email this pageA fig tree of my imagination
April 25th, 2009
The tree in my mind's eye
I can see it. It's tall and broad-trunked, with a spreading canopy heavy with fruit. The figs are dense and sweet, with tiny brittle seeds that don't get stuck in your teeth. The leaves are sturdy and green, big enough to justify Adam and Eve's faith in them.
Kevin and I want a tree like that and, this weekend, we took the necessary first step: we planted one. Unfortunately, trees when you plant them don't look much like trees when you imagine them. Today, our brown turkey fig tree doesn't even look identifiable, much less Biblical. Give it a few years, though …
Raising your own food is an exercise in delayed gratification. We'll have chives in a few weeks, tomatoes in a few months, shiitakes in a year or two, and figs god knows when. I know that's very back-to-the-land and in-touch-with-nature and all that, but I'm hungry now.
Live AND taped
May 8th, 2009
Planting seeds is the easy part of gardening. You poke a hole in the ground, you drop in the seed, you cover it up again. Then all you need is a little water to set the process in motion.
The hard parts of gardening are all peripheral to the actual planting of the seed. You need to know when to plant it, where to plant it, what to feed it, how much to water it, how ruthlessly to thin it (invariably more ruthlessly than you think), what to plant next to it, how to protect it from pests, and what steps to take when it stubbornly refuses to live up to your expectations.
The actual planting of the seed, though, is easy.
But when you plant a lot of them, and they're supposed to be evenly spaced in a straight line, you can run into trouble. At least I did, last year, with the radishes. Not only did I plant them too close together, I managed to spill a whole bunch of them, so we grew a cluster of radishes just to the left of the row.
This year, I discovered a simple, elegant solution: seeds on tape. Seed companies simply attach the seeds, evenly spaced, to biodegradable tape. It's genius! You dig a furrow and lay the tape in it, cover, and water. No spacing problems, no spills, no crooked rows. We planted carrots, beets, and radishes in under ten minutes.
Who thought of that? If there were a Nobel prize for gardening, I'd nominate him.
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