Pesto Pilgrim's Progress and the Pine Cone Park

I've been stalking this park for three days, since I realized that the entire quarter mile loop of paved walking path was studded with pine trees. So what, you say? So PINE NUTS. See, once upon a time I went to buy some pesto, and lo, that shiz was expensive. Verily, said I, hell no. I'll make my own. And if it's expensive because of the ingredients (basil and pine nuts) I'll grow my own. Turns out you can grow your own pine nuts, because they grow on pine trees. Inside pine cones. Who knew? (Not me, that's for sure. I thought they might grow on bushes like peanuts.)

Originally I had no idea where to find pine trees, since in my neighborhood I've never seen anything but acacia trees, carrotwood, jacaranda and eucalyptus--largely, the ornamental one tree per lot the developers of my suburb threw in when they clear cut the native plants and scraped all the topsoil off our lots. Once I had it in my head to look for pine trees with closed brown pine cones though (green cones haven't developed their seeds yet and open cones have mostly had their seeds stolen by squirrels and birds) I started seeing them everywhere. Along the side of the road. In canyons between the streets. In the undeveloped land between the neighborhoods. And here, in a nice community park where I happened to start walking last week. Since pine trees are native to California I realized they were the remnants of the native plants that must have been here long before the developers got it into their heads to build tract homes here. In fact, for thousands of years the native cultures of the southwest--the Shosone, Paiute, Washo and Ute peoples--subsisted through the winter with the high caloric density (over 3000 calories per pound!) of pine nuts gathered from native pine trees in California, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah and Arizona. Two thousand years ago a family might gather around 1,200 pounds of pine nuts in the fall, which would feed a family of four for about four months. The men would either use simple poles to beat the tree branches to make the cones fall (did they wear helmets? This seems precarious when you're underneath) or a more complex tool with a forked hook at the end to pop the cones off their branches. The women would gather the cones and heat them on the fire until the cones broke open; then the cones would be put into bags to be beaten until the seeds shook loose. Finally the seeds themselves were heated to crack and release them from their shells and finally get at the pine nut itself.

I don't have a complex stick with a forked hook. I literally have a two foot long stick I found on the ground, one I am ready to discard at a moment's notice should I attract the attention of the other denizens of the park so I can blend into perfect suburban blandness and disappear unnoticed. If I only had a maxi dress on and had straightened my hair! I'd be practically invisible.

There's a pack of Fit Moms (Memes?) barking at each other in a Baby Boot Camp Walk Run Circuit Training Station Class at the other end of the park. They're unpredictable--despite their coordinated-but-not-matchy-matchy cropped capri workout pants-tops-cross trainer combos and perfectly straightened sleek blonde ponytails, their state of the art military grade running strollers mean they're ready to be on the move and running short laps around random points at any moment. At the moment, they're doing squats. Hmm. Circuit Training. I'm doing Circuit Training. I flex my legs experimentally before aiming a jump at the low-hanging branch with my stick. The cone I had my eye on pops off and lands at my feet. Huh.

I pause not far from Zen Chick, who is meditating silently, eyes closed, legs tucked under her in the grass, her ipod speakers softly playing Chinese flute music. There are three cones hanging temptingly from a long hanging branch, again, just out of my reach, but I don't want to knock them out with my stick for fear I'll disturb her. I can just reach some of the drooping needles and from there I can catch hold of a stick, then a thicker branch, then I can finally pull the whole bough down low enough to get all three cones. I congratulate myself for my cat-like reflexes and my plus to move silently right before the pine cones, too big for my one-handed grip, pop out of my hand and fall with a loud clatter to the sidewalk. "Sorry!" I whisper urgently and hurry on. I almost run headlong into Pokemon Teen, flip-flopped and phone-handed. Staring at his screen he stops short right in front of me and backs up before quickly changing direction, muttering "Vaporeon." When he pauses at a random spot in the grass and flicks his thumb upwards across his screen I know I've escaped his notice for now. I hear him quietly swearing behind me; hopefully he has enough pokeballs to keep trying to catch whatever he's found before he looks up and notices me, since I've now abandoned dignity and have jumped up to swat at the branches where a particularly plummy cone is hanging. There are needles and crumbly bits of decayed cones caught in my curly hair.  My hands are black and sticky with crusted sap; I have to make a physical effort to restrain myself from wiping the super-gluey goo on my shorts. I wipe a dangling pine needle from where it hangs down in my face and I can feel the swipe of sticky sap across my cheek.

I arrive back at the car with my cloth grocery bag full of pine cones, still feeling itchy that someone might be watching me and waiting to take back my bounty for--what? Do pine trees need the cones to sprout new needles? Are there endangered native squirrel populations that depend on the nuts for survival? I'm suddenly certain I've heard that you're never supposed to remove pine cones from public parks under penalty of law and equally certain that the maintenance truck with City of San Diego that stops right in front of me is filled with Park Cops waiting to tackle me to the ground and wrestle away my cones. The driver adjusts his City of San Diego ball cap further onto his face and I'm bracing myself to answer back with all the indignity I can muster while readying myself to run to the car, relying on my keyless entry for a quick getaway, but he just gets out, tips his hat to me like an old-timey sheriff and starts adjusting a broken sprinkler.

This is ridiculous. I feel like I've just gone through the Pesto Pilgrims Progress. The task before me, the baking and shelling, is daunting, according to Penniless Parenting, who says in her blog about harvesting pine nuts both "Now I know why these things are so friggin expensive" and "Don't try this if you want to keep your sanity."

Instead of putting the cones into the fire, Shoshone style, I put them into a 350 oven (with tinfoil to catch any sap) until the scales popped open--I set the oven for an hour, then let the cones cool in the oven. The house smelled pleasantly ("like getting smacked in the face with a dry cedar sauna", said my grinning husband) like pine.

Both air freshener and spa facial in one. 

The cones popped open and a ton of the tiny seeds just shook loose, looking like the whirly birds or helicopter seeds I used to see as a kid under some kind of tree that grew near my grandparents' house in Wisconsin.

Most of the seeds shook loose but I could see them inside the cones and didn't want to waste the ones that were still in there; so I went whole hog and smashed them with a hammer, Shosone style.

This cone is nice and open and you can see the seeds tucked in at the base of the scales. The cones in the top picture going into the oven are tight and closed like dragon eggs. 

Energy invested so far: enough to hatch five separate Pokemon eggs or, alternately, walk the Rock and Roll Marathon (for foraging) plus Cross Fit with Shake-weights (for hammer smashing). Penniless says you can gather the nuts themselves under the pine trees in September and October as they shake loose from the cones as they open naturally; but the lack of cones on the lower branches and the number of squirrels and rabbits and birds I saw in the park makes me think it'll be a daily pilgrimage to root around in the pine needles and avoid suburbanites to get enough pine nuts for a decent batch of pesto.

For the final step, cracking open the seeds and getting to the pine nuts, Native Americans "parched" the seeds over coals and then cracked them; Penniless used her teeth to shell them like sunflower seeds. I took a look at my bowl of blackened, hard seeds and thought about how proud I was of my dental work, then went and got a pair of pliers. The first shell I opened was empty. So was the second. And the fifteenth. There was a nice, pleasant nutty smell of roasted pine nuts but the shells were completely dry inside. I realized in my desire to make sure all the cones opened enough to shake out the seeds, I'd parched the living hell out of my pine nuts too, and basically rendered the fat completely out of those lovely, fatty kernels. I was able to find one pine nut, intact, and all the rest, I'd desiccated into dust.

Yay. Success. I can now make a thimble-ful of pesto for one noodle. 

If I was depending on my foraging prowess to feed myself I would literally be dead.

Well, Pilgrim's Progress is all about the journey--right? Win on finding cones, on shaking open seeds, and on shucking the kernels, I just roasted them too long. Would I do it again? Maybe. It was fun looking for pine cones when I was out walking anyway; fun smashing them open; I enjoyed the nice piney smell of them roasting in the kitchen. It might be worth a second try--note to self, roast ONLY UNTIL CONES OPEN. In the meantime, though, as much as I like to be sustainable and local, I think I might just bite the bullet and buy the pine nuts.
Basic Pesto Recipe
2 cups packed basil leaves
1/2 cup grated parmesan
2 cloves garlic
1/4 cup pine nuts
2/3 cup olive oil
kosher salt, fresh ground black pepper
Combine basil, garlic and nuts in food processor. Add oil and pulse until smooth, season with salt and pepper, and stir in cheese.

My Love-Hate Affair

I have a sick obsession with sunflowers...they disgust me and yet...I just can't stay away.

When I was a teenager searching for identity I went through a phase where I identified as a sunflower. I had just seen my first bottle of Estee Lauder Sunflowers perfume, probably in a Walmart, considering the availability of department stores to my non-driving self growing up in California's rural central coast, and I was hooked. It smelled like nothing I'd ever experienced before, sort of warm and salty and sweet, evoking a perfect summer's day eating buttered sweet corn on the cob, like the coconut-tropical sun oil so iconic to the 90s mixed with the fine salty sweat that springs from laying contentedly in the sun. The bright, cheerful yellow packaging pleased and soothed my eye and seemed perfectly, entirely right with the world. I thought about sunflowers a lot, how they turned their dancing heads to the sun and lifted their faces in smiling worship. There was a serenity there that I sought and a beauty, so I took to sitting in sunny spots wherever I could find them, my legs curled under me and my face lifted to the sun, soaking in the warmth, experiencing rare moments of absolute presence.

I didn't actually write this book. My exploits as a half-teenaged girl, half-sun worshipping flower became the stuff of legend.

Sunflowers were my summer romance when I was a teenager. My adult sunflower garden is, as all faerie tales must be, a little more mired in the mundane.

I first planted sunflowers in my garden after a trip to the beautiful Carlsbad flower fields. There as part of a sustainability class we potted tiny sunflower seeds, a kindergarten primer on the joy of growing from seed. Sunflowers come up quick and grow like gangbusters and this little pot of seeds was no exception, pushing up through the soil in less than a week and spreading out strong leaves from its sturdy little stalk. Inspired, I grabbed a packet of random sunflower seeds from the racks at my nursery and carelessly threw them out in an empty patch of bare soil I'd just cultivated. They exploded out of the soil like the fireworks they so resemble, quickly growing to five feet high and unfurling their goldenrod petals like a crown around chocolate-brown centers bursting with seeds. Just like when I was a girl, they thrilled me with their size and their brilliance and their cheerful presence. They became the first place I brought people on my little garden tours.

Hello, my prince.

"Aren't they beautiful?" I gushed to my brother-in-law, inhaling the ambrosial scent of the tomato leaves, hot in the sun, and soaking in the same warmth my flowers were industriously converting into selenium-rich seeds.

"Beautiful," he agreed. "Hope you get some of the seeds. I planted those all over the ranch last year and the birds got every last seed before I could harvest a single one."

What now?

I hadn't thought about the birds. Honestly I hadn't really thought about the seeds, I'd just liked the thought of having sunflowers but suddenly I was determined that no wretched little bastard birds were going to steal my freaking sunflower seeds. I had no idea how to harvest the seeds but if birds could do it I felt sure it couldn't be that hard...like anything about urban farming, how hard could it be?

Sure, professor. Tell me again about the coconut powered tractor slash television slash nuclear reactor we're building. HOW HARD COULD IT BE. 

 A quick web search told me I'd have to wait until the seeds ripened on the heads and the heads dried up enough to easily release the seeds. I went out to my sunflowers. A few of them had nice stripey seeds but they weren't releasing the seeds. A brightly colored yellow finch flew down while I was checking and malevolently watched me from my fence, taunting me with its grinning, tweeting song, a horrible inversion of my Snow White fantasies where the sweetly singing bird companion was actually biding its time to inflict its dark will upon me.

We want. THOSE SEEDS.

Okay, no problem. I'd have to keep the sunflowers on the heads for a few more days, and just...keep the birds away somehow. I draped the flower patch with black bird netting; now my flowers looked like they were getting reading for a Victorian funeral, their cheerful petals were crushed, but at least the seeds were safe. It was just for a few more days. Weeks. Whatever. The leaves, huge and lushly green one day, started browning and dying on the stalk as the seeds ripened, but refused to fall. They hung on the stalks like wrinkled bats dangling in clusters. The petals fell until nothing was left but the seed center, that I'd once idealistically compared to chocolate, to velvet, to the warmth of summer garden soil--now just ugly, dried, and dead. With mounting concern I ran my fingers over the seed heads daily, checking to see if they'd release the seeds. The flowers steadily decayed, no more handsome dancing princes but haggard, hideous crones and still those seed heads refused to give up their bounty.

The birds watched. And waited.

Fear us. We come.

I finally got to the point where I couldn't stand the daily suspense and cut down some of the heads that were mostly ripened as a gardener friend suggested. I bagged the heads in brown grocery bags so the air could still circulate and the heads wouldn't mold while they dried out, and weeks later, the heat in my garage had finally finished drying them to the point that I could shake the heads into the bags and get my seeds.

Once I had the seeds I completely forgot about all the stress of waiting for the seeds to ripen and how ugly the stalks became and the daily stalking by seed-seeking pterodactyls and planted more. 

Damn you, sunflowers. 

This year I added to the seeds I'd propagated from last year to plant sunflowers from The Great Sunflower Project, an organization dedicated to "identifying where pollinators need help, and helping!" I planted "Birds and Bees sunflowers", an heirloom variety with extra pollen for increasingly endangered pollinators like honey bees (and, uncomfortably, for my nemesis, the backyard vultures. Finches. Whatever) and rich, super oily kernels with soft shells. Ignoring completely how I'd hated how ugly the sunflowers got in the backyard I planted them in a raised bed in the front yard; I decided if I planted them thickly they'd support each other's stems and stay looking nice for longer. I put down a thick layer of fresh compost and chicken manure and planted the seeds by the handfuls.

What came up were enormous, gargantuan, monstrous sunflowers. "Birds and Bees" were supposed to grow between 6-8'; the stalks shot up to 8' and kept on going, some reaching 9 and 10 feet. The stalks were thick, several inches in diameter, and the heads were 8" across. They blossomed in extravagant yellow, unfurling their petals like a lady shyly spreading her skirts, first one then the others in quick succession, a procession of blithe and bright-eyed dancers, buoyant in the sun. Every morning I'd find honeybees crawling all over the huge heads, three or four per flower, rare in these bee-starved times. I also saw literal flocks of finches, sparrows and songbirds flying out of the sunflowers every time I went out to water, but I didn't want to cover the heads with unsightly bird netting since they were in the front yard unless I absolutely had to. I tried to tell myself the birds wouldn't get everything and if it started to look like we were losing too many seeds I'd cut the heads like before. The stalks started to die back and look terrible again and since they were ten feet high there was extra room for them to look completely horrible, the most enormous weeds in a giant's abandoned lot. I worried what the neighbors thought. 

"At least we're not the worst yard in the neighborhood," my neighbor the hoarder told me brightly while walking his one-eyed dog. The ancient cocker spaniel leaked goo from her one good eye as they walked back to the dead yard next to the open garage filled to the top with boxes and precariously piled assorted cobwebby junk. 

I can't fault his observations.

Still, I want those seeds. Seed packets are $3 for a handful of seeds, a fraction of what even one seed head can produce. At the end of each sunflower season we have plenty to eat (here's a recipe for roasting salted seeds) and to share with the chickens for feed, with tons left over for replanting. So it's a daily struggle between wanting to cut them all down to keep the yard from looking so gross, and just giving in to absolute chaos and netting and brown bagging the heads right on the stalk. I've taken to pulling the hanging-bat dead leaves off the stems to reduce the amount of brown and mulching them into the beds and trying to just keep the flowers looking somewhat tidy, but the seeds stubbornly remain pure, unripened white even as the stalks deteriorate daily. Every morning I think, well, at least the flowers provided a ton of pollen to sustain the declining honeybee population, maybe that's enough. Maybe I should just take them down today.

Except one of the seed heads turned stripey. I ran my finger over the seed head and the seeds fell gently into my palm, perfectly formed, ready to eat. I cracked one open with my teeth and ate it right there, and threw a handful to my backyard hens. They descended upon the seeds and gobbled them up like gumdrops. I noticed there were some little sunflowers sprouting at the base of the huge stalks, opening their baby yellow cheeks to the sun filtering through the amazon forest of legs.

Hmm. Maybe the neighbors can wait. 

The Perils of the Front Yard Food Forest

Someone ate my tomatoes last night. The very first, just ripening from orange to red, roma tomatoes from my garden, MY GARDEN, from my tomato plants that I water with a bucket I use to catch the shower water as it warms up and afterwards haul down the stairs to the garden which is, if I haven't mentioned, MY. GARDEN.

Wait, but what?

The worst part is that I can't complain to my husband. Because he told me so.

I don't like it. 

Urban food gardening is hard. You have to find soil space, first of all and just as importantly you have to find sunlight. Some food plants work in shade but not tomatoes, basil and fruit, which is what my spoiled Mediterranean palate leans toward; so when, in my first forays into food gardening, I realized I had exactly two raised beds worth of sunny space in my backyard, I planted one of tomatoes and one of strawberries. Neither produced well (I realized with more research that they inhibit each other) and even after I switched to only planting one or the other, the plants still struggled to produce no matter how much homemade compost and chicken manure I added to the beds. Plants like tomatoes and strawberries pull a lot of specific nutrients from the soil and over a few years neither does well being planted in the same soil--so I had to go look for new places for my tomatoes.

Cue the battle for the front yard food forest.

Before the California drought hit critical levels my husband was adamantly opposed to food in the front yard. His beautiful carpet of suburban green grass was a point of pride. We watered three times a week to the tune of 2000 gallons of water and fertilized and yes, fed and killed crabgrass and dandelions with Roundup Weed and Feed. We didn't know how bad Roundup was then but we definitely knew we didn't want food growing where pesticides and herbicides had been sprayed. 

He had another problem with the front yard food forest, though--what if people walked by and took apples from our apple trees? Our backyard is fenced in, the front yard is not. While I laughed at the thought of a cheerful, barefooted Tom Sawyer-ian apple thief shimmying up our trees (which were at that point the height of my waist and had four buds on two branches) he reminded me of how freaked out I was when a few years ago a strange woman with a stroller had taken to picnicking on our lawn with her baby. I would back out of the garage and see her spreading her blanket out on our (then) green lawn in the shade of our carrotwood trees, taking her baby out of the stroller and eating a snack herself. When she caught me staring at her in disbelief she would gaze back at me eerily with dead, empty eyes while she ate her pudding pack. 

What care I for lands and titles. Forsooth, this choco-vanilla swirl is the bomb.  

"You want scary mommy stopping by to pick kale? Maybe she'll bring her juicer and plug into our power grid while she's here." 

Ugh. Point taken. 

But at this point I had read about "Farm City" by Novella Carpenter and was fascinated by the idea that she had not just tried to address the fresh food desert in her neighborhood of urban Oakland with a food truck or accessibility to fresh fruits and vegetables in stores but that she had created a food forest in an abandoned lot, and left the gates open to anyone who wandered by and wanted to pull a carrot or a handful of greens. It was beautiful, seductive, the idea of an urban Garden of Eden that could feed and nourish the nutrient-starved masses that abutted its flowering borders. It was like the food forest playgrounds of Portland where everyone was welcome, where everyone could forage as we once had, where the land could provide in abundance and we could once more be connected to the gospel of soil. I had visions of my children climbing the apple trees like Scout and Huck Finn and the Boxcar Children, the neighborhood kids picking blackberries as they walked by and finding themselves less hungry for refined sugar, the adults coming for armfuls of squash and a pumpkin at Halloween. 

Tell me more. Is there a chocolate waterfall in this fantasy?

More to the point I have always been aware of a population of immigrants that wander our neighborhood, knocking politely on the door or calling to us when we were working outside, "Trabajo?" I would see them wandering the aisles of Target with their dusty backpacks on hot days, looking without interest at shelves of cheap toys and rubber flip flops, just looking for the relief of air conditioning and trying not to draw negative attention to themselves. I would see them gathered at the corner of our grocery store plaza, with their hands shoved into their pockets, waiting endlessly for the chance at working as day laborers. They looked so weary, so worn out. Where did they sleep at night? What did they eat when they didn't find work that day? What if an apple from my yard might give them a moment of comfort?

Wow, it sounds so benevolent, doesn't it? Until I found those tomatoes missing this morning and partially lost my mind. 

See, San Diego is starting to become more sustainable and urban garden-friendly, but not having the water resources of Portland and northern California, yards around here are more likely to hold drought tolerant plants, fake plastic grass, or rock gardens. Although the drought has made people more tolerant of each other's landscaping choices, I still feel self-conscious about our front yard. Our dead grass apocalypse-landscape lawn was one of many last year, when the drought was in the news every day, but now I've started to see lush green lawns again, despite the fact that this year's El Nino storms had almost no effect on reducing drought conditions in San Diego and 2016 promises a La Nina storm system, which will bring drier than normal conditions. Now that the neighborhood has started to perk up, our food forest is an eyesore. The sunflowers I planted for the pollinators (Seen a Bee Lately?), massive, with heads 18" across and standing about 12' high, are wilting as they set their seeds--and I want those seeds for next year's planting and for the chickens. Trouble is, they have to sit in the sun and finish ripening on the stalk, with their droopy brown leaves dangling from their amazonian stalks and the petals curled and dried out around the heads. The pumpkin vines started fading as the pumpkin crop ripened on the vine; the huge leaves and sprawling green vines quickly turned from gorgeous expanse of verdant abundance to dead and dry and brown forest of death--which has to stay while the last of the pumpkins finish turning orange. The lettuce has bolted and turned to huge brown obelisks as the seeds set. It's the end of the season and I can't wait to rip everything out. I feel like everyone's watching me water and thinking, "This is what she's making out of all those gallons of water? Basically an abandoned lot?"

And you came in the night and stole my tomatoes. 

Why not the tomatillos? I have more tomatillos and serrano peppers than I could ever eat or turn into salsa. There's kale in abundance and butter lettuce literally growing in the lawn. There's green onions! Why the tomatoes. I haven't even HAD a tomato this year yet. Yesterday I went to the grocery store, saw the roma tomatoes on the display and thought to myself smugly, nope. Not buying any of those because I have my own and they'll be ready any day now. 

Dammit. 

Sigh.

I was such a benevolent person before I had to put in any work for my imaginary food forest. No one else came and tilled the ground by hand or saved every scrap of compostable garbage for months to make compost or bought organic vegetable fertilizer. No one else got up early every morning to help me water or hauled buckets of conserved shower water down to the garden to feed those tomatoes. No one else picked bugs off by hand, or wrestled with ethical questions: I have chickens to provide manure for my garden--when they stop laying eggs is that manure worth what I feed them or do I cull them to make room for new ones? No one else lives with the eyesore in the hopes that what they're doing is making a difference...oh. 

Once I actually read Novella Carpenter's "Farm City" I found out her benevolence was taxed too, when she waited for months for a prized heirloom varietal of watermelon she'd been nurturing to ripen. She woke one morning, looking forward to checking to see if her baby was ready, and found it had been picked during the night. She railed angrily and was furious with her neighbors or whatever wandering stranger had decided to come into her garden and take the very best thing available, the one thing she'd wanted only for herself.

Ultimately Novella made peace with the watermelon thief. How could she not? She'd mentally declared the garden open to all the happy strangers who wandered in to take carrots, onions, and plums. She couldn't in good conscience say to herself "you're welcome to everything here, but only after I've gone through and taken what I want". 

I don't know if I'm there yet.

Ugh. GOD. We all love each other. I GET IT. 

The book "The $64 Tomato" really addresses the struggle we food gardeners have to address--food you grow yourself is not free. If you add up the cost of water (did I mention? State water authorities in California suddenly realized last year that with consumers doing the responsible thing and cutting back on their water by 25% to defray the water shortages in the state, they also were going to be losing 25% of their business--so they raised prices to compensate. Now we pay the same or more for using 25% less water), vegetable fertilizer (do you live in perfectly fertile farm land that's been wandered by free range cattle for decades, dropping manure like little gold patties all over the place just waiting for tomato plants to sprout? Please call me. That's incredibly sexy), seeds/plants, and compost to build the soil back up for the next season, backyard tomatoes are not free. If you plant things like blueberries that really don't survive and flourish except in an acidic soil, and you have to amend your soil with store-bought amendments (I don't have elemental sulfate in my medicine cabinet) constantly, those costs go up even further. I will never again take for granted those bags of vegetables or citrus fruits people leave on the table in the break room.

Double sigh.

The truth is my tomato plants are covered in nice sized fruit and I will have plenty of tomatoes once they start ripening. I can spare three tomatoes, whether they were the first of the harvest or the last on the vine. Do I wish I had been able to have the thrill of picking the first red tomatoes, after having watched them eagerly for weeks for signs of ripening? Of course. Do I really hope that the person who did get to pick those tomatoes was hungry and in need? OF COURSE! Do I not want to think about the fact that it could be the teenagers that wander our neighborhood grafitti-ing stop signs and toilet papering trees didn't take them to, like, throw at people? Yeah. Obvs. I wish I hadn't mentioned it because now I'm, like positive that happened. 

But would I give up my front yard foot forest, with the sun and the space, the birds that are nesting in my giant sunflowers, the Monarch butterflies I keep finding on my nasturtiums, the abundant basil patch that cost me three bucks instead of $15, the fresh onions and kale and tomatillos and the strings of serrano peppers hanging in my kitchen? And really, would I give up the chance to share fresh tomatillos and amazingly flavorful berries and tomatoes that taste like fresh warm sunshine, even with people who didn't ask for permission first?

Nope, never. And someday I'll have my chocolate waterfall too.