Better.

This is not the failed potato plot from last fall (see entry below). This is the plot that Yahya and Sophia tilled and cultivated before they moved in December. Juliette, my gardening partner, and I inherited it, and it's in a much sunnier location in the backyard. This season the balance of sun and rain has been ideal so far. My water bill isn't nuts, I'm rising earlier in the morning, and we have mushroom mulch and a wheelbarrow. Too much mulch, it seems, because there's an abundance of leaves and few tomatoes, peppers and assorted stuff we planted that's supposed to appear when the garden goddesses grin. 

I found the Garden Rant blog, maybe from someone on facebook. These could be good people. Everybody likes to post pics of their gardens to show how hard we're all working and how beautiful and challenging dirt/soil can be. I am in that number. Our backyard garden needs worms. Where do they come from? This fall, Juliette and I will plan better and not just a) buy whatever's cheap; and b) plant stuff fairly haphazardly so we can't tell the difference between cauliflower, collards, and cabbage, especially when the cauliflower doesn't show up, just sprouts beautiful, strong bluegreen leaves.

Call your mother with recipes for random leafy greens so she doesn't have to figure that out, too. Thanks. 

Originally posted on June 18, 2011.

No mastery whatsoever.

I admit to being relieved and inspired by a TED video that my good friend Drozda sent me this week. TED is an expensive soapbox for accomplished people's ideas. (I snuck into the TED conference about 10 years ago when it took place in Monterey, California. Yes, Herbie Hancock was in the audience, and yes, the air crackled with A-game energy.) The presenter, Dr. Brene Brown, studies vulnerability. 

The photo is of the potato section of my small vegetable garden. My friend Juliette had kept the spuds behind one of her French doors in a brown bag for weeks. I felt so clever as I followed the directions and cut them up so that each section had 3 - 4 eyes, then planted them in my crooked rows just before the rain so they'd get the real thing, not water from the hose. Of course, it rained forever. It rained really hard forever, and the gusts were 45 mph, and of course potatoes don't like too much water, so living beneath it holds little promise for them.

During this same stretch of my life, I am also doing a lot of other stuff that I don't know how to do. Like creating flowcharts. (I am a graduate student.) My children and many of their friends whom I've known since they were afraid of artichokes have raced to the top and picnicked there, and I am here in the thick middle and I am vulnerable. Call your children when you're vulnerable. Call your mother when she can't help but be confused. Maybe crack a couple jokes.