The Inadvertent Gardener

Once upon a time, there was a gardener, and she wasn’t actually very good at gardening, and she also, apparently, wasn’t very good at writing all the well-intentioned posts she had on her list to write.

The end.

Translation: I have much to share with you, good readers of the Interwebz, but life has been moving at a breakneck pace, and today, I’m choosing to opt for a little work slowdown on the blog to add some breathing room.

I’m also heading out to the land of the giant, fire-breathing flowers once again, so this space shall remain quiet until my return. But when I’m back, there will be stories of gardens that tower overhead, and butter cows, and a status update on my containers, and all that. Since we’re actually just heading into Bay Area Summer, there are plenty more tomato updates to come in the beginning of what is Fall in the rest of the country.

Have a great rest of August and early September, and I shall return anon. I promise.

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

Editor’s Note: This post appeared earlier this week on BlogHer, but since I’m headed to the Iowa State Fair this weekend, I thought it was most appropriate to point you in its direction.

The first time I visited the Iowa State Fair, I arrived armed with an annotated map.

My friend Leah, whose father is the Executive Director of the Iowa State Fair Foundation, grew up attending the fair. When she heard I was going for the first time in 2006, she told me she had a set of places she liked to go. At her cubicle, she used a marker to identify the best booths and the best food.

“Only the Campbell’s corndogs,” she said. “Look for the blue hats. Don’t eat any other kind. And there are lots of mini donuts, but you want the ones from the church, not the other kind. Also, the cheese curds are the best you will ever have. They’re here,” she said as she put an x marking the spot. “They’re in this triangle near the Agricultural Building.”

Leah did not steer me wrong. Of course, like an amateur, I tried to get through her entire list of food recommendations in my first hour and a half on the grounds. Do you know what happens when you do that? You can’t feel your feet for the next hour. Yes, those of you who are physicians, you SHOULD be alarmed by that symptom.

Read more at BlogHer…

Last night, Fatemeh assigned me the job of side dishes to go with pork chops. Roasted fingerlings, I decided, and roasted green beans tossed with preserved rangpur lime, because in the Bay Area, summer is so damn chilly and foggy that it’s quite normal to be able to roast up some vegetables a la winter.

While she was off gallivanting around the neighborhood, I pulled the vegetables from the crisper and realized I had some baby padróns that I needed to cook. “I’m making them as an appetizer,” I said when she arrived back at the apartment. I sautéed them up in olive oil, and dumped them in a bowl to add salt.

At this point, Fatemeh was mixing a marinade for the pork. “One of these days,” she said, gesturing at the bag of brown sugar on the counter and then at the peppers, “I want to hit those with that and caramelize them.”

“Do it,” I said. “Now.”

She tossed some brown sugar into the hot pan, and I dumped the blistered padróns back in. “Can I add salt to them?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said, in the tone that finishes the sentence with the implied dumbass.

“Kettle padróns,” I said. “We’re making kettle padróns!”

We made them, and then we ate them. All of them. With our fingers. While standing up at the counter.

“The kettle padróns were gone in under five minutes. We have a problem,” Tweeted Fatemeh. “Either that or a business plan.”

Kettle Padróns
(Serves 1-2, hastily)

1 pint padrón peppers (No need to seed or stem them…)
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 ½ Tbsp brown sugar
½ Tbsp kosher salt or sea salt

1. Heat the olive oil in a sauté pan over medium-high heat. When the oil is just about to smoke, toss in the padróns. Sauté them until they’re starting to blacken and blister.
2. Add in the brown sugar and continue stirring for about three or four minutes, until the sugar’s melted and starting to brown.
3. Transfer the caramelized peppers to a bowl. Add the salt.
4. Eat the shit out of them. Then email me and Fatemeh and thank us for this discovery.

When I got home from work Monday night, Fatemeh said, “There’s an herb growing out there on the patio.”

“A what?” I asked.

“An herb,” she said. “I don’t know what kind it is, but Stella tried to eat it.”

Sure enough, when I went out to water the containers, there it was, grown big enough that it was more than a mouthful for Stella, the tiny French bulldog. I pinched off a leaf and smelled it to be sure, but it was, most definitely, a slightly fuzzy clump of sage.

Of course, unlike the rest of the plants, which are growing in relatively expensive, allegedly good soil, this sage plant is growing in some sandy, tiny dirt that separates our patio stones from each other. I’ve never watered it, nor even given it any attention until today.

“Unbelievable,” I said when I got in from watering. “It’s the most successful plant out there.”

We’re leaving it and seeing how much it’ll grow. After all, the sage in the container garden continues to grow in a stunted, sorry manner, so why mess with the one real success outside?

The experiment in which I actually water the plants has now been in effect for approximately two weeks, give or take a watering or two. While I was gone to New York for a family reunion, Fatemeh picked up the slack in my stead, and had the pleasure of learning just how much water two gallons really is. (The answer: A hell of a lot of water.)

The plants look better than they did. There are still yellow leaves, but not nearly as many as before. The basil has started growing again. And the bean plants have started putting out a couple of runners.

But everything still looks sickly and sad, and though I have myriad yellow blossoms, there are no tomatoes fruiting yet. In fact, there are a few yellow blossoms that have taken suicidal dives into the sand below the pots.

This is not how I define success.

I have some excellent ideas on how to remedy the situation from a certain tomato doyenne in Tennessee, but haven’t made to any store that sells the right stuff (including a garden spray bottle) to actually try out said remedy. That’s going to have to wait until next week, for any number of reasons, many of them starting with B and ending with LogHer. I’m spending the rest of the week and weekend in New York City, slinging back martinis with the rest of the Lady-based Blogerati, and doing very little thinking about gardening and yellowing plants.

But when I return, I have to buckle down and figure this out. Now that I’ve tackled the water deficiency, it is clear to me that something else is missing, and that something else is, most likely, some sort of plant nutrient.

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

My very first California tomato blossom did not, indeed, yield a tomato. Instead, it fell victim to whatever was causing the yellowing of the plant. It browned. It shriveled. It most certainly did not transition to a fruit.

This, which in my world constitutes an emergency, spurred my research into what might be killing all my tomato plants. I began by looking up information about blight.

This, of course, is kind of how I operate: Assume the worst-case scenario is true. If it turns out to be so, then really, it won’t matter, because whatever…you’re already mentally prepared for it. If it turns out not to be so, then really, it won’t matter, because whatever…the outcome’s much better than you expected.

I find this an excellent way to move through life. The constant state of near-panic drives a person forward in a much more efficient manner than, say, a laid-back attitude. We shall not speak here about blood pressure issues. No, we shall not.

But in my early research into the blight I was so certain my plants carried, I stumbled across this other, disconcerting explanation of what could be causing the problem. It appeared I was obtusely missing the obvious signs of drought in my own wine barrels.

Plants: They need soil, sunlight, nutrients and, um, water. Water is key to the whole growth cycle. And apparently, yellowing plants, when accompanied by curling tomato leaves, indicates a plant that is gasping for liquid.

I thought back to how I’d been watering, and realized I’d been using about half a watering can every day, or, well, sometimes every other day, because sometimes a girl is busy, and sometimes she might forget, or sometimes she might have been out too late the night before and she might be running late to work and then she might have something after work and then suddenly she might realize it has been three days since she watered the tomatoes.

And it occurred to me that perhaps, in a giant wine barrel of dirt, half a gallon of water every couple of days for two tomato plants plus, in one case, lettuce and sage and, in another case, basil and beans, is not even close to enough.

Then I noticed that, when I put any water to the soil at all, it sucked it in like it had never heard of water before. Like water was a beautiful tonic. Then, after pouring an entire two-gallon-watering-canful of water into one wine barrel, I noticed something I had not noticed the entire time I’ve had those tomatoes on the patio: Water running out from under the pot. Water that clearly had finally made it to those drainage holes I created with such drama. Basically, this whole time? I’ve barely been watering the surface.

So now there’s a new watering regime in town. I’m hoping it’s not too late to save the tomatoes. And if it does, in the end, turn out to be blight, at least I can rule human stupidity out of the equation.

“Do you realize the tomato plants are turning yellow?” Fatemeh asked one day.

I probably turned a little yellow myself. I had, indeed, noticed, but in my usual manner, had been trying to ignore it. I had also developed a convoluted set of theories that explained the problem.

For example: We are downwind of a meat smoking business, which means smells of delicious smokey pork waft over at regular intervals. Tomato plants are vegetarian, right? Therefore, couldn’t it be possible that they were dying from the smell of ham?

COME ON, PEOPLE. If your kid came to you with this theory, you would call them VERY CREATIVE.

But the truth is, I feared blight. I feared air pollution. I feared lack of enough sunlight. Regardless, I know this: The only thing that should be yellow on a tomato plant are the blossoms that lead to actual tomatoes.

And it wasn’t just the tomato plants suffering. The bean plants looked like they were gagging on their own selves. The basil had grown to a certain level and stopped. And even the sage was looking, um, yellow instead of green.

It was time to start doing a little research into the problem.

I’ll admit it. I used to think watering cans were stupid.

I mean, sure. They’re fine if you’re Peter Rabbit and need to hide from Mr. MacGregor or whatever, but for ordinary gardeners? Really?

After all, when I looked around our kitchen, I saw plenty of vessels perfect for carrying water outside and dumping it into the dirt.

It took one trip out, though, with a pitcher filled with tap water, before I realized exactly why people get watering cans for their container gardens. Particularly container gardens on patios that don’t have hoses with sprinkler attachments. The distribution of the water without some kind of sprinkley functionality? Absolutely stupid. As I poured, I was just making holes in the dirt, thereby displacing basil and sage seeds and whatever else was there.

The day after planting, I went to Target for other reasons and came home with glowsticks (not for the garden, although they would make a nice nighttime decoration on a tomato plant) and a watering can. Those of you who are smarter than I am will agree: watering cans? They’re for more than hiding. They do, indeed, assist with proper water distribution.

In other words, I stopped putting divots in my own dirt.