The Incompetent Gardener, Part III

Supermarket grocers would have thrown it out. If the grocers missed the gaping wound on its flesh, supermarket shoppers would surely pass it up. They would sneer and shop somewhere else next time, at the supermarket on the next corner. Even if light streaming through windows played across the tomato’s skin and made the blemish look more like a beauty mark, the tomato would not be bought. What if worms had crawled into the tomato, the shoppers would think, rare worms from Asia that crossed over in the hulls of cargo ships, worms that cause all the wrong parts of the body to grow to absurd sizes. Also, it would probably taste bad, right? Given that shoppers pay for tomatoes by their weight, not by their appearance, why would someone deliberately choose an ugly tomato when some other tomato in the stack of available tomatoes looks perfect? Only a shopper with an ugly soul would buy an ugly tomato.

But this tomato was never in a supermarket. I grew it. I planted six tomato plants late in the season in 2006. They did not produce. I never saw a blossom. Out of frustration, well after the season for tomatoes ended, I tore up four of the plants. I left two of them in the ground. I left the scraggliest ones as a reminder of my incompetence. As winter arrived, the two tomato plants hung limply. It got cold and their leaves shriveled. Then, in late December, one of the tomato plants started to bloom yellow flowers the size of BabyG’s fingertips. I still didn’t water or care for the plants. Then the flowers turned into tiny green fruit. When the temperatures dipped below freezing, this survivor finally passed and I plucked the fruit from the brittle vines. They were miraculous tomatoes. The ripest one was the wounded one.

I ate the tomato after slicing off the imperfection. Maybe I should have swallowed it whole without chewing, as if it were a big red pill that cures alienation. I sliced the fruit up and put it on a sandwich with cheese and mayonnaise. Before eating it, I smelled the tomato and it smelled intensely of tomato. When I ate the sandwich, I realized I should have plucked the tomato from the vine earlier, because it was mushy. The other ones, which were not so red, tasted better. I’m not interested in memorializing those succulent tomatoes. It’s that first homegrown tomato with its repulsive mark that I sing of here in cyberspace. I will always remember that blackspotted tomato bathed in light.

Houston Goes Fruity

MaGreen, BabyG, and I went to Urban Harvest’s annual fruit tree sale on Saturday, January 20, here in Houston. Within minutes of the 9:30 am opening, people – at least a thousand folks – had cornered almost every tree and vine.

Urban Harvest is a non-profit dedicated to nurturing communities through gardening education. They hold classes, send instructors to schools, maintain a seed library, and disseminate information about how to garden in the Houston area. Their largest event is an annual fruit tree sale. The sale has grown steadily and this year it was moved to a new, more commodious space next to the Emerson Unitarian Church.

The main fruit trees available were those that are ideal for Houston’s climate: oranges, lemons, grapefruit, kumquats, limes, tangerines, persimmons, apples, pears, figs, grapes, blackberries, peaches, nectarines, plums, mulberries, pomegranates, jujubes, blueberries and mulberries. An addition to this year’s sale were more tropical and sub-tropical plants like dwarf mangos, star fruit, Cherry of the Rio Grande, and jaboticaba.

By the time I arrived, just fifteen minutes after the opening, only a few orange and lime trees remained. The mood was civil, but people had a half-crazed look as they guarded their plants. Late comers looked bewildered. The check-out line snaked around the entire lot. The Urban Harvest website says, “Our vision for Houston is a city thriving with a network of gardens and orchards building community health, vitality and pride.” Seeing all those people clutching at their trees made me feel hopeful about this beast of a city. Maybe Urban Harvest’s vision is possible.

Their next sale will not be until January 2008. Check out Urban Harvest’s list of other fruit tree sales around Houston if you live nearby and can’t wait.

The Green Parents of Hatchet Cove Farm

On this blog, we’ve chronicled our efforts to defy the SUV-centered, socially-fractured, concrete and strip mall, Velveeta cheese and microwaved broccoli culture of this great city Houston. Today’s post, however, is a break from our urban struggle. We had the honor of interviewing two young organic farmers from Maine – Bill Pluecker and Reba Richardson. They have a beautiful toddler and are visiting Houston to see their brother, who is a friend of mine, for the Thanksgiving holiday.

I always tell MaGreen that our baby should grow up to be an organic farmer and she tells me that I have a romantic notion of organic farmers’ lives. So I jumped at the chance to talk with Bill and Reba. The interview did indeed disillusion me of my romantic ideas about the organic farming life, but it also renewed my respect and admiration for organic farmers. Their lives are clearly not an escape from the tribulations of modern life. They are busy and overwhelmed. They have a hard time balancing family life and work. And yet, the satisfaction they get from their labor is so clear. And they look so damn healthy. Not like appendages to computer workstations. I want to become an organic farmer just to have such a strong, vital body.

To hear the interview, click here – interview of the green parents of Hatchet Cove Farms.

If you live near Friendship, Maine, I would like to encourage you to join their CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program. You can reach them at 207 832 2264.

The Incompetent Gardener, Part II

I had a dream a year ago, before our baby was born that by this time I would no longer be the incompetent gardener. I dreamed that our whole yard would be edible and that I would have a rotation of plants that produced seasonal, organic food to supplement our regular groceries. I dreamed of turning our food waste into compost and using that compost to fertilize our garden, thereby avoiding pesticides and chemical fertilizers. But with childcare, my forty-hour work week, and MaGreen preparing for her doctoral degree exams, our yard looks rather pathetic. And BabyG has strep right now.

My garden plots are mostly overgrown with weeds. The six tomato plants I bought never produced a single tomato. They are scraggly vines. I should pull them all out, but I just look at them with disappointment every time I park my bicycle by the side of the house. The seeds I bought from Bountiful Gardens are slowly becoming unviable in the refrigerator.

Even the hardy chard and dill plants I wrote about in my last installment of The Incompetent Gardener finally died. It was these two survivors that "renewed my enthusiasm not only for gardening, but for the whole green parenting project." I was again on the verge of giving up on gardening altogether as a silly romantic yearning. Then one afternoon my neighbor gave me new hope. I'm not sure neighbor is the right word. He shares a long wall with us in the split duplex we live in. He is a union electrician and is given to walking around the property aimlessly, poking at the ground, or talking to the sky. When I saw him that one afternoon, he showed me his latest discovery, an oak seedling growing next to my tomato patch. Although my soil improvement and constant watering did not produce any tomatoes, a little oak tree thrived because of my efforts. A beautiful and momentous accident. I really want that seedling to grow up with BabyG, so I can tell her they were born around the same time and that were babies together. I dug it out of the ground and potted it in my compost so I can move it to a perfect spot this winter.

A few other survivors of my incompetence subsequently kept my hope alive. I planted an eggplant plant from the store and it grew huge. It has produced three eggplants in the same number of months. What I value about that eggplant is not the food it has produced, but that I have closely witnessed for the first time in my life how a flower turns into a fruit (or vegetable or berry or whatever it is). I am embarrassed to admit that I never saw how the blossom closes up and then slowly starts to fill out. How it takes on the purple color.



Another survivor is this basil plant we brought home from Whole Foods and stuck into the ground. It was destroyed by a tree trimming service we hired. I think they ran over it with a machine. MaGreen harvested the crushed plant down to a stump. Our neighbor really wanted the plant to live because he used the leaves in his salsa. I think his cravings coaxed the basil, and my gardening dreams, back to life

A History of Magic and Muck

In my last post, I satirized two attitudes that infuriate me. The first is good old American consumerism dressed up in green, saying in a deep, earnest voice that it is our duty to buy insanely expensive products that supposedly save the environment. The second is that there's no point in even attempting a green lifestyle because it is too expensive unless you want to be a dirty hippy. We should find a happy medium, you might say. Extremes are always bad, right? I'm more in favor of exploding the questions that trap us between two static poles. We should set a green agenda that is ambitious but not dogmatic, material but not consumerist, focused on individuals in families but engaged with the sociopolitical situations that we live in, and internationally-oriented without exoticizing the other. We've got to get beyond sheeshy green verses hippy green.

If you've been reading this blog consistently, you know I've made compost into a kind of metaphor for everything, a way of decomposing the familiar categories that hold us back, and coming up with something fertile. The following history is my way of suggesting an alternative, a third way of approaching green living.

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Rivers and brooks crisscrossed the land. A half-man, half-goat played his flute in the woods. A hunter who ogled a nude goddess was turned into a deer. Garbage, as we know it now, was not practiced. People left their peelings, the uneaten innards from the hunt, and their own evacuations wherever they might. The world was their bathroom. If they turned their campsite into a dump, they moved on. They foraged somewhere else – the next meadow, another continent. The earth was its own waste management system. Then people took to agriculture and they built cities. That is when composting was first born. The earliest instances of writing – the clay tablets from Akkad, the capital of an empire on the Euphrates – mention the manuring of soil. Instead of moving their homes around, people carried their detritus out to the fields. As civilizations spread, so did composting. The Greeks, Early Hebrews, and Romans all described compost. The Arab Book of Agriculture describes the value of crushed bones, wool scraps, wood ashes, and lime in compost.

The invention of modern composting is attributed to Sir Albert Howard, an Englishman who lived in colonial India from 1903 to 1931. He promulgated the Indore Method, named after the state where he carried out his research, in a book called The Waste Products of Agriculture. The hallmarks of the Indore Method, and its many derivatives, are 1) the layering of nitrogen and carbon rich materials and 2) the turning or aeration of the pile. Hot backyard piles and industrial composting are largely derivatives of the Indore Method.

Sir Albert believed that the introduction of improved crops and better soil management could improve the total agricultural output of India. Unlike his peers in Europe, he did not look at nature as adversary, but as a teacher or the “Supreme Farmer.” Indian farms were just one step removed from the ideal of nature. He wrote, “The agricultural practices of the Orient have passed the supreme test – they are almost as permanent as those of the primeval forest, of the prairie or of the ocean.”

According to Louisa Albert, his second wife, Sir Albert saw in India a vast laboratory of composting, “a series of 100,000 experimental plots which were plain to the eye.” He traveled to Baluchistan and Kashmir, Sikhim and Nepal, and into Sri Lanka. He noticed that agriculture in the countryside was average but “where human excrement was daily deposited, was infinitely richer.” He lamented like other Englishmen that Indians did not use cow excrement to the same effect, but instead had to use it as fuel. Sir Albert was determined to use his resources as the Director of the Institute of Plant Industry at Indore to develop a way of creating a manure from unused agricultural waste like cotton stalks, grass, hay, leaves, and urine earth, mixed with some cattle dung.



Louisa sums up her father’s genius, “The solution of the manurial problem of India was thus to be found in the combination of animal and vegetable wastes. Yet India herself, in spite of her 100,000 'experiments', could not provide the final formula of success.” But the story is only half-told. Louisa herself notes that Sir Albert named a co-author to The Waste Products of Agriculture, an Indian by the name of Yeshwant Wad. Ironically, it was Wad – the child of the mystical Orient –who provided the scientific rigor of a trained chemist. He carefully documented the nitrogen ratios in each of the composting experiments. For some reason, Wad is never credited as a co-founder of modern composting. He is given little more mention than the nameless Indian men and women who constructed the compost bin, stacked the cotton stocks, mixed in the manure, and carted out the soil to the fields.

I have focused on the fact that modern composting was developed in colonial India, because it reflects one of the central tensions I feel as a parent. I always seem to end up in India whenever I start to dig into alternative parenting and green living. This has to do, in part, with India’s important place in the world, the depth of its history, and the innovations of its people. Or am I imagining my way back to India? Am I searching it out? I could be obsessing over India because I fear that my daughter, who is half-White and half-Indian, will be lost to the homogenizing forces of American culture. Its feels so odd to discover my own cultural through European or White American reformers. This story of Sir Albert, Yeshwant Wad, and Indian peasants is odd. I want to bare witness to its oddity in all its fullness.

Sir Albert was ridiculed by his European peers for his faith in “magic and muck.” He must have been a strange gentleman to devote himself to the study of Indian waste. Consider Florence Nightingale’s one-year public health mission in India. This what she had to say by the end in 1870, “[Indians live] amidst their own filth, infecting the air with it, poisoning the ground with it,” and “polluting the water they drink with it...some even think it a holy thing to drink filth.” Nightingale’s sense of compassion, her famously tender nursing of and advocacy for British soldiers in the Crimean war, seems to have failed her in India. Whereas Sir Albert studied waste management in India with a keen eye and helped improve it, Nightingale saw her own prejudices reflected back to her. It is not Sir Albert’s fault that the historians of compost give no credit Yeshwant Wad. At least Sir Albert had the courage to work with an Indian chemist and list him as a co-author. To think that modern composting was invented through the partnership of elites and subalterns – a churning of science and tradition that defies the boundaries we too easily believe in – this is the type of story I want to tell my daughter.

My Secret in the Backyard, Part II

It was a Sunday afternoon. I went out to look at the compost pile I started six months ago. About three feet high, the pile was covered by a mix of leaves – oak, maple, hackberry, and grass – in various states of decay. Also, littered here and there were: peelings from an avocado; weeds yanked from the yard; the scatterings of coal and hickory ashes from our tenant’s smoker; shuckings from corn we cooked with MGreen’s dad; green beans we bought at a premium organic price from Whole Foods but never cooked; bitter melon our friend Nicole bought us but that we were afraid to eat; curled tulip blossoms; and half an onion, its layers thrown in high relief from having dried out, separated, and pulled back, as if onions are tulips’ dark sisters, blooming as they decay.

I wasn’t back there looking at the compost pile for nothing. I had with me half a pot of brown rice and a container full of mashed yams, both too old to eat. Time to turn the pile, long over due actually, and add some new matter. I was excited to unveil the pile, not only for the physical labor my office body badly needs. Perhaps the sloughings and detritus from our lives -- MGreen's, BabyG's, and mine -- would reveal something to me, whatever it is I search for by light of day and never find. Each artifact brought back traces. An avocado sandwich MGreen made me, snatches of conversations from my in-laws’ visit, and an inane argument I tried to make-up for with flowers. Perhaps turning the compost pile would be like peering into the hippocampus and poking at memories unmediated, rummaging through the jumbled scraps of the past before they get reorganized into the Past and my Memory.

With the first scoop of my shovel, I saw a black beetle the size of my thumb tip scramble away. Then innumerable, tiny bugs (are they infants?) moving in every direction, their white bodies set off against the black rot. They disappeared. They seemingly dissolved back into the mound. I dug down deeper and there were dozens of white and tan roly-polies. The sweetness of the rot was in the air. The leaves lost all trace of shape, the rot had a consistency of its own. But even towards the bottom of the pile, I would encounter the occasional intact stump of a cabbage, a whole lime still deep green, or a cross-section of a sweet potato. Deeper down – where the rot was the rich black of mature compost – I came upon something astonishing. I didn’t know what it was. My heart raced. I rushed to the house with a clod of dirt on the shovel blade to show MGreen.

MGreen wasn’t even showing when I started that compost pile. BabyG weighed less than a pound. Composting was just one task in our greater effort to become green parents living responsibly in the urban beast called Houston. However, the compost became something more without my really expecting or understanding it. The expecting parent who does not carry the baby (i.e. the father, the other mother, the non-receptacle person, or what have you) carries the psychic burden of expectation and fear, but has no embodiment of that stress, no physical growth in the womb to focus on. The compost pile became my substitute womb. Baking cookies in the oven, remodeling the bathroom, building a crib – parents do all kinds of things to project their desire to control an uncontrollable process onto something that can be controlled. Compost has the advantage over these other activities of being biological in a way that is both scientifically explainable and yet mysterious, much like pregnancy. Compost incubates. Nine to ten months, in fact, is a typical length of time for maturation.

Parenting guidebooks usually acknowledge the stress that the non-pregnant parent(s) experience, but stop there. Some books and magazine articles tell you that it is your duty to work out your baggage for the sake of the baby. But an expecting parent can’t always be expected to work it all out in forty weeks. What if there is a history of incest, abuse, divorce, death, difficulty conceiving, or multiple miscarriages? What if one or both of the partners is in the middle of a crisis? Will the mother and child have a safe place to stay after the delivery and money during a time when she cannot work? But even when there are urgent matters to focus on, expecting a child has a way of turning the psyche. The mental exhumation is overwhelming. Memories unearthed. The fear of reproducing everything you loathe in relationships. Worst of all, the truths are always scurrying away into the recesses of your mind like tiny albino bugs. Your psyche keeps turning on itself even if you try to will it to stop.

When you turn a compost pile, you don’t figure the compost out. Compost is, after all, a mass of decay, not a time capsule or an analyst’s couch or a laboratory experiment. The unknowability of the compost’s totality does not keep you from turning the compost over. You turn it regularly, once a month if you don’t want the heat at its center to fizzle out. You turn the compost if you want it to become rich fertilizer for a garden. In the process, you might come face to face with the creatures that commonly live in compost piles – beetles, roaches, mice, rats, possum, worms – animals that will not kill you but that you might fear. You get over it. The possum and the rats move away if you keep the compost moist. The worms are good for garden soil. They leave casings. For me, the compost pile became a useful embodiment of what for me could only be an idea. An idea that I was to smile about at all times but that threatened to eviscerate my sense of self. Compost was an alluring metaphor for me precisely because of its productive darkness and mystery.

When I got back to the house with my shovel and clod of dirt, I opened the door and called for MGreen to come quick.

“I found something at the bottom of the compost pile and I don’t know what it is,” I said.

MGreen rushed over and looked down at the shovel blade. We were in the kitchen. In the middle of a black chunk of compost, there was a shining white ball about the size of a marble. It unfurled. The thing looked like an overfed, albino caterpillar as long and thick as my finger. There were many more where I found it. I was delighted that throwing my refuse in a pile could make a habitat for such a fantastic thing, but I felt bad exposing it to light. Could I be killing a future butterfly? Even a moth? MGreen took digital pictures and googled around the net. After some time, she shouted out, “I know what it is – beetle larvae.” The little white bugs were probably mites, which are actually arachnida and often thrive alongside beetles.

Was it disappointment that I felt? Wouldn’t it have been better if the larvae were meant to become beautiful creatures, not the hard-backed survivors of millennial ruin known as beetles. MGreen said she was terrified of beetles. She’s afraid of the compost now. When she said that, it became clearer to me that when I unearthed the shining larvae, I had experienced the sublime. Sublime in the sense that Edmund Burke had meant it -- the astonishing union of terror and beauty, danger and excitement, fear and awe. And what could be better preparation for the (hoped for) resurrection of the self that is called “becoming a parent”?

Composting 101 – Compost Bins and the Third Eye

At first, burying things in the backyard, or trench composting as it is called, was fine. It’s basically free unless you need to buy a shovel. However, there’s a limit to how much you can bury. Burial is a good method for vegetable peelings and eggshells, but not for leaves, grass clippings, ashes from the barbecue, or whatever else. So MaGreen and I decided that we needed a bin.

There’s an overwhelming selection of bins at stores and on the internet that range in price from about $60 to $200. (Or you can have one designed and built to match your Japanese garden for $600 like MaGreen’s Aunt Patricia.) MaGreen and I, though, are cheap. And it seems a little counter-intuitive to me to spend money on a container to let things rot in. Maybe the “compost tea” that the expensive compost bins produce is the best thing since chocolate, but I would rather start out with something simple and FREE. We’d rather spend our money on a new organic cotton mattress or buy tickets for a vacation or donate to Oxfam.

Miah read somewhere on the internet that it’s easy to make a compost bin with shipping pallets. So we started looking for pallets on the side of the road, next to dumpsters, and behind strip malls. For about a month, we couldn’t find one. I’m not terribly skilled at scavenging. When my parents raised me they always discouraged me from using discarded or used stuff. “We can buy you a new one,” they would say. Having grown up in India right after independence, my parents saw scavenging as something people do to survive, not something that a person with an education and money should do for fun. It wasn’t until I started hanging out with artists, musicians, and writers that my third eye – the garbage eye – opened up.

Miah eventually spotted three shipping pallets in a lot close to our house. I shoved them in the trunk of the car – as in the dickey or boot for all you Brits and Indians - and drove them home. After that first sighting, we started to see shipping pallets everywhere just waiting for us. All of a sudden, the whole city seemed awash in pallets. Scavenging is sort of like birding. Once you’ve learned to spot your first hummingbird, you start to see them everywhere.

Well, to cut this story short, I picked a spot in the corner of the backyard to create the compost. I had to dig up an oleander bush, which MaGreen wanted me to do anyways because it is poisonous and she didn’t want our little girl to chew on the leaves. Then I dug little trenches to put the pallets into so they wouldn’t fall over. I made two four-sided bins with the neighbor’s fence as the backside. The front side swings open. I used an old plastic bag as a sort of hinge. I used the leaves from the dug-up oleander bush to inaugurate the pile.

Composting 101 - My Secret in the Backyard

I have been going into the backyard at night with a shovel for two months now. Usually I go after dinner once the dishes are in the washer and MaGreen has gone into the computer room. Our backyard does not have much lighting and I walk out to the darkest corners where there isn’t any grass. I dig a hole that’s at least one foot deep. And when the hole is made, that’s when I dump our vegetable peelings in. OK, so I'm not burying a body or anything illegal. But you have to admit that whether you are burying a body or vegetables, both lead to decomposition, worms, and enriched soil.

I started burying things because MaGreen and I are a bit lazy. MaGreen always wanted a compost pile, but we just didn't get around to starting one. It was frustrating. Putting the peelings in the garbage disposal often clogged the sink. If we threw leftovers away, the garbage smelled after a day. Once I tried to dump our vegetable peelings out the window into a flower bed, but the next morning we were embarrassed to find them scattered around on the grass and sidewalk. Then on a short trip to Brooklyn, MaGreen’s friend Sarah showed us how she just buried stuff in a tiny patch of ground underneath the patio. It was like shortcut composting. If Sarah could do it in a tiny Brooklyn “backyard”, we felt we could do it in Houston.

Soon I found myself addicted to burying things. I tried to find excuses to peel more things. Cooking and eating at home became more appealing because then I would have something to bury. Since we don’t cook meat at home, just about everything is suitable. Eggshells, onion peels, carrot shavings, the scrapings of leftover food that it wouldn’t make sense to eat, or the Vietnamese food in a doggy bag that’s been sitting in the fridge for a week. I loved how the shovel slipped into the dirt more and more easily each night. It was astonishing how quickly stuff turned back into dirt. Once I went during the day and when I turned the soil, there were three huge earthworms, flipping around in a glorious panic.

“I saw three earthworms,” I told MaGreen. She was delighted.

“That means it’s working,” she said.

As the soil assumed a moist and black consistency, I was reminded that I wasn’t only burying things for the sake of burying them. We wanted to start an organic garden and that beautiful worm-laden decomposing trench was the beginning. Our child will eat vegetables picked just before they are served. She will see the cycle of life and death – not in some Disney flick – but in her own backyard. Maybe she will go with me one night soon. And I will hold the peelings as she works the shovel. The sound of a critter scurrying along the fence or a tree branch might alarm her, but she will concentrate on the hole.