Personal Growth in Heels: from Lettuce Seeds to Ecoterrorist

A year ago, I had messed things up, as usual.

Like an idiot I went to the nursery just to, you know, see what they had--you know, in April, in Southern California. Yeah. They had everything. I immediately started running around with my little cart picking up six packs of pumpkins and cilantro and pineapple sage and tomatillos and about nine thousand packets of seeds because I had one 2'x6' bed in my backyard and it could obviously sustain all the edible plant life necessary for a complete food forest. 

I have to admit the people at the nursery were complete freaking enablers holding the end of my tourniquet so I could shoot myself up with my drug of choice because at no time did anyone stop me and say hey loser. Are you a farmer? Are you a commercial poppy grower? Do you own an estate in Columbia where you anticipate having to support the entirety of a vast army of rebels? Because you will one hundred percent never in life ever be able to find places with enough sun and enough space for like, a fraction of what you have in your cart right now. Unless you plan on stealing this shopping cart and making it into a planter, in which case then yes, you can go ahead and take that tomato plant. 

Worst was all the packets of seeds. Once I got home and started looking more closely at the spacing requirements for all my six packs I realized I had room for exactly one six pack of plants. The rest I dug into odd places here and there and put into pots for the time being and then looked forlornly at my packets of seeds. I distributed about half a packet of green bean seeds into an enormous, ridiculously expensive set of peat pots seed starters and then looked at the other like, ten thousand seed packets and went to go look for a mirror so I could punch myself in the face. Goddammit. I was never going to have blue pumpkins. 

I was just going to have to come up with a solution, so I left all the expensive seed packets sitting on the backyard table to make sure that I didn't forget about them.

Since I usually mess up in clusters, I forgot all about them.

Until it rained during the night. During a drought. In April. It does not rain in April in So Cal, much less during an historic drought but it rained that night in a torrential downpour that promptly ruined all my heirloom seeds.

I swear to God. I'm gonna punch you in the freaking face.

Desperately I turned to google and amid a sea of laughing actual gardeners who just shook their heads at questions posted by dumbasses like me, one guy was like, "Sure. Throw them out in the garden. What do you have to lose?" Clinging to those heartfelt words of encouragement and support, I pathetically salvaged one packet of butter lettuce seeds and scraped them out of the soggy clump in the bottom of the envelope, not so much carefully sprinkling them evenly over the ground as like, flicking them off the side of my fingers in slimy clots. I put them in where other stuff was already growing so I could pretend like I was still successful even as I watched to see how much of a failure I really was. 

They. Came. Up. 

Lettuce. At last. The one thing even I can't mess up.

Except I read something in passing about something called bolting. Lettuce bolted if it got too hot. Huh. Not sure what bolting is. Also, lettuce could "go to seed" if planted too late. This seemed unlikely. First of all, where are there freaking seeds on a lettuce? And also, if it just rained in the middle of a damn drought, it definitely was not going to get too hot for the lettuce to bolt. Whatever that might be. They grow lettuce in fields in full sun in, like, Fresno. My lovely shady backyard is not going to be too hot for a lettuce.

Oh. Bolting MEANS "go to seed."
 Like, become inedible and send up crazy cell phone towers out of the center of the lettuce.

So my lettuce bolted because obviously I did exactly zero of the sun research you're supposed to do to map out the zones of your house, the compass directions, and the hours of sun each area of the garden gets each day. We had about a week of beautiful wonderful lettuce and then it bolted. Each head shot up on stalks about three feet high and sent up yellow flowers that turned into little dandelion fluff. The stalks extrude a milky sap that seeps into the leaves, making them bitter and inedible to protect the plant once it starts trying to set seed.

Ever practical, my husband listened to me wail about the turning of the tides and how fate was intervening in our destinies for a minute before asking, "If it's setting seed, shouldn't you be able to collect it?"

Hmm. Back to google. Aha, YES, you can collect lettuce seed (waiting until the yellow flowers turn to little brown pods and then breaking them open). After a few minutes of doing so I was startled to realize I'd collected at least a couple hundred seeds from a single plant. I went and got an envelope. Holy crap. Thousands. Of seeds. 

I planted our harvested seeds last fall and though birds got them, bugs got them, weather got them, somehow, miraculously, I ended up with a bed full of lettuce again this winter that cost me nothing. An unseasonable hot spell sent them bolting again, and they've already reseeded the bed and the lawn around the bed. Lettuce heads are cropping up everywhere and we're back to gathering seeds, though for what I'm not sure. The seeds are in every inch of dirt on my property by now, blowing here and there on the wind by the dandelion fluff parachutes they sprout. My little son comes out to pop seeds heads open and empty the seeds into envelopes with me. "Let's have a seed sale," he suggests. "We can have like a lemonade stand but with lettuce seeds. For ten or fifteen dollars." 

I'm not sure the demand for heirloom butter lettuce is quite THAT high yet. We do have so much seed though, and I'm a little smug every time I go to the nursery now and shake the $3 packet of lettuce seeds. If that was really how much those seeds were worth I could retire on what I'm pulling out of my lettuce bed. 

"What are you going to do with all of it?" my neighbor Suzy asks. 

"I don't know. Maybe just scatter it into people's lawns at night and run away shouting 'Grow Food! Not Lawns!' like an ecoterrorist ninja." I laugh, but my daughter looks sideways at me. 

"Shh, mom. Now they know our plans."

The Death Bed

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

Well, it looks like crap, if you must know.

Despite my vast library of books and my grand plans for a winter garden, (why shouldn't I?! It's Southern California!) I was defeated by The Death Bed.

Inspired by seasonal eating books that seduced me with magical promises of the unequaled sweetness of winter cauliflower and broccoli, fall blooming lettuce, and butternut squashes, I planted as soon as the days got short and the temperatures dropped. I dug out and filled new raised beds in the front yard so I'd have enough room and dropped in heirloom seed packets of broccoli de cicci, Toscano baby kale, butter lettuce, cauliflower, butternut squash and, for fun, loofah gourd seeds. I spent hours carefully measuring the distance between seed holes that I carefully dipped into the soil with my fingertip and lovingly covered with soil made from a mixture of kelp meal and homemade compost and chicken manure.

The Death Bed ate them all.

When nothing came up the first time I surmised that hungry autumn birds might have been at whatever seedlings were coming up, so I carefully replanted and netted the beds, supporting the nets with bamboo stakes I'd whittled grooves into by hand to make a perfect plant nursery. I watered my new set of seeds in with rain water I'd collected from the summer storms.

The Death Bed ate them all.

Not a single cauliflower sprouted or a butter lettuce or even a single leaf of kale. We're the birds eating them through the raised netting? It seemed impossible! I tried new seeds. Maybe my seed packets were too old to be viable. The Death Bed ate these too. Oddly, I started finding vining seedlings outside of the raised beds; demoralized by my failure  to obtain the mythical sweet winter cauliflower and broccoli I let them grow as they would, unwilling to root them up but also determined not to water them. If everything I had so lovingly planted would refuse to grow, I wasn't going to waste effort on these bastard vines.

Except the bastard vines grew and multiplied and holy crap they took over literally everything. Within a month the vines had covered the barren Death Bed and spread to the entire lawn. They grew up the side of the house, clinging impossibly to the stucco at crazy angles and blooming fantastic brilliant yellow flowers the size of hibiscus. Despite the shortage of bees the flowers fruited and started transforming into humongous watermelon sized cucumbers that pulled the vines down from the stucco. Undaunted by their thwarted journey to the sky, the vines settled and split and flowered again and fruited. Everywhere.

Yay. These were my loofah gourds. Because of course the only thing I'd be able to grow in my food garden was infinite quantities of inedible gourds. And I hadn't even planted them. The birds found them so inedible they'd spat or shat them out right next to my beds and even still they thrived better than anything I HAD planted, utterly without any help from me. Once they were dried and cut I had all the exfoliation I could handle. No food. But my skin was soft as hell, dammit.

Except...

Sometime in the middle of winter I noted that under the web of loofah gourd vines something was growing. Weeds? Crab grass? I was determined to just leave it there in the Death Bed, as betrayed as I was by the failure of all my educated efforts. Just take over if you want to, then. I don't care.

They did take over. Four months after I planted the seeds that should have sprouted in a week, impossibly, butter lettuce sprouted in the Death Bed. Higgledy piggledy, in nothing resembling the carefully spaced rows I'd planted, they sprouted all over each other, heads growing up over the other heads, leaves the most beautiful, bright brilliant green winter had ever seen. Darker, jagged edge leaves popped up between them and formed towers rising above the butter lettuce heads, shading their cousins, and soon sprouting familiar deep green clusters of broccoli. We ate butter lettuce all winter and when the spring came, too soon, bright and overly sunny, the lettuce and the broccoli faded and flowered and set seed.

This morning I went out to take a look: my lettuce heads have grown into purple tinted obelisks, ready to bloom and turn flowers into white cottony chaff that will fly a million seeds into the summer breeze. They are, objectively, ugly. The leaves are too bitter to eat, natures way of keeping the plant alive until it can reproduce. The broccoli grew three feet tall and faded as it set its yellow flowers, turning into ungainly stalks with tan leaves and flopped over into the soil. It is a mess. And yes. It looks like crap.

But to my surprise, this morning when I looked I found butter lettuce growing in the lawn. Seedlings are all over the Death Bed, churning the heat from the decomposing compost into bright green leaves two inches across, but they are in my lawn too, where a year ago, perfect bright Kentucky bluegrass grew in a straight flawless carpet of weedless  glory. A year ago there was not a clover to be seen, clover that fixed the nutrients in the soil and covers the bare ground to keep the more invasive weeds away, but now the clover is sheltering tiny lettuce seedlings in my lawn. A year ago we'd have sprayed them away or mowed them over, and maybe my neighbors will find little lettuce seedlings in their lawn and mistake them for the ugly spade shaped weeds we fight in suburbia and root them out. Maybe. Maybe life will find a way.




I bend over the bed, where nature has arranged the obelisks of the parent lettuce in a perfect way that shades and protects the baby seedlings from the birds and the sun. There are new broccoli seedlings, a few inches high already, crowded by the wealth of lettuce clamoring to live and thrive in this shrinking space. I slide my hand into the soft soil, warmed by the sun, loose and rich and crumbly from the kelp meal and the compost, and guess at how far the roots have descended. I'm right, and find the perfect scoop of soil that contains the new life and its nursery all in the palm of my hand. I dig out a new home in the other bed where it can set roots and spread out. I find a few others and add them to the broccoli bed--they do better together I think.






Nearby my chickens are greedily devouring the clover patch I moved them to this morning and I realize with a start of recognition those are lettuces they have found under the clover and are gobbling down to their roots. It doesn't matter. We have more than enough.

Failure in Heels

I mess up. A lot.

Like in any given day I have probably broken a heel, sat in chalk, and if it's a special day where I need to meet with someone very important I have most likely worn a white dress and spilled coffee down my front. I definitely walked across your freshly painted floor and brushed against the white board with my sleeve messing not only myself but everything you had written. My hair looks crazy because I probably ran to get here because I almost certainly realized too late that I was late.

In my garden it's no different; and humiliatingly, it's almost always my fault. I could mention the many, many stunted vegetable crops (my 3" corn cobs were of particular pride) because I either forgot to water or didn't bother to fertilize, trusting that my housing development was certainly built in the middle of some lush-ass farmland. I could mention the pumpkins I lovingly added fish emulsion and compost tea to while they grew poorly in a virtual rock garden. I could mention the entire bed of cauliflower I murdered because I didn't take the ten seconds to reread the article on making organic aphid spray out of soap and water to find out the proportions. My super concentrated soap spray killed the aphids and also left a barren wasteland of shriveled purple cauliflower obelisks as grim, resentful monuments to my own laziness.

But the worst is the strawberry fiasco.

Attempt #1: strawberry pot. Has lots of little pods on the outside of the pot. This is like a Spanish pottery staple so this must be a thing. Hmm. Seems like not much soil for all these plants to share. Also, what are spindly long things running out the sides? No berries anymore. Why? Martha Stewart did this exact thing on show. Maybe need fancier strawberry pot. Possibly reclaimed. Depending on what that should turn out to mean.

Attempt #2: hanging sack of soil thingy. As seen on TV!  Wonder if should use some kind of special soil...? Enh. It's expensive. Probably dirt from backyard is just fine since housing development certainly built in remains of unknown but presumably highly fertile farmland. Soil sack thingy box says will get a quart of berries from each plant! Hurrah! Strawberry jams, will most likely need to sell excess. Except berries are sour. Like REALLY sour. Um, basically inedible. And long spindly things are running over the side again. Minutes spent wondering what spindly things are: 127. Minutes spent googling spindly things: 0. Minutes spent on computer moving past Google home screen to Facebook: approximately 15879.

Spindly things.

Attempt #3: raised beds. AND spindly things running over sides are called runners! Am now strawberry expert. Carefully plant raised bed with strawberries and tomato plants, just fudging the recommended spacing directions by a few inches. Sure it's fine. Runners will make new strawberry plants. For free! Hmm. Strawberries are not producing though. Dammit. Runners are running.

Attempt #4: raised beds sans tomatoes. Apparently...tomatoes and strawberries kill each other. Like to the point that you can't plant strawberries in soil where tomatoes have been for THREE. YEARS. Okay. New acidic soil that berries will love. Acidic fertilizer. Organic compost. Bird netting.  Set up for some freaking SUCCESS, dammit.

Then came outside to see my terrier delicately pick a single strawberry through the bird netting, lift it over the bed side and carefully chew it through the netting. Through. The netting. Dammit.

Oh did I mention the slugs found the beds this year?

I mess up. A lot.

I think though, we make the assumption that farming or gardening is easy. Seeds, water, soil, sunlight. Even an idiot should be able to make that work. For gods sake if a FARMER can figure it out...!

My husband, a computer engineer who writes the software that makes planes fly themselves, was trying to install a drip irrigation system for my raised beds. He came in from the yard soaked from shirt to shorts and mad as, if you'll excuse the expression, a wet hen. "How can it be this hard? It is impossible that it is this hard and farmers do this. They wear overalls! They poke seeds in holes! They don’t even read!"

The irrigation system is still sitting out there on the lawn.

So, we mess up.

Failure in the garden is just going to happen. The one thing I learned (once I finally stopped being lazy and actually researching what I was doing) was the one thing I should have realized intrinsically--nature is complex. There are more variables in play than I will absolutely be able to control or even always anticipate (like where do the squash beetles come from if there are no other squash around? How did they find me? Why do they eat my squash?! Why?! Why?!) and that's just life. I can't take it personally no matter how the perfectionist in me screams "you idiot you have a master’s degree! You can't best a packet of seeds and some dirt? You're literally not as smart as the DIRT?!"

Nope. I still have a ton to learn. But I'm proud to say I have blueberry bushes producing a good quarter cup of berries every morning; snap pea pods on my carelessly sprouted seedlings; and even my poor strawberries, when you cut out the slug bites, are absolutely delicious. I'll keep trying to outwit the dirt. I haven't broken a heel farming so far.