Ending is Better than Mending

So yesterday I happened to turn into my neighborhood and saw a Jaguar covered in pale pink and bright green house paint, with the buckets on the roof, a skeleton in a feather boa in the driver's seat, and a stencil on the trunk saying "Permission to be Wonderful".

WHAT.

Vengeance? Vandalism? Nasty divorce, cheating spouse, someone come out as gay? I was pretty curious. After a little investigation I found out the people who live on the corner had won that car in an auction a few years ago, and it had "died" there on the corner the day before. The lady of the house was an artist and she'd always wanted to "do something like this". So she destroyed the car. This morning I saw her happily putting bright purple flowers into the buckets into the paint cans on the roof and stenciling a florentine design onto the unevenly pink splotched sides of the Jag.

Ha, see because the car DIED. So no one else could possibly use it, ever. It stopped going, so we may as well "reuse" it--isn't that what recycling's all about, reduce, recycle and reuse? Hurrah, environment!

Ha.

So, funny story, Aldous Huxley, back in 1931, looked around at the human condition and was like, you guys are gross, and wrote a book called "Brave New World" . In the World State, this futuristic "perfect" society, everyone is preconditioned with hundreds of thousands of repetitions of the appropriate subconscious messages before joining society, one of which is "Ending is Better than Mending". See, in an effort to bulk up the consumer-driven economy with tangible goods, this society made throwing stuff away rather than repairing it a societal value. Anyone that shows up in the World State in patched or even worn clothes is automatically viewed with nothing less than disgust; while the ability to repair is so bred out of society, viewed with such horror, that when a lone woman from the World State finds herself among the "savages" (read: normal people living well, cooking their own food, building their own houses, but viewed as insane and crazy chicken ladies for not wanting to join World State) she is absolutely unable to function and is reduced to wearing rags because she cannot bring herself to learn to mend things nor has she any ability to do so. Huh. Weird...

Ironically Aldous Huxley wrote this story out of disgust toward the path humanity was taking during the Great Depression, which, by the way, was one of the most penny-pinching, repairing, reusing, make-do-ing, making-it-work-ing times in American history, you know, with it being, like, the Depression and people starving to death and everything, like, making "mock apple pie" out of ritz crackers and cinnamon. He looked at the state of society in the midst of arguably our most frugal time period since the pioneer days and was like, whoa, guys, this is getting out of hand.
If we don't slow our roll we're going to end up like gross suburban housewives who destroy $40,000 cars because they've "always wanted to".

Question: did you have those gallons of paint? Or did you go out and buy $60 worth of paint for this project?

Okay. Stuff is hard. Hard to find time, hard to find money, hard to know how, hard to learn, I get it. Is it possible, though, that we've ignored the lessons of our sophomore English teachers and Senor Huxley himself and somehow gotten it into our heads that Ending really is better than Mending? We are a nation of hoarders that is also drowning in trash . Somewhere along the line we forgot how to fix and make and make do. We may tout the tenets of "Reduce, Recycle and Reuse" here in Southern California but we're much more likely to do some ridiculous pinterest project that actually requires buying (and consuming) 40 t-shirts to tear into brightly colored strips in order to make a tie-dyed papasan chair out of that old hula hoop. We don't know how to patch holes in our clothes so that they really are as good as new, or tailor them into something new.We don't know how to repair our cars or for GODS SAKE DONATE IT TO CHARITY so we buy new ones or we take a trip to Home Depot to buy semi-gloss art supplies, with a stop at the flower shop for accent colors.

You're making Aldous Huxley cry, you guys.

Whoa, it's okay, Al. We're gonna fix it. 

Stuff is hard, and Aldous Huxley thinks we're gross, but listen. Here's one easy thing you can do to not be a gross member of the World State (or  my neighborhood, apparently). Simple composting can reduce 50% or more of your trash output even if you're already recycling. If you have a spare trash bin it can cost you nothing. If you have a spare corner in your backyard for a pile, it can cost you nothing. If you are consumer driven William's Sonoma loving artisan copper handle reclaimed barn wood person, a compost bin will set you back about $2400 but in any case the composting process itself is free, reduces your trash (our family of five, instead of filling a 50 gallon dumpster every week, now, uses one kitchen trash bag a week) and most beautiful of all, it can repair your crappy topsoil. Go out and look at your soil under the grass and you'll see clay, crumbly dry sand, gray or tan dust; it's full of chemicals and devoid of nutrients. A little compost will put all the good stuff right back in so even if you're a grass person instead of an urban farm person, you can still make the dirt you have do better with what you're growing. No garden?Apartment living? Save your compostables and give them to someone who can use them. A little social media blast and you'll certainly find someone looking for extra compostable stuff since small bags of compost sell for $10-$15.

Simple method: drill drainage holes in a 40-50 gallon rubber/plastic trash bin. The holes should be about 1" and plentiful around the entire circumference of the bin, starting about a foot from the bottom and carrying all the way down and through the bottom of the bin itself. Fill with a ratio of 1:5 green to brown waste. Green waste is anything that comes from a fruit or a vegetable (including coffee grounds) and brown waste is anything that came from a tree, including black and white newsprint, plain cardboard, brown paper bags, and paper towels that haven't been used for something like sopping up meat grease or wiping things down with Windex. It will all eventually break down but a good way to keep circulation is to start with a layer of greens (which starts out bulky but will break down faster) separated by a layer of browns (leaves, small twigs, cardboard that you've dampened and torn into smaller pieces) and repeat. You can also throw in any old potting soil that needs a rest, it'll pick up the good microbes and nutrients from the compost as it decomposes. If you want it to go faster take it out and turn it every day. If not, just leave it alone and it'll do its thing. If it starts to smell, dump it out, pick it apart with your shovel a bit, throw it back in with more brown stuff (too little brown stuff makes the compost become anaerobic and smell bad).

You can also just throw all that stuff I just said into a pile and let it do its thing. Free. Easy. The cardboard doesn't have to go to a recycling plant which produces pollution to recycle that cardboard.
It can go right into a micronutrient stew gardeners literally call "Black Gold" that you'll eventually put right down on your lawn or in your tomato bed to freaking miraculous results.

So, this was a $3 six pack of tomato seedlings before I composted. You may be able to see the stakes and twine support they have completely destroyed in their desire to grow and take over the world.

It should scare us a little that we don't know how to darn socks anymore or sew invisible patches; how to repair our plumbing or build things like a solar still to purify our own water. How would we even collect water, since it's illegal in some states to collect sky-water? It scared Aldous Huxley. But maybe small, sustainable changes like composting can help us push back against the Brave New World. Even if we are making them in heels. 

Where Have all the Barbaloots Gone?

"Can't we have the puppy pee on this lawn?" my little son inquired during our morning walk past the neighbor's house. "Look how green it is. Don't they know we're in a drought?"

Indeed, the neighbors lawn fills me with an unreasonable rage. In March of this year the governor of California announced that the state was in one of the worst droughts in history, only to see Californians save a whopping almost no water. After only a 3.6% water conservation for the month of April the government was forced to make water restrictions of 25% per household mandatory, which in our neighborhood also means mandatory restrictions on your outdoor watering to twice weekly or less.

Yet, my lovely neighbor's lawn, filled with the highest quality, fine-bladed, lush and soft Kentucky bluegrass is uniformly the color of water in a deep, still forest pond; the green of a ripe cucumber, watermelon green, the color of life and growth. The grass is so soft and so fine, with nary a tan or yellowed blade amid its luscious carpet, it forces you to imagine squinching your bare toes in it, or laying in it blowing dandelion wishes (if weeds were allowed, which they are not), or braiding daisy chains (if landscaping flowers were allowed to be picked, which they are not). Dr. Seuss must have had grass like this when he wrote of his famous truffula trees, "the touch of their tufts is much softer than silk."

What I'm saying is this lawn did not get nor remain this green by being watered twice a week. 

My lawn, as of March, is D-E-D dead. My lawn is as dead as the girl in the zombie movie who stops to make love in the peach orchard. My lawn is as dead as any character that you name out loud as your favorite character in Game of Thrones (why, Ned Stark, why? Why did you have to be so noble?). My lawn is an alien threat who, having been warned by Doctor Who to stop whatever they are doing, does not stop whatever they are doing. My lawn is a red-shirted nameless helmsman in a Star Trek away team. Dead, is where I'm going with this. Like so dead it's a little embarrassing. My lawn is the color of a truck stop waitress's hair in Texas.

My lawn when when it was green was getting watered twice a week and still using over 2000 gallons of water a week. In exchange for about $100 a month in water resources it gave me:

• the satisfaction of driving up to my house twice a day and seeing a green lawn that matched the other green lawns in the neighborhood
• a soapy chemical runoff that watered the street in front of my house really well
• the pleasure of playing on my grass no, wait, we never played on the grass
• the smell of fresh cut grass  no, shoot, not that either since the gardener cut it
• lots of barefoot front yard barbecues no, front yard parties are not really "done" around here
• some other stuff...wait...there was something. I feel like there was something though...

Total minutes of joy for the month: 60. So, like $1.60 a minute. I mean, you could have phone sex for that much. I think you can buy a dose of heroin that will jack you up long enough to make that worth it. I'm not sure the joy of driving up to see my green lawn before I pull into the garage twice a day was really that kind of high. 

We told our neighbors we were going to let the lawn die. They all shook their heads at how brave we were. Yep, just the heroes of Mount Suburbia over here, willing to shoulder the badge of shame that comes with a dusty brown lawn. Cancer survivors have nothing on us. I am Khaleesi, Queen of the desert grass.

The only problem was that in March we also start watering the vegetable garden more aggressively, and at the same time we decided to let the lawn die, we had just put in two more raised beds in the front yard. I decided to hand water with a watering can for a week so I could keep track of how much water I used; it came out to 175 gallons a week. In exchange for less than $10 a month in water resources it gave me (well, less, actually, since I saved rainwater that particular month): bowls of blueberries

• 5 bowls of blueberries 
• 4 small heads of broccoli
• 50 snow pea pods
• 15 handfuls of strawberries
• 4 heads of spring garlic
• 3 bouquets of fresh cut roses and scented geraniums
• the strong and heady fragrance of blossoming lemon trees
• the exercise of lifting and carrying buckets of water
• a bunch of fresh air and sunlight

Total minutes of joy: 900. That's a pretty good cost per minute of joy ratio. I can handle that. And it was good joy. Fresh blueberries straight from the bushes and a bunch of vitamin D from a few extra minutes of sunlight the garden forced me to get, AND we not only met our water restrictions mandate of 25%, we exceeded it by reducing 90%? I just might be the smartest girl, in the highest heels.

"And so," said the Lorax, "please pardon my cough,
they cannot live here, so I'm sending them off.
Where will they go?
I don't hopefully know."

Most people are addressing California's water issues by digging out their lawns and replacing them with hardscaping and rock gardens; some, like my Bluegrassian neighbors, ignore water restrictions entirely in favor of flowerless manicured outdoor carpets soaked in as much as three times the chemicals per acre of commercial agriculture. Meanwhile songbirds, butterflies and honeybees are becoming fewer and further between as their search for seeds and flowering plants for food pushes them (and us, by the way) into extinction. They are the Barbaloots, the Swomee Swans, and the Humming Fish that disappeared from the Lorax's Valley.

I propose a third option. A pot of flowers. A hanging tomato plant. A bunch of potatoes sprouting in a bucket. A fruit tree. Instead of wrought iron ivy curling up your fence posts, actual bean and pea plants. Instead of grass, paths between the carrots and strawberries patches. Food, not lawns. Butterflies, not chemicals. Purpose, not picture-perfect. For the water, for the bees, for the topsoil, we just have to do better with the resources we have. And unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot...

"...unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot
Nothing is going to get better. It's not."

Off With Her Head

In her Ted Talk We Need to Feed the Whole World, Dutch scientist and writer Louise Fresco says that eating well is the privilege of the wealthy. Gwyneth Paltrow already showed us that in April 2015 with her disastrously-out-of-touch-with-what-food-costs attempt at the $29 Food Stamp Challenge, where she attempted to shop to feed her family for $29 for the entire week, as many poor families on government assistance must.

Gwyneth's Twitter picture of what she bought for her $29. Her caption: "This is what $29 gets you at the grocery store--what families on SNAP (i.e. food stamps) have to live on." She ultimately gave up four days in and bought a bag of black licorice to celebrate not being poor.

Not only is this, like, a pretty blatant postcard to the world of "Hey guys I don't cook for myself EVER since even though I named my child after a piece of food I actually have no idea what the caloric needs of a family of four would be or how much rice a sack of rice makes and then how to put those two numbers together to get a weeks worth of food"...but that she thought that for $29 a week total she would get to not only have green stuff, but fresh green stuff, and fruit and garnishes? Oh Gwyneth. Calorie dense. Not nutrient dense. Nutrition is for rich folk.

It's incredibly offensive that someone so absolutely out of touch with even her own food needs (or really, the idea of a budget, or, like, I don't know, putting stuff back onto the shelves once you realize you essentially made a half of a taco salad with what you picked out and that's only going to last little Apple Paltrow until snack time) considers herself an ambassador for the Food Bank program. But Louise Fresco isn't talking about Gwyneth.

Eating well is the privilege of the wealthy.

I had to sit with that for a minute.

See Louise shows her audience a loaf of artisan bread and loaf of white Wonder bread. Which would we prefer? The point I waited for her to get at was how big agriculture and its irresponsible chemical shortcuts have robbed our food of its nutrition and nourishment; or that government subsidies for big corn and wheat have necessitated so much placement of refined white flour and corn syrup that the white Wonder loaf now bears almost no resemblance to the loaf of actual bread, the beautiful, irregularly shaped and crusty artisan-baked loaf.

Instead she said we live in a time of unprecedented abundance. Our science has made it possible to feed every man woman and child on earth (even though our distribution systems haven't caught up with production yet) and that has all been made possible by the agricultural science that is represented by--you guessed it--Wonder Bread. Her point being that science makes it possible for us to have enough, and to have it whenever, and to have it here. Oranges in the Netherlands in December? Sure. These oranges can travel. Bread in Bolivia for peasants? Yes. This bread will keep forever.

Her point is that big agriculture isn't the villain we make it out to be and without it we wouldn't be able to deliver citrus fruits all over the world; more of the population would be required to work to grow food instead of making advancements in neuroscience and astrophysics; and we wouldn't be able to get bread to poor farmers in Peru. So by extension, when I purposefully try to hurt big agriculture by taking my spending dollars to farmer's markets and stores with local and organic produce from small farms and grow my own blueberries, I am, as a privileged member of the elitist aristocracy, and by extension, the urban farmers, the farmer's market-goers, and the crazy chicken ladies, taking bread from the mouth of peasants.

Eating well is a privilege of the wealthy. Jesus. I am Marie Antoinette. "Let them eat blueberries!"

Because Americans suck at feeding the hungry (thanks Gwyneth! You can be our ambassador! Say hi to the folks at Nobu!) Louise Fresco wants us to bring science to underdeveloped countries so maybe they can feed themselves.  Because, by the way, Global hunger is not caused by food scarcity. And she's right. we make more wheat, corn and soybeans than we can possibly eat in this country. We make so much we have to find things to do with the extra. That's why fries are coated with flour and salad dressing has corn syrup and muffins have more calories than a double burger and bread, the most basic unit of nutrition for human culture, has a page of ingredients instead of only three. Science is giving us all of that! And when we don't accept what science is giving us (by growing in our backyards, going to farmer's markets, and shopping locally) we are hurting our global ability to end hunger.

Except here's the thing.

Backyard farmers like me now produce 20% of the world's food. And it's not just food, it's nutrient dense food like Gwyneth likes to eat at her favorite celebrity restaurants (like "Animal", where she finished celebrating not-poorness with a nice $80 dinner. Pfft. Beans!). My backyard blueberries don't sacrifice flavor for portability. They're packed with the stuff that they pull out of the compost I make from my kitchen scraps. They are at their peak of vitamin potential because I picked them just before I shoved them in my mouth. I save heirloom seeds and teach my children to love vegetables picked fresh from the vine and that even the deformed strawberries are still sweeter than anything you can get at a grocery store.

And yes. The little stone fruit orchard that brings me cherries and apricots in season at the farmer's market is taking up land resources that could be cranking out wheat, corn and soybeans. While commercial wheat fields crank out continuous chemical enhanced crops for endless corn syruped ciabatta buns, depleting the soil to the point that we may have less than 60 years of usable growing soil left, the little organic stone fruit orchard harvests the crop for the season and spends the rest of the year rebuilding the soil with compost.

Eating well is a privilege. Those blueberries in my backyard have a cost attached to them; more so the artisan bakeries and free range goose farms and my beloved stone fruit orchard who stand in the path of progress and that inevitable march toward scientifically engineered wheat fields as far as the eye can see.

But those wheat fields have a cost too, Louise.

I'm not sure I'm the one in aristocratic heels this time.

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.

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.

I Don't Want to be the Crazy Chicken Lady

I don't want to be the crazy chicken lady. I know people who have chickens in their backyards and I judge them all. They are either crazy hippie jump-on-the-band-wagoners who live in tiny houses and farm their own hops or yokels in the backwoods who come out swinging with a golf club to gather eggs from the old tires where their chickens roost. I will not engage in hippie liberal bullshit or be a backwoods bumpkin!

Yet I want eggs...

Damn it. Our perception of farmers and gardeners is just not flattering. It's not high on our zero to glam scale and definitely not high on anyone's list of 100 most intellect demanding professions. I have absolutely mocked my friends who turned their yards into food gardens and their circles of friends into some bizarre vegetable covens of co-op communism. How nice, you cute little farmers. Do you wear overalls? Do you drive a pickup truck? Do you pick your teeth with hayseeds?

Yet I want strawberries that are actually sweet and tomatoes that taste like something...

Backyard farming has gotten a little more trendy recently. I mean. If Williams Sonoma sells compost turners and designer canning jars, the backyard homestead has got to be transcending the hemp-wearing dreadlock crowd and the apocalypto paranoia off-the-grid-ers and the cowboy hat, high-school-football-watching, county-fair-going, country-music-listening, carrying-a-lariat-around-to-practice-roping Rodeoers.

So if I buy the $475 artisan chicken coop made from reclaimed barn wood and have heritage breed heirloom chickens that lay green and blue eggs like Martha Stewart's Martha's Vineyard flock (although--does she live in Marthas Vineyard? That seems ridiculous...) but I do it with tongue in cheek irony, whimsically poking fun at the archetype of the dust bowl farmer, is that okay? If my compost turner has a hand-tooled copper handle and I wear 5" Stuart Weitzman stilettos to gracefully mist my tomato beds is that okay? Will that keep me from being the crazy chicken lady?! Will it!?!

I try different things to appeal to the approval of my neighbors depending on what I think they will respond to.

To the old lesbian environmentalist: "Hey, I decided to let my lawn die so I can plant a food forest. In the meantime the water savings have gone from 2000 gallons a week (20 sprinklers for ten minutes twice a week at 10 gallons per sprinkler per minute...just trust me) to 175 gallons a week drip watering my raised beds. Oh, and no chemical run off to poison the ducks downstream or the bees!"

To the ultra chic foodie couple with their lavender infused honey and their edible flowers: "Hey, I decided to let my lawn die so I can plant a food forest. Btw I have four different types of blueberries with varying levels of complex acidity and cultivars of strawberries and tomatoes  you can't buy even at Whole Foods. We should totes have a tasting party and make sure we do the wine pairings, something French for sure. As expensive as possible. This is gourmet berr-oir."

To the locavores with their Parisienne baskets for the farmers market: "Hey, I let my lawn die for this food forest because, I mean, farm-to-table, right? You can literally walk from my farm to my table! Yay! Please don't give any more thought to whether my dead lawn is driving property values down in the neighborhood!"

To the haute housewife in her yoga pants-slash maxi skirt and careful pontytail and the Kate Spade diaper bag full of artisan diapers: "Hey, food forest. Hey did you know that backyard chickens, because they are truly free range and can get a more natural diet of worms and grubs as well as the vegetation from your weeds and eat your vegetable scraps lay eggs that are naturally richer in omega-3; and the food you can grow in your backyard from your own compost is jam packed with extra nutrients and flavor? And did you further know that since we started backyard farming my children eat fresh greens and pea pods right off the vines as a snack? Like voluntarily without a fight. It's fine. I mean, I'm an amazing mother."

I still feel their judgement because it's my own judgement. I want fresher more nutritive food! I want a closer ecological connection to the land like my ancestors had! I want to taste things I've never tasted before that you can't buy in any store! I just really don't want to be the crazy chicken lady.

So until I can positively change the iconic image of "farmer", "homesteader", and "pioneer" for the better...I guess I'm farming in heels.