Fresh

If I haven't convinced you to garden yet by any means available to you, I'm going to keep trying :)

Eating food straight from the garden is entirely different from food from a market or grocery store. Eating a plant that was alive 10 minutes ago is fresh life force, crispness, and a special kind of intimacy. Food I grew, right next to me.

I've written before about how dissociating it felt to me to move to a city for the the first time where people were not surrounded by food growing. For all they know, physically if not intellectually, food comes from a box store with flourescent lights, lined with product marketing and brands, piled high with toxic stickers, likely trucked from several countries away. That's insane.

It's August in New Hampshire. When it hasn't rained recently, I walk outside first thing when I wake up, barefoot and in my pajamas, and water my garden. The grass (I live in a rental that still has grass) is soft and cool and dewy under my feet. The grass, soil and underground fungi that I have a relationship with even after only having lived here for a few months. I check on the baby watermelons I planted for my partner; how much have they grown?! Are there any new shoots from the seeds I recently planted? Ooh those beets and carrots are ready to harvest! In the evening I cook up some zucchini, eggplant, carrot and beans straight from the garden. Plus some mushrooms from the store because I haven't figured out how to successfully grow them indoors yet and won't be here long enough to start a log pile.

The first time I ate beans from my garden was a revelation. I don't even have words to describe it. They tasted different, more nourishing, and... closer. Maybe it's closer in the transportation sense (if I'm doing the math right, global food transportation accounts for 8% of global carbon emissions, not including the emissions from growing food with tractors and trucks), but also closer in terms of relationship with organisms.

Delicious intimacy.

Cutting open the zucchini, it's glistening with moisture. It seems like they take longer to cook than store-bought because they're so crisp off the vine, unless that's a seed variety thing. I understand why in Portland people will put zucchini inside people's cars with open windows, because it grows so abundantly. Alas I'm still losing some of them to slugs or birds or something, but we still have enough for our small house unit to eat without buying any. Apparently the solve for slugs is to get ducks because they eat them. And then, you also have delicious eggs :D.

I'm really excited about my Chinese eggplant bush. Not only because it looks like a dong tree which is highly amusing, but I have perfectly size eggplant, that I don't have to travel to a grocery store or market to get, that isn't so big we can only eat half of it before it goes bad. And it's SOMUCHMOREDELICIOUS than store bought eggplant. Now I need to learn to save seeds from it so I can grow the exact same thing again next year. I'm sure seed magic is going to blow my mind once I get into seed saving and sharing.

Shoutout to all the Native American seed sharing groups out there, and the millenia of plant breeding among communities around the world who have made so many amazing kinds of squash, and potatoes, and tomatoes, and and and and and. You ganja loving people I'm sure know what I mean 😆. Friends who study with Indigenous teachers in the Amazon often talk about how the forest is a living library of medicine and biomedical knowledge. Even around me here, even in an urban setting, there are edible medicinal plants all around. Burdock and ground ivy (in the mint family), and goldenrod are three I've recently learned about. Ground ivy commonly grows on lawns in the Northeast US. I had no idea goldenrod was a flower not just a color. Ooh and pokeweed, a poisonous weed that grows all over around here, can be used to make magenta-colored dye!!!! I'm so excited to try. The plant is the most vivid contrasting colors of magenta, green, and deep purple, totally striking creature. My partner does a good method acting impression of it as "evil berry".

When I'm at my computer coding and communicating with people around the world all day, I often feel pretty dissociated from my body and life. Whenever I get to the point of "what is happening" and being in a mental whirlwind from my knowledge worker role, I walk outside barefoot and walk around my garden and I feel like a human again, calm, at ease. It's the perfect balance to a job where you're on a computer all day.

Have I convinced you to start gardening yet? Even a single basil plant in your kitchen, or a pot on your apartment balcony. I'm growing in pots for now, although I'm getting more comfortable with taking the landlord up on their offer that I could rip up the lawn and plant in the ground.

This year I planted some borage, a wonderful lovely plant that has antidepressant properties and the bees love it. I like to sit by it; it's fuzzy and I swear the antidepressant effect rubs off simply by being next to it. I learned you can eat its flowers!!!!!! They're beautiful and purple, nice on salad with some nasturtiums. I'm sure I'll slowly have a whole edible flowers garden going. If you have favorite edible flowers please do let me know what they are!

That's it for now from garden happy land.

If you want to see what some of the more advanced community and commercial gardeners are doing in Bloom Network for community-led economic development and food security, check out the posts at https://bloomnetwork.earth/communityposts . When I'm not gardening lately, I'm setting up the financial infrastructure for this community. It's workinggg!!!! You can learn about that here: https://www.inverter.network/blog/let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom