Gardening a la Linsey

Volvo wagon helpful, but not necessary to fruit and vegetable production.

Neighbors flock to our yard, amazed at all that is up and green, and that most of it lived through the winter. I hesitate to tell them it was my laze that created such green fortune. But see, lazy and gardening! They are BFFs.

You can even drink while pursuing this activity! And grow things to put in your drinks!

These are not the kinds of things you should plop in your Pinot, but aren’t they gorg? These scarlet emperor beans grow themselves, and flash red flowers to woo you. I’m behind the eight ball on planting these guys, but here’s my secret to gardening: I don’t care. If  they produce, I will be up to my nipples in beans; if not, well, I’ll just keep buying them from the store.

And here’s another neophyte gardening secret of mine. See that pole the beans will run up? Yes, well, it’s part of my collection. My horde-shit-till-you-can-use-it-in-the-garden collection. It is VERY handy, and N only complains about the piles of junk every once in a while. Let me show you how I’ve used, nay, upcycled all this crap. Cause I’m nothing if not inventive.

On the far left you’ll see bamboo poles, which I took from another trellis I got for free at a garage sale. The netting was from a Bellingham fishing pier; my friend Karen and I dug until we found nets large enough to carry several pirates. The orange string holding together my architectural masterpiece? Bailing twine from the barn. The large Y wood pieces are branches from a tree my neighbor demolished last year, and yes, ladies and gents, the post on the far right is from a bed frame I found for free on the side of the road. On Orcas Island. In the rain. (See how the Volvo wagons might aid your gardening? Gotta have a wagon to bring home the free loot!)

There is so much lettuce coming up, going to seed, and popping up again (I guess I took succession planting to heart) that I am giving it away in bags to the neighbors. And it’s not just vegetables that I’ve hacked: turns out I can grow pretty things too! Check out the side bed N and I started last year:

In the back is our wedding pear tree, the little purples on the left are wallflowers, there’s artichoke, allium (the purple globes to the right) and a California poppy, lest I forget my roots. Plus, my laziness ensured that this glorious smelling sweet pea, April in Paris, returned. All I do is forget about this stuff–ignore the hell out of it–and it comes back the next year. (This method explains why I was not a good babysitter.)

And it’s okay if your significant other doesn’t love your “gardening aesthetic.” Pretend like you know what you’re doing. Like my two had-to-have, years-old purchases, both rusty white metal, N’s favorite.

See that baskety thing against the fence? Yes, I have carted that thing around to four houses. It spoke to me. It has fleur-de-lis on the top, what can I say? I have had to fight N at every full moon not to haul that beaut to Goodwill, and given his goodwill, we finally hung it last weekend (with left over copper wire from our wedding. See? Nothing in our garden is new!) Doesn’t it look like it belongs there? Like its found its always home? Sigh. And P.S.: if you look just between the playhouse and the tea kettle (what? you don’t have a tea kettle whirly gig in your backyard? Get on it!) you can see one of my stashes of stuff.) Just to make sure you get how really  cheap my yard is, see all those plants in front of the playhouse? All donated to us! The picnic table? Constructed by N’s dad from his old water tank! The driftwood? Scoured from a beach! Free, free and free! Who needs Target when all this free stuff is begging for a home in my yard!

And N’s other long-time favorite piece of rusty metal? A Hungarian baby bath. Now herb garden! Who doesn’t want their thyme and nasturtiums straight out of a baby’s bath?

I love that asparagus to the right. I’ve only ever been patient enough for two things in my life:

Me getting to date N took as long as an asparagus patch!

N, who has made up for every bad date and heart-break of my life, and this damn asparagus patch, which I may get to nibble from when we have the first Hispanic or woman president. In the meantime, the trees flop and flail and make me giggle at their wooziness, as if they’ve had too much bourbon, and just had to lie down.

It’s funny how much joy a little bit of green brings to my life. I swear, somehow I am not a slave to all this. I weed (I don’t even know if I can call it that) once a month, and that’s with a beer in one hand. I water only when it’s hot for several days in a row, and my biggest challenge is harvesting the stuff before it goes to seed. Case in point: this little spot used to house a behemoth sized oil tank. In just two years, its rich with life: forget-me-nots, swiss chard, sage, hellebores and some other donated native stuff. Is it Sunset Magazine worthy? Not by a long shot. But it does make me smile. It flavors my dinner. It provides flowers for my home.

And when I get to cut conical lilac wands from our tree, and the house fills with their  wafting scent, and I munch on a spinach and radish salad fresh from my yard, I can’t think of a greater way to spend a parcel of  time.

Do you get excited about going to the grocery store? Is it okay with you if you loiter about the market for over an hour? Does your market lure you in, whisper to you? Sing a siren’s song? Do you linger in aisles and query the produce mongers and the beauty manager and the plant specialist? Do you debate–for whole minutes–over which thumb-sized cheese chunk you will drop in your cart? (Answer: all of them.) Skim the bulk section for at least five minutes, imagining what you will eat (despite your grocery list) over the next few days? Is there excitement as you scoop lentilles du puy into your former marinara jar?

They are so…*sigh*…beautiful. All layered and moody green-blackish.

Do you buy locally grown savoy cabbage because it’s so breathtaking that you can not go home without it, even though half a head of cabbage sits patiently in your crisper at home? Do you ask your husband, and the cashier, Isn’t it beautiful?, as though you’re pointing out a sunset or an infant’s smile.

Do you and your partner-in-crime stock up on dark chocolate when it’s on sale because the cupboard isn’t complete without a full catalogue of cocoa?

Do you squee in delight–and imagine decorating a room in the palette–as you crack open pistachio shells? Who would have thought greens and purples and taupes could look so rich together?

Does the inside of a grapefruit remind of you bacon? Sans the fat. Plus the vitamins?

Do you love to try out a new recipe–Heidi or Deb (oh god–those brownies!) or Molly–but tweak it just a bit, given what you have on hand, and your current seasonal obsession (still grapefruit) to bring to a dinner gathering?

Do you–at least once a month–revel so deeply in your purchases that you want to photograph your market loot? Collards and apples and pears and leeks and beets and cabbages and kales all from your little farming valley?

You too? “Then there’s a pair of us–don’t tell. They’d banish us, you know.”

If you have eaten the equivalent of an entire Costco pumpkin pie…

If you have stumbled upon the world’s best eggnog and now drink it by the gallon…

If you made holiday cookies and have pictures of you eating half the bowl of dough…

If you consumed coconut brownies, a chocolate pistachio covered apple, and a hot buttered rum in one evening,

then this is your altar call. REPENT, you sinner!

I’m not saying you did. I’m saying I know you have more willpower than me and the person who did those things does not exist in 2013.

But just in case…I had my first grapefruit of the season today and, as I cut into it, I remembered this salad: last year I made it once a week from January through the end of grapefruit season. It’s that good. And it will totally vaporize any of that crap you ate in 2012. (I know, you didn’t eat any. I hate you.) And if that’s not enough, you get to SUPREME grapefruit. True verb. As I tell my students, for most verbs, you can add an -er to the and get a noun–the person who does those things. Hence, you will be a SUPREMER. It just doesn’t get better than this, folks.

I dare you–double the recipe: SUPREMEST.

Grapefruit Kale Salad:

2 grapefruit (I like the ruby red ones)

2 Meyer lemons

4 dates, pitted

1 bunch of kale

1 large handful of fresh mint

1. Remove the ribs from the kale and chiffonade the leaves; place them in a medium bowl.
2. SUPREME! the grapefruit: Carefully cut the skins from the grapefruit, taking care not to remove the flesh. (I tried for a long time to put words to the rest of this process, but now I’m just shuffling you over to this video. I like the Miami Vice music in the background and how she reminds you to “be careful not to slice your thumb off.”  Add to the bowl (grapefruit, not thumb). Some people like to massage the kale with the grapefruit juice, saying that it breaks down the greens a bit. I’m too lazy to do this. I won’t tell if you are too.
3. SUPREME! the lemons and dice them; add them to the bowl.
4. Dice the dates and add them, along with the mint, to the bowl.
5. Enjoy your repentance!

A new Thanksgiving tradition: parking lot turkey

I know you can’t believe it: when I finally post after damn near eons I’m going to make a Mitt reference and give you the 411 on some drab house-hold item? Just you wait, my friends; this will be the tale of intrigue, imagination, ingenuity and of course, a chuckle over the endearing ways of my hysterical husband, N. Remember this “bread” debacle?

N and I had a Thanksgiving date with the Ferrells, Interstate 5 and 12 hours of traffic. After a half day’s worth of work, the boy and I divided and conquered: I would gas up The Silver and he would brine the turkey. (This is where I should have smelled the sour odor of chores gone awry: N in the kitchen and me at the car? Huh– Nevertheless, I came home to a packed cooler; we loaded up the car and dashed, only to sit and sit and sit in mid-day traffic on our State’s only  coastal artery.

N mentioned, somewhere around Seattle, that yes, he had brined the turkey–in its’ plastic bag–and yes, the giblets and neck were stiff frozen and shoved in the carcass. “The brine will defrost it and I’ll pull it out when we stop.” True enough.

Cue the stop: seven p.m. (six hours of driving and still not out of the state). We’ve gassed up the car and pull into Safeway to snag some ice for the cooler. N decides that he will pull out the giblets and neck.

“Gonna wash your hands, right? I mean, you just pumped gas.”

“Nawh. I’m just going to reach in and pinch out the bag.”

“No. You’re gonna wash your hands, right?” I feel my teacher index finger alert and point like a blood hound. “The bathroom’s in there, to the left.”

He concedes. Returns. Dons his headlamp. It is dark, remember? And we’re in the Safeway parking lot, remember? In the second stall, close to the entrance…for all those last minute shoppers to gawk and realize, “Hey, I’m not in such a bad spot: look–these dorks are pulling giblets out of their turkey in the middle of a grocery parking lot.”

N and I–we’re always tickled to make others feel better.

N rolls up his sleeves and switches on his headlamp. We remove carrots and celery and sage from the top of the cooler, and there is our turkey–brining, floating in a vat of plastic encased water; peppercorns and cloves, salt and orange rinds undulating around it like some Aphroditian bath.

And that plastic bag? Yep. Closed shut with binder clips.

Binder clips. To seal a plastic bag holding a gallon and a half of water, laying horizontally.

It will remain one of the great shames of my life that I do not have a photo of that particular Ferrell fix.

To his credit, it was holding, and to his credit, he’d had the foresight to prop up the bird with a colander, so the whole thing didn’t tip over.

And then he fetched the giblets.

I  had the camera out at this point–we’re in the parking lot with headlamps with hands shoved up a turkey’s ass. The guts were stiff frozen inside. N’s hands were freezing, his headlamp shaking with fervor. “Grrrr…ahhhh….gaaahhhh!!” He stood in a lounge, as if he was a gladiator going into a war in Antartica…with a dead bird. There was so much grunting, I’m sure several passersby considered that one of us was giving birth, but then, I stood alongside, laughing so hard that I couldn’t even hold the camera still enough to shoot. So, the flesh wasn’t coming out of me.

Finally, after some serious hand warming and lamaze breathing, N ripped the guts from the bird. I think I recall a large suctioning noise. Slup. “It looks like afterbirth,” he said.

Thank goodness we had retrieved a monster-sized paper cup from Safeway, cause isn’t that where Martha stores her gizzards and hearts before cooking them? Now, with turkey-laced (and washed, thankfully) hands, N began the process of re-binder clipping the brining turkey.

We made it to Oregon after midnight and cooked one hell of a bird, innards and all.

Lest you think I condemn my husband’s ingenuity, I have taken to seeing the binder clip in a whole new light. Sure, we’ve always used them in the kitchen for chip clips, but just last night, when the parchment paper wouldn’t stay down in the loaf pans–voila! A binder clip on each side’ll do’er.

A binder clip to cinch together all those escapee half empty nut bags in the bottom of the freezer. A binder clip to hold open the cookbook page. One to hold my stirring spoon off the counter; two to rest my laptop on. One to clamp down my Tom’s tube. A solution–finally–to the damn wet brillo pad mess: a binder clip hanger! I’m going to hang one from my headboard to hold my phone changer tail and here’s a tip for using binder clips to slip on your duvet cover.

It’s difficult to tell now which humble, unassuming guy is more brilliant–this one:

Or this one:

Three cheers to them both!

Ingredients for a Summer

1. At 4:30, forget the gym and have a nap in the afternoon sun.
2. Forget the gym again at 5:30 and pour yourself a glug of wine in a jelly jar.
3. Harvest whatever you can—however small—from your garden.
4. Clutch a good novel under your arm.
5. Don a sweater if the weather refuses to match the calendar.
6. Walk barefoot across the just-mowed grass.
7. Convince one neighbor to have freshly cut cedar planks and another to grill over charcoal. Force the wind to waft these scents your way.
8. Lean heavily into a lawn chair.
9. Raise your feet onto an elevated platform.
10. See to it that the jelly jar is still brimming and within arm’s reach.
11. Sit to read and read and read and read.