Broccoli - and Me

At the tender age of 39 I went back to the land and that changed everything. I loaded my family into our Conestoga and moved from the San Ramon Valley to a woodsy ten acre parcel at the end of a Gold Country gravel road called Buzzard's Gulch. The house was modest: one bedroom, one bath, one living room. Heat came from wood and propane. Electricity including the well was supplied by a generator. Water pressure from an open steel tank was provided solely by gravity. No perks, except the solitude. 

We fashioned a small photovoltaic system mounted on skids so I could move it with the sun and rolled a sealed plastic water tank up the hill and bought a 12 volt refrigerator. I built a greenhouse and felled some trees for more sunlight and wood and tilled up the rocky soil to start a market-garden. 

Having spent my life in relatively comfortable middle-class circumstances, I was used to light, water, and heat appearing at the flip of a switch. Suddenly, these vital elements were no longer commodities easily purchased from utility companies but precious sources of life and comfort that had to be planned for, monitored, and conserved. The vegetables I managed to draw out of that soil and protect from deer and our neighbor's peacocks were equally precious. All of the necessities were inherently scarce and became available only with varying degrees of struggle. Even social contact involved a 45 minute drive to town. I quickly learned not to take anything for granted. 

Now, many years later and back in the suburbs, water, light, and heat are flowing freely again. Yet when I harvest a head of broccoli that I've nursed along from seed to flower, I still see a precious gift that over the last three or four months has taken shape before my eyes. I remember the struggle that allowed the gift to grow. I recall the condition of the soil, the sun, the weather, the watering, the weeds, the aphids, and the slugs. And it's immediate history leads me to think about it's ancient history and how long-forgotten farmers took a wild plant and shaped it into this broccoli I hold in my hands. 

But when I pick up a head of broccoli from the supermarket or even a head of organic, free-range broccoli from a farmer's market, I get only that: a head of broccoli. I might as well be flipping a switch.

I suspect that the farther we get from the sources of the things that sustain us, the more careless we tend to be with them. Maybe that's just an unfortunate consequence of material over-abundance. Do we really need summer produce in winter shipped from South and Central America? I worry that when the essentials become mere commodities, life itself becomes less a precious gift to be treasured and more an assemblage of stuff to be squandered. 

While I think it would be a fine and valuable experience for us all to live off-the-grid for a while and feel the proximity of scarcity, that's probably a bit too much to ask. Perhaps the best we can do is to grow something, anything, from seed – a non-hybrid seed - in a pot or a piece of ground. Watch it struggle everyday and, when it comes time to harvest it, no matter how puny or misshapen it may have turned out to be, give thanks. 

February's Garden To-do list:

Rain has returned. I hope we all got out and did some weeding during the break. That will lessen our load come spring. 

The nurseries are full of bare-root plants. If you buy something bare-root and the soil is too wet and gummy to work, heel it in. I usually do this by setting the plant in a large plastic nursery pot and covering the roots with compost or peat moss or anything organic and loose. I want to keep the roots damp until I'm ready to plant. The traditional way of heeling in is to dig a roomy trench with sloping sides in a shady spot, set your plants in it at an angle, and cover the roots with loose soil and/or compost. If you do this, be sure the trench drains. You don't want your plants to drown.

 Continue to turn compost or, if it's finished, spread it around. Don't leave any soil exposed to the elements.

 Be sure not to tread on any of your garden beds, especially when they're wet. Soil compaction is your garden's worst enemy.

 And continue to dormant prune. I prefer not to prune when the weather is wet or about to become wet. I don't want to encourage the spread of any unfriendly water-borne organisms. 

Spray fruit trees and roses with dormant oil. Some people spray their peach trees with lime/sulfur mix to combat peach leaf curl. This should be done monthly before the buds open.

 The San Francisco Flower and Garden Show (http://www.sfgardenshow.com/ ) is coming up March 23 – 27 in San Mateo. The emphasis this year seems to be on edibles. Ros Creasy will be speaking as will Alice Waters and several designers who incorporate edibles into their landscapes. I haven't attended since the show was at Fort Mason decades ago but I think I'll check it out this year. If you buy one-day tickets online before March 13 you can get a discount.