The Inadvertent Gardener

If you’re an organized person, you planned your Fourth of July menu weeks ago. You have a little menu card, a shopping list. Actually, you probably already shopped.

But if you’re the rest of us, there’s still time to prepare properly for the Fourth of July. And by properly, I mean, there’s time to declare your Food Independence.

Kitchen Gardeners International is the instigator and sponsor of Food Independence Day, along with the IATP Food and Society Fellows and the Mother Nature Network. You can participate by simply preparing your Fourth of July feast using locally-sourced ingredients.

At the Food Independence Day site, you can also sign a petition asking the nation’s 50 governors and their families to help with this effort. Signing the petition will put you on the map…literally…of people who are participating on the holiday.

After seeing Food Inc. last month, I became even more determined to do what I can to heal our broken national food systems. Taking a day—or, just a meal—or, just one dish on your holiday table—to eat locally makes a statement. This is not shouting into the wind. If anything, it’s a resounding shout in support of local farmers, local purveyors, and food that heals our nation and our planet rather than hurts it.

I’m going to get up and go to the farmer’s market today. I don’t know what I’m going to prepare, but I promise I’ll report back early next week with news of my fully-local meal. After all, as far as I’m concerned, eating can be as much an act of patriotism as waving a flag.

What locally sourced ingredients will be on your table this Fourth of July? Share your ideas and food finds in the comments below.

My coworker, Adam, was around the corner talking to Dave, the security guard, when I spotted the garden cart.

Pots. Plants. Soil. Best delivery ever.

“Stay away from my trees!” Dave yelled at me.

“I’m just taking a picture,” I said, from my crouch in the corner.

“Where’s this going?” Adam asked.

“Third floor,” Dave said.

“How can I get one of these?” Adam asked.

Dave pointed toward the management office. “You’ll have to ask them.”

“Hey,” I said. “Can we grow tomatoes on the roof?”

Dave sputtered, smiled and shook his head. Again, he pointed toward the office. “You’ll have to ask them about that, too,” he said.

“You don’t have the authority on this matter?” I asked. And I knew he didn’t. But I had to ask. It never hurts to ask.

When I was a little kid, my Grammy used to cook up beet greens studded with tiny baby beets, a dish that I both dreaded and adored. Finding the little beets were like going on a treasure hunt, but I always found the greens too bitter for my taste.

That has all changed as an adult. Now, I love getting fresh beets and greens at the farmer’s market, bringing the beets home to roast, and washing and sauteeing the greens with olive oil and vinegar and some hot sauce. If I’ve got some bacon around, I might throw that in, too, for meaty flavor.

But this year, my knowledge of the using of greens has expanded far beyond the beet greens of my childhood. It started with Clotilde Desoulier’s recent post about radish leaf pesto, which was my first indication that radish greens could be used for anything besides compost. I’ve been snapping up radishes with their lovely greens at the farmer’s market ever since, using the greens as another item for the sauté pan, or, as Clotilde did, in a pungent pesto that I tossed with lobster ravioli.

I landed in Chicago late yesterday, and, cranky and exhausted from a turbulent travel day, turned to Twitter for a dining suggestion that was close to my hotel. “Honestly, get in a cab and get thee to Avec. Seriously. Thank me later. It’s 5 mins, and as a singleton, you’ll be fawned over,” Tweeted back my friend Fatemeh. My friend Sean, shortly thereafter, corroborated Fatemeh’s evaluation of the situation.

Fatemeh’s wicked smart, so I followed her and Sean’s advice and hopped a cab over to Avec, where there was, indeed, an open seat at the bar and where the bartender welcomed me graciously. One of the specials on the board was beet and kohlrabi greens sauteed with garlic and shallots, tossed with housemade cotta, which is like a softer version of salami. Kohlrabi greens? I had never even heard of kohlrabi before I moved to Iowa, but eat the greens? Who would have thought it?

I ordered it (along with a half-order of the bacon-wrapped Medjool dates stuffed with chorizo and topped with a smoked bacon and piquillo pepper sauce that was worth licking out of its little ceramic crock), and can now report that I can add yet another unexpected green to the list of What I Like.

I can also report that I’m going to start taking a closer look at all greens in general, but particularly the ones attached to vegetables at the farmer’s market. Being able to cook the greens as well as the vegetable itself certainly makes the item even more economical than it already is. Even more satisfying is the fact that I’m wasting less of what I buy. That feels good, particularly when I don’t have any kind of compost set-up in place.

Gardeners, plant and nature lovers can join in Green Thumb Sunday every week. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

I could tell you that I’m not doggedly stubborn, but that would be a lie that my parents would loudly and happily debunk. Most of my friends would happily join them in said debunking.

And although I know a ton of people who would gladly attempt to debunk this particular statement as well, I’m going to make it nonetheless: I’m actually quite shy.

I hear the collective laughter of the masses going up over this one, since I am both shy AND the girl who will walk into a room, talk to a stranger, and, over the course of the next 15 minutes, appear to become their very best friend. I am also the girl who will grab every karaoke mic she sees, and who will write about and photograph mad quantities of her life and put them up on the Interwebs for all to see.

But that doesn’t negate this: a lot of times? In doing those things, I’m overcoming a small, frightened voice that likes to recommend that I stay behind the curtain, in the house, and out of view of the world. The older I get, the better I am at shushing that voice. But it’s still there, and the only reason I ignore it is because life? Well, it’s much more fun lived when it’s peppered with new and interesting people, people who can only be met and experienced when one gets out there, shakes hands, and embraces the maelstrom.

This all has something to do with gardening, though. Something big. It is the reason that, every time someone has offered me space in their yard, I’ve turned them down.

There have been offers, even if some of them have, for sure, been more solid than others. Fundamentally, people are good and kind and generous, and so often, when I say, “Yeah, I still don’t have a garden,” they get very concerned, because what is The Inadvertent Gardener without a garden, after all, and they want to help me fix the problem.

The challenge is that their fixes often involve space in their own back yard.

I’m so grateful for these offers. I think they’re wonderful. I even, often, tell them what a wonderful and sweet offer that is when I have conversations with people. But then I let the issue drop.

I really do want to garden again. I’m excited about figuring out how it all works in California, where the growing season is longer, but the challenges (no water, microclimates, etc.) are myriad. But for me, part of gardening is being able to go out there and play in the dirt and make mistakes without affecting anyone but me or the people eventually eating my food. If I’m gardening at someone else’s house, even if I’m using an otherwise-unused plot of land, I’m going to be all manner of self-conscious about how I’m staking and pruning and sprawling vegetables. I’m going to feel weird about showing up first thing in the morning and late at night. It’s going to take me awhile to be completely comfortable crawling around in the dirt taking macro photos.

These are all things that I would feel wholly comfortable doing in my own back yard, or in a community plot designated as mine. But under other circumstances, I just can’t do it.

Call me stubborn. You’ll be in good company.

I’ve spent a lot of time during the past few years educating myself on the food I eat, and have worked hard to make ever-better, ever-wiser choices. I’m by no means vegetarian, but I eat a lot less meat than I used to. I try to shop for locally-produced and -grown goods…most of the time. And while I’ll always choose local over organic (unless I can hit both with one product), I pay attention to both labels. I’ve read The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Food Matters and Fast Food Nation. I do what I can to raise awareness through this blog and other platforms.

But tonight, I got to attend a preview of the new documentary, Food, Inc., and I watched much of it with my mouth open and my mind blown.

The movie’s prime players are the ones most folks active in food access/politics and the locavore world know: Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser. But I cried along with a mother who lost her two-and-a-half-year-old to E. Coli, and winced at the sight of industrial chicken farms and factories, and recommitted to only buying meat that’s grassfed and sourced locally.

Like An Inconvenient Truth, the movie is disturbing and absolutely clear in how it presents its opinion. But also like An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary tells its story in an engaging, gripping manner.

Due to a lateish lunch, I hadn’t grabbed dinner beforehand, and by the time the movie was over, it was pushing 10 p.m. and I needed to find something to eat near my hotel that wouldn’t offend my post-movie sensibilities. I ended up across the street at Ciudad, which serves local, organic and sustainable food wherever they can on their menu. I’m glad they came through for me, because after viewing Food, Inc., I don’t feel like I’m doing nearly enough. I can make better choices, and thanks to this movie, I am even more committed to do so when and where I can.

If you eat food, go see this movie. As a matter of fact, it’s probably more accurate to say if you think you’re eating food, go see this movie. It may be one of the most important films you’ll ever see. The movie opens in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York tomorrow, with wider release scheduled shortly thereafter.

Gardeners, plant and nature lovers can join in Green Thumb Sunday every week. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

About a week ago on Michael Bauer’s San Francisco Chronicle food blog, he broke the news that Bill Fujimoto of Monterey Market would be leaving the market as of today due to a business dispute within his family.

The news shocked me, especially since, less than a year ago, I got the honor of walking the market floor with Bill as he greeted customers, sliced tomatoes and handed bites to us to taste, and even caught a glimpse of Judy Rodgers of Zuni Café rummaging around in the produce crates in the back for just the right ingredients for that night’s menu.

Monterey Market’s not the most convenient to me, and so I haven’t been as much of a regular as I would like. But, although I have purely no statistical evidence on this, I’d say Bill has had a huge influence on other markets in the area, particularly the independent ones.

Bill injected the market with such a unique personality, with such passion and love for the small farmers who supplied the amazing produce sold there, that he was like the salt that brought out its sparkling flavor. Without him, it’s just going to be an average, fairly tasteless place to shop.

Unless the family manages to come to accord and he returns, I will take my business elsewhere.

Tomatoes need cages or stakes. It is a fact of life, and it is what it is. They get tall, they get sprawly, and there’s nothing worse than coming out in the morning to the garden and discovering that a heavy, ripening tomato…

(Sorry. I needed a moment there. And what I really need is a tomato plant to nurture.)

…has fallen off the plant because you hadn’t supported the branch properly and it drooped and snapped off and oh my God the horror the horror.

So cage ‘em up, people. Cage ‘em up.

But…there are more ways to do this than just to go to your local hardware store. While I’m not crafty, I admit being intrigued by Laura Crichton’s invention, the Tormato. Featured on Lifehacker over the weekend, this little funnel-shaped wonder provides water directly to the tomato plant’s roots (where it’s most needed), and a sturdy support for the growing plants.

Next opportunity I get, I’m giving it a try. But if you try it out, come on back and tell us how you did. I’m curious to hear field reports!

Gardeners, plant and nature lovers can join in Green Thumb Sunday every week. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information.