I Hate Martha Stewart

I hate Martha Stewart.

My $70 spindle. Did you know spindles are actually non
returnable, even if you can't outwit wool? 

I mean, not just her. I also hate Williams-Sonoma and Pinterest and youtube videos of people who are like hey why buy your own yarn when you can spin your own wool from a fleece here's how! Oh yes. I'ts just so easy, isn't it. Freaking  Pinterest with their papasan chairs made out of old brightly colored t shirts and hula hoops and William's Sonoma with their either buy it from us for literally, LITERALLY $900 or else see below our cake pan which makes six tiny cakelets in the shape of teeny tiny roses that you will now have to individually mold with fondant and a fondant embossing tool...

But particularly, when it comes to the garden, Martha Stewart.

The Divine Ms. M (no, actually that's not what anyone calls her. That would be Bette Midler I think.) made a name for herself back at the turn of the century. Lets call it that, so she sounds more antiquated and annoying. Really, around 2001, I think is when I started watching her on TV, after the magazine but before the prison sentence. And that name was "you could be so much better if you just would work  a thousand times harder, add a bunch more steps, and spend more money on superfine glitter". Unfortunately for me she didn't just confine her home improvement advice to the garden, she also had cooking segments. I foolishly set out to make her black-bottomed banana cream pie, painstakingly making the crust from scratch with my ceramic pie weights (it took me three tries for it to come out right) then cooking the custard from scratch before dividing and carefully adding the hand grated chocolate and then taking the other half and adding gelatin which had been dissolved at exactly the candy thermometer temperature proscribed (I messed this up twice) and finally adding bananas. The result, after two days of work, during which I feverishly tested and discarded five different pies before finally bringing this glorious creation to my in-laws' house for my first married Christmas?

A lackluster banana thing.

In the garden, Miss Martha has also taken the opportunity to screw me by showing how easy it is to keep dwarf lemon trees in teeny little ornamental pots. Literally no one in the world could screw this up, a dwarf lemon is the easiest plant on the planet to fruit. Martha has just hundreds of them in these little pots in her dwarf citrus orchard not to be confused with her actual citrus orchard in the Martha's Vineyard. Or Martha's Orchard. Farm. Slash TV studio, where she lives.

You bitch, Martha.

So what did I do but trustingly follow her directions (I actually checked the website this time) and dutifully bought my dwarf lemon tree (careful! Get Martha's brand!) and put it in a pot the size Martha said. It was a Martha freaking Stewart pot and it's a lemon tree in California. How could this go wrong?

It went wrong. After two years of the fruit falling off in little mutated worm-like brown corpses without ever turning green, much less yellow, I brought it back to the nursery. The guy asked me how big my pot was and laughed at me when I told him. Half the size necessary and in the wrong kind of soil and was I fertilizing regularly? Because if not I had basically stunted this tree into barrenness. And that was now my name. The Baroness of Barrenness. Because I continued to follow this woman's advice like a faithful acolyte of failure. Strawberries in strawberry pot! Fail. Herbs in strawberry pot! Fail. Dyeing your own eggs for Easter with onion skins and a superfine wax crayon melted onto the head of a pin! Oh my god I want to punch you, MARTHA.

The problem is not with Martha, though, or Pinterest, however much I may despise their Bento Box lunch ideas. It's a generation of women who are so far removed from the land and the skills of creation (as in, create a pie. Create food in your garden. Create wool. AUGH! damn you, youtube spinner girl) that we have no confidence in our own abilities. They didn't teach home ec in my high school, it was long past the days of girls learning to "keep a home" and sweep around in full skirts lightly dusting everything with lemon scented pledge. Which is fine, except that there was no one left to actually teach us to cook for ourselves, feminism or no feminism. Ditto for gardening--it became something that old ladies did; and farming, or the keeping of backyard chickens (both of which were actually pretty common in the 40s during the rationing of WWII!) became associated with hicks and hippies. No one teaches us how to take cuttings to propagate a plant into a new plant (for free!) or how to make compost (also free!) or how to bake a pie! No one told us we could still eat imperfect tomatoes or weirdly shaped fruit, or that the reason we eat so much wheat and corn syrup is we had to find something to do with all the ammonia we had left over from the munitions factories of World War II, so we started putting it into our fields, where wheat and corn responded with huge surplus yields that themselves necessitated finding something to do with all that wheat and corn. No one told us why we stopped eating green foods and fresh foods, we just lost how to grow and cook them and how to tell when they're ripe. What color are blackberry blossoms? And why aren't the squash leaves green?

Blackberry blossoms. Pink!

Instead we had a new education, a commercial education. Williams Sonoma says peppermint bark comes in a tin, not that you can make your own by melting white and dark chocolate onto a cookie sheet and crushing candy canes on top. HGTV says a quick fix for chicken strips is to roll them in crushed potato chips and deep fry them in butter; when a simple roasted chicken (325, 40 minutes) sprinkled with olive oil, salt and pepper is maybe the most delicious and easy thing to come out of your oven. Monsanto's brightly colored marketing told us to kill grass and weeds in your sidewalk cracks with Roundup. No one told us you could do it with plain old boiling water, or that commercial herbicides might ultimately hurt the pollinators, or like, what a pollinator was and how crucially important those bees are to our ability to not starve.

More importantly could I kill a chicken if the zombie apocalypse comes?! Does it kick? Is it going to scream? How do you gut it? How do you cook it? Darryl Dixon and Rick Grimes never gut chickens on The Walking Dead. How am I supposed to know how to do these things?!

Martha, and the chicks on Pinterest, and the spinner girls on youtube aren't experts and more importantly aren't teachers. We take their word for it because they're on the internet or on TV. It's an okay place to start, I guess. But you know what also works? Reading a book by a real farmer or a real chef or a real homesteader. And better yet to try and fail and write down everything you did, make notes, analyze and go, okay that worked, one blueberry bush lived. Now to try for two...handful by handful of blueberries, it happens.

I bought a new lemon tree and I keep it in a nice big whiskey barrel next to the old one, which I don't have the heart to throw away even though it's never ever fruited. It's my little reminder that learning is its own reward. I will never not know what to do with a dwarf lemon tree again.

Oh, and by the way? I taught myself to bake and developed my own, make you fall on your knees and beg me to marry you regardless of your sexual preferences, amazing black bottomed banana cream pie. It requires no pie weights. Perfect for serving as you sweep around the house in a full skirt and heels.