All You Need

It has never left me, the day in December, 1962, when my father finally shut down his life in Banning, California.  Things had not gone well for him professionally, socially and, God knows, psychologically.  Now all four doors of his De Soto stood open while he stuffed a few final boxes and lamps in for the short drive to Riverside.  What hasn't left me from that day is my final act of gardening.  A tomato plant clung to life in the weedy lot behind his office.  I clung to the hope that, having watered it sporadically, and having placed a toy hibachi beside it, the thing would somehow grow.  Someone in Banning would light a few coals in the tiny barbecue to guard against frost.  The rains would come.  And...if one gets beyond the pathos and poignancy of the recollected scene...what then?

Now 45 years later, it's still winter, and I'm still trying to make things grow in a patch of land that isn't mine...and working the soil with something between wonder and desperation.  The cover crop planted before our autumn trip to Europe, and recently turned under by our apartment house garden crew, should be decomposing nicely.  In the realm of quadriplegic agriculture, it's a rather neat trick, this.  Grow the grasses and the legumes, have Ramon take a pitchfork to it, give the stuff a week or two to decompose, then plant.

Unfortunately, the rains came.  The much feared drought evaporated in a series of deluges, while the thermometer dropped and snow appeared on the Bay Area hills.  All of which is splendid and adds a bit of bite to what passes for winter in California.  But this wet and cold sent my former cover crop...the green lying facedown with roots in the air, a layer of steer manure to block the sun and speed the rotting...it sent all this into suspended animation.  How was I to know?  In fact, flushed with the success of earlier cover-crop-rotting experiences, I had moved in the opposite direction.  I'd planted vegetables almost instantly.  Winter be damned.

My account of planting, gardening, soil improvement and harvesting, omits one essential element.  The circumscribed and found-object nature of the enterprise.  Somehow, it's become a big deal to start up my van and make the half-mile drive to our suburban nursery.  Even in the middle of the day, the garden center populated only by flora, housewives and retirees, even then, it all feels like too much.  My world is shrinking.  On Sundays, the open-air market offers a narrow range of root vegetables, citrus and offbeat seedlings for the home gardener.  That's where I bought the chicory plants, plus a cross between broccoli and cauliflower, along with a spotted lettuce variety.  Who knows how the seedling guy came up with this offering, but there's a reason why he's standing outside selling vegetable starts for two dollars, instead of shipping trucks of plants to Home Depot.  And there's a reason why I'm buying his stuff.  He's close.  The farmers' market is only three blocks away, which requires no driving and little motivation.  The options are few and so are the risks.  As I say, my world is growing smaller.

Growing haute designer vegetables is splendid, if you have absolute confidence.  If you don't, it's much more gratifying to watch crops emerge from the Menlo Park soils that you'll find in the neighborhood Safeway.  No weird hybrids.  No waiting to find out what chicory is or isn't.  Just some known vegetable side dish, natural and bursting with authentic botanical life.

The same can be said of soup.  I have a very limited repertoire, everyone acknowledges.  A variation on a theme by legumes.  Beans with this, and beans with that, unless for the sake of variety you want beans with beans.  I can do all this and more.  Not much more, unless it involves beans.  The thing is, quadriplegic energies being finite, why bother?  I mean, one can delegate this sort of thing to Campbell's.  The answer has to do with nurturance.  There's something primal, fruitful, maternal about boiling up liquid dinner in a big pot...the concentrated essence of things that would otherwise go unused, maybe even unnoticed.  Like bay leaves, normally swept up in the autumn and burned.

Urban agriculture is another matter.  The products may be homey and earthly on the hearth.  But the experience is all about forces of nature gone awry.  The cover crop still refuses to die.  With the incessant rain, steer manure keeps washing off the surface of my raised beds, and just enough to allow light to penetrate to the dormant grass beneath.  It shouldn't be dormant.  It's green manure, as organic gardeners put it.  Rotting is its thing.  But not this year.  Green shoots keep reappearing, and I keep bashing them down.  Die, die.  Meanwhile, I keep planting.  I don't care.  The more I plant, the more what I plant disappears.

Earwigs.  A non-native insect, hailing from Brazil, that somehow got loose and got everywhere.  Unfortunately, the layer of steer manure and the leafy cover crop material dying underneath are heaven to earwigs.  It's the stuff garden books warn you not to have lying around during earwig season.  Which is any season.  Earwigs, the boys from Brazil.

The remedy for earwigs is capture.  Actually, the stupid things capture themselves.  At dawn, pincers waving, they give up their nocturnal mission to eat your garden down to the roots and find someplace to sleep.  Rolled up newspapers are good for this sort of thing.  Or a nice flat board with dry space underneath.  Toss out the newspapers, stomp on the board, and the pests are gone.  Actually the pests are gone as soon as the dead leaves and other garden junk are gone.  Pesticides, by the way, organic or otherwise, are useless.  You just have to back off and let nature take its course.  And unless you screw up very badly, its course is to give your garden back.

Is it too much to hope for the same with Marlou's cancer?  A bunch of rogue cells eating what they shouldn't, hiding among the available organic material.  Chemicals somewhat effective.  But the better course: let them give up and go away.  I cringe at the thought of my 13-year-old self hunching over the soon-to-die tomato plant on the poor patch of land my family no longer owned.  Heartbreaking novels may be enjoyable to read, but not to live.  I don't like seeing myself as pathetically impractical, warming things that can't be warmed, saving things about to be abandoned.  What could I have been thinking about with the charcoal burner beside the tomato...except the smudge pots that orange growers of that era used to keep the frost away?  And since I was about to slam the car door on the entire place and head for a new life in Riverside, was I in my right mind?

I now understand that I was in no mind -- but in something beyond mind.  Things were out of control.  The children in my family had been emotionally abandoned.  And I was imagining a fire and a living plant...a ritual.  Warmth.  Growth.  Renewal.  I was in no mind at all.  The earth was talking to me as it always had.  Being young and short and closer to the earth, both in stature and origin, I found a language to answer.  Sometimes that's all we need.