Last night I made salad! Food that I had raised right up from the ground! I don’t know why that is so exciting. Of course after I picked the lettuce I packed it in plastic, rented a truck, drove it 200 miles (100 hundred miles away from my house and then 100 back) and then I put it in my refridgerator for 3 days and THEN I ate it. I mean, I just was nostalgic for that mass produced taste…
I looked at my pepper plant and I actually seem to be growing peppers! I am perhaps overly impressed by this, but there you go. Also I noticed when I took the picture that I am kind of proud of my pepper plant for having grown a pair. The lettuce also seems to be becoming more lettuce. Two points for me!
Okay, so it’s not incredibly impressive, but last year I bought a bunch of herbs and proceeded to kill them. The very fact that things are growing seems to me to be a miracle. If I ever have an actual yard I now feel a sense of hope that I will be able to make food come up from out of the ground.
Things are looking good although I think it is going to rain forever which means that now that I am not over-watering my plants, mother-nature is. I have now realize though that one of the downsides of growing food is that although I have a decent amount of potential vegetables on my porch, I will not have actual food for a while. At that point I will then have too much food. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Too much. I feel as though technology should be able to offer us plants that bear fruit at a rate of say a couple per week. We could call these plants grocery plants. I really think it will catch on. I also think that technology should be able to offer us teleporting. If you think about it, with teleporting, we could pop off to India, get some mangoes, and then pop back. Teeny-tiny global footprint there, right? Because everywhere would be local.
I will post some pics of my less dead plants and I’m going to make some no-knead bread tomorrow.
Unless you water them so much that they can’t breathe. Apparently in an effort to be very diligent and take care of the tomato plants I watered them. I watered them often. Perhaps I failed to let the roots ever get dry enough that they could breathe and take in the water and nutrients from the soil. OOPS! I will now attempt to grow plants without waterboarding them.
As of last week, I now have a tomato plant that claims to be a “big boy” tomato plant. I also have some basil, lettuce, and a bell pepper plant. The lettuce and the bell pepper need to be re-potted so at some point today I will have to bike dirt up the hill to my apartment. As a city dweller I am scared of the dirt in my yard. I am under the impression that it is filled with lead paint, gasoline, chemicals, and death. I don’t know if that is true but I was raised in New Jersey and I was taught to be afraid of dirt and water. I lived for a brief time in Boulder, Colorado and people would just go down to the creek in the middle of town and swim in it. I had to fight the urge to yell at them to not touch the water. So today I will buy dirt and take care of that.
The thing I am finding the hardest to do is leave the plants alone. I water them and then I stare at them. Then I go inside and look at them through the window. I keep expecting them to do something. “Boom! I grew a tomato for you, Gardener!” or “Boom! I’m dead. You have failed and your colony will eat nothing this winter.” I came very close to killing my tomatoes by over-watering them. This weekend I was away from my apartment for three whole days and I figured when I got home they would either be dead from neglect or thriving. I got home and they were fine. They were healthy, socializing better, driving cars, and dating. So I guess my plants are growing up. I will not tell them quite yet that I eventually plan to eat them.