip it off at the roots it will grow back again. Oops. We planted another row of spinach. None of the seeds germinated.

Tomatoes do not thrive in fog. Not even a specifically designed, genetically enhanced variety named “San Francisco Fog” could thrive in the summer of 2009. I do not thrive in fog. Fifty nine degrees with a heavy marine layer and bitter wind is not my idea of a good time. For weeks it was so cold I had trouble forcing myself to go out back and water the vegetables, but most of all, I missed the morning light. Once or twice this “summer” it cleared before noon and the light was dazzling.

Gardens are great for gift givers. Eric’s summer birthday has provided the opportunity to indulge his two passions - tennis and cooking. He now owns every cookbook from appetizers to Zuni stew and all the cooking accouterment, tennis shorts, socks and bags one could want. It was time for a change. Bring on the hose nozzles, the seed packs and seedlings. Enter absinthe and artichoke plants. Now all we need is for the sun to come out and we’ll go back to the garden.