by Jen Hatmaker
Ouch.
Day 1
My fingers are raw.
My back is aching.
My feet are throbbing.
My shoulders are burning.
As I sit in filthy clothes past the “wring the sweat out” phase but damp enough to chill me to the bone and also gross me out, I’m ruminating on the first day of Green Month/Waste Fast.
It started with a trip to the Sunset Valley Farmer’s Market with my produce sherpas, Gavin and Sydney. We brought the necessary tools: reusable cloth grocery bags and cold hard cash. (You want to draw scorn from the Austin local foodie community? Exit the Farmer’s Market with fifteen plastic bags. Might as well dump oil into Lake Austin and drive a Hummer through the Earth Day parade.)
Austin is a very green city, so plenty of patrons at the Farmer’s Market looked like average 9–5’ers. However, there was an exciting contingency of granola people, which made for excellent people watching (“Mom! That lady’s nursing her baby while she’s walking around! ”).
It’s July, so the Farmer’s Market is in lovely form: tomatoes, English cucumbers, blackberries, melons, peaches, beautiful squash, green beans galore. Other local vendors bring artisan breads, gourmet olive oil, freshly ground flour, handmade hummus/salsa/pesto/pico, fresh eggs, organic meats and cheeses, fresh tamales (bliss). We devoured homemade tacos and hand-squeezed lemonade while a sweet little Birkenstock band played us some bluegrass.
I was in foodie heaven.
My perfect children improved this nirvana by freaking out over every eggplant and heirloom tomato. Whether this was sincere or satirical, I’m not certain, but still. We carried bags packed with produce picked in the last day or two, smudged with dirt, all delightfully messy and unpackaged.
With vendors like this, how could we go wrong? Acadian Family Farm, Fruitful Hill Farm, Full Quiver Farm, Engle Orchards, It’s About Thyme Garden Center, Johnson’s Backyard Garden, Kitchen Pride Mushrooms, Rocking B Ranch, Sandy Creek Farms—the farthest farm is an hour away, most within city limits or just outside.
We brought our bounty home and ate half immediately. It’s peach season in central Texas, reader. Our Fredericksburg peaches lasted three hours. I sliced up cucumbers, onions, and tomatoes and immersed them in vinegar, sugar, fresh dill, salt, and pepper, which will be gone tomorrow. Everything else got chopped, peeled, diced, or rinsed, ready for quick consumption.
So I’ll discuss this in detail tomorrow, but we planted a garden two months ago for this phase of 7.
I have so much to say about this.
Again, tomorrow.
Anyhow, today Brandon and I edged our garden with two by fours. This involved a lot of digging, scooping, grunting, and lifting. The fingers on my right hand are so sore, I keep choosing words that are left-keyboard dominant. (My nemesis? The letters I, K, and M. -y --ddle f-nger -s ach-ng!) I’m such a garden virgin that I don’t have proper tools; hence, ungloved hands that act as shovel, hoe, wheelbarrow, and vice.
The garden properly contained, I went inside to construct my first composting bin. Piece A to Piece B, snap in, snap down, slide on top . . . voila! An overpriced plastic box. Considering my mom’s compost is a huge pile of rot on the ground (this has a good connotation here), no one need overspend on a plastic box with “ventilation outlets” (holes) to contain it all.
Brandon: Are you putting that together inside?
Jen: No, I just spread the parts all over the floor because I wanted more things to pick up around this house.
Brandon: I’m picking up on your sarcasm. Are you sure it will fit through the back door?
Jen: Uh, I think I can accurately eyeball the basic width of a box and determine if it can fit through the door.
So I’m in the living room typing next to my compost bin that won’t fit through the door. Whatever. (My husband made sure I included that wee detail in the day’s retelling.) I’ve spent hours researching composting, and even though every Web site says, “This is the easiest thing in the world!” the next line includes formulas for the necessary carbon/nitrogen balance lest your compost turn into a slimy, stinky, rotten mess and attract every rodent and fruit fly in a ten-mile radius.
“Leaves = 60:1, Legume Hay = 15:1, Non-Legume Hay = 30:1, Sawdust = 400:1. A moisture content between 50 to 60 percent is desirable in an active compost pile.” What the what?? How do I know if hay has lost its leguminess? What does 60 percent moisture content look like? Somewhere between putrefied decay and damp rot? There is clear room for this project to turn nasty.
So for now, I’ll just kick my feet up on my compost bin and watch a little Food Network (thank heavens media month is over).
Day 2
I’m smart about a few things. I’ve managed my kids’ math homework all the way to seventh grade with only a couple of meltdowns. I can talk pretty confidently about the Twilight series. I am now an expert on international adoption (I-600A? USCIS? DTE and RR? I know what all that means). Thanks to my girlfriend Laura, I can now “turtle down” with my head and make my face look skinnier in pictures. So clearly I’ve got some skills.
Gardening is not one of them.
Rarely have I encountered a subject I am more ignorant about. For three-quarters of all produce, I have no idea how it grows. I don’t understand life cycles or know where anything is found in nature.
Sydney: Mom? Can we plant watermelon?
Me: Honey, I don’t know if we have room for a watermelon . . . bush?
I’ve never plucked an eggplant off its vine/stem/root (please circle whichever system gives eggplants their life). Until now, my produce originated from the same place where it is all in season, all the time: the grocery store. Whether it is a hot-weather vegetable or a fruit that requires sandy soil, I haven’t a clue. It doesn’t matter because it can be prematurely picked, artificially ripened, and shipped from anywhere on earth if I need it for my cobbler that day. I’ve never picked something from my backyard and fed it to my family.
Thinking ahead to this month, I couldn’t shake the idea of gardening, cultivating respect for the earth and the miraculous way it sustains humanity. I don’t want to raise ignorant little consumers who think food is from the fridge where produce angels magically deposit it. Appreciating creation means learning what it is capable of producing. I want to initiate the seed > plant > harvest cycle, like every generation in history has done until mine.
*Here* is the appropriate place to mention I kill all plants.
My mother-in-law gave me a cactus, which needs water once every two months, and it perished under my sustained neglect. Every plant in my home is plastic. Somehow I gave life to actual human children, but I cannot remember to splash water on a bougainvillea. I have a dismal history growing anything other than Homo sapiens. To be honest, while considering a garden, the voices in my head said, “You won’t actually do this” and I was 95 percent sure they were right.
Enter the best thing that ever happened to Month Five. E-mail from my friend Amy:
Amy: Hey Jen! Your mom said you were researching garden stuff but you were probably too garden stupid to pull it off. I am similarly inept but interested and just found a nonprofit that is the answer for remedial bleeding-heart gardeners.
It’s called the Karpophoreō Project (pronounced car-puh-fuh-RAY-oh), a Greek word that means “to bear fruit in every good work.” The KP Project bears genuine fruit, from the soil and in the lives of real people. This is their mission:
The Karpophoreō Project bears real fruit (. . . and vegetables and farm-fresh products!) in the truly good work of reclaiming our barren and underutilized landscapes. We aim to be a blessing to the environment, to the social fabric, and to the lives of beautiful people across the city of Austin.
KP and the HOW program work with a community of men, women, and families that once suffered from chronic homelessness, most
having experienced at least one year on the street. The marks of such homelessness go much deeper than can be solved solely by the acquisition of a home. KP is a community environment, fostering an environment for healthy interactions with each other and a positive contributor to the city.
Every person has a voice with a distinctive story and specific skills they can offer the world. Every person plays a necessary part for someone in the world. How does a formerly homeless person get in position to play the role of their lifetime? That’s where KP comes in. We provide a basic set of skills and employment opportunities that can help take the financial edge off societal reintroduction.2
Willing partners offer KP their land for a backyard garden and/or backyard farm (the farm involves chickens, and I’m sorry, but I can only handle so much, ya’ll), and the KP folks BUILD AND PLANT THE WHOLE GARDEN. Their team includes regular volunteers as well as formerly homeless men and women.
Then, they come out weekly and prune, treat, and harvest. Half the produce stays with the homeowner, and the other half is sold at the farmer’s market or in CSA boxes. The formerly homeless who work the gardens keep 70 percent of the profit. Bam. Sustainable income from locally grown organic produce with nearly zero overhead.
Genius.
What a creative use of privately owned land in lieu of costly public property! What vision to connect privileged landowners with the chronically homeless, building relationships and making something beautiful together. KP just planted a huge garden at the Travis County Correctional Center, continuing their inventive mission of bearing good fruit in unlikely places with unlikely farmers.
Speaking of unlikely farmers, I have a garden, thanks to the KP team. I’ll write about the garden inauguration tomorrow, but if you’ve paid attention, you realize I managed to mix local organic food (Months One and Five) with intervention for the poor (months all) where other people do the heavy lifting and I get to feel good about that instead of guilty.
And you should see my tomatoes.
Me and Steven, founder of the KP Project. We're building a community garden for refugees. My hands look suspiciously clean.
Day 3
You might recall from Month Two that in the midst of dog excrement, a legitimate gardener assessed our backyard: Steven, founder of the KP Project. There was some digging, some looking at the sun, some staring at dirt. Outside of the obvious poo-poo situation, our space passed, and a date was set to install our garden.
Our backyard is pretty small, so we planned a 15 x 15 garden. We bought $200 of rich composted soil, which was unceremoniously dumped by our back gate. Twenty wheelbarrows full and a minor hernia later, we moved it twenty feet to the actual garden site. (Really, dirt guy?) We staked out the garden, which felt very farmerish and awesome.
“Mississippi” was one of the formerly homeless assigned to the Hatmaker garden, and he could’ve easily passed for James Earl Jones’s brother. In the marathon dirt relocation process, he had a mantra for the females:
“Use your legs, girls. Use your legs. Easy. Eeeeeasy . . .”
I wanted to use my legs, Mississippi, but my arms were required in shoveling seven hundred thousand scoops of compost into wheelbarrows. (These arms could not be lifted the next day. Thanks for nothing, legs.)
About this time Steven busts out the tiller, and it had its way with him for twenty minutes. It was like watching an out-of-control bull rider hanging on for dear life. Thus, the sod we lovingly installed was churned into oblivion, reincarnated into its next life where it will produce more than beautiful blades of Bermuda.
Hearing a low hum, I looked for a swarm of locusts or approaching tractor. The hum grew louder, picking up volume and definition. Our heads popped up as we attempted to identify the crescendo and conceal our alarm. The sound became chattery and high-pitched, causing a fight-or-flight response in me, left over from ten years in student ministry. Then they descended:
Twenty-five teenagers on a mission trip from Arlington.
Steven failed to mention they were coming to “help.”
Jen, the KP liaison (not me, Jen, as in the author, a second Jen, KP Jen), escorted them with what can only be described as wild eyes. With a frozen smile and posttraumatic stress, she said, “Yeah, I’m not as good with teenagers as I thought.” Evidently, ours was the third garden install of the day, and this church group was assigned the heavy labor to provide a superior springbreak option other than starring roles in Girls Gone Wild South Padre.
Let me sum up their involvement: Twenty-three of them flirted while the other two sporadically tossed grass clods aside (which I retrieved and put in trash bags). The event also included: water poured on heads, cheerleading moves practiced on trampoline, and one girl who sat in my living room with sweet tea because she was overcome.
I fully remember why we quit youth ministry.
They left after thirty minutes, and the rest of us burst out laughing. (Is this at all like Americans who take international mission trips and make a giant mess of things and leave feeling good about themselves while the locals shake their heads and clean up the wake? Oh, surely not. We know what’s best for everyone in the world, right?)
Anywho, Steven, Jen, Mississippi, my mom, and a handful of volunteers planted the goodies, and with Steven’s careful instruction, in went squash, tomatoes, bell peppers, corn, basil, zucchini, green beans, arugula, and watermelon. Seeds the size of atoms stuck two inches under dirt. Yeah, I was 100 percent convinced this was so not going to work. I predicted crop failure immediately. I instantly became a farmer—tipped my hat back, looked to the skies, scratched my head. Like washing my car is the impetus for a downpour, planting a garden guaranteed a drought. I expected it to commence at once.
When the team left, it was exactly like the moment I was alone the first time with my baby. When the experienced mothers vacated, I was left with an infant no one was sure I could raise. (Ironically, we practically have to be sainted to get through the adoption process, but any fool can spawn and have a baby, tra la la.)
So I had a little come to Jesus meeting with my new garden:
“Garden? I’m really going to try here. I promise to care about you and feed you water and fight off your enemies. I can’t make too many promises, Garden, because I once (allegedly) killed a cactus, but I’m turning over a new vine. I’ll be there for you. These five words I swear to you. When you breathe, I want to be the air for you.”
Garden just sat there looking rather embryonic, but I picked up on the signal it sent out. It said:
“I feel very scared.”
This is the compost we bought for our new garden. Please note the gate in the background which leads to THE ACTUAL GARDEN SITE. Thanks for nothing, Dirt Deliverer.
My daughter Sydney, the #1 gardener in the family, inspecting the kale. I think that's kale. Related: I don't like kale.
Can you even handle this??? Look at my squash! I have fennel! I know how to grow fennel!
Day 5
Garden update: My melons won’t grow.
The last time I said this was seventh grade, with an eerily similar angst.
If I understand this problem like I think I do, Watermelon Vine is sick with envy, wondering why Tomato is ripe with plump, round fruits while she is still flat as a Kansas highway, developing gawky, awkward shoots everywhere, but no freaking melons. I bet she does a self-examination every morning hoping, hoping for development, a promising bud at least, only to discover a lengthening of her skinny vine in another clumsy direction, impossible to maneuver with any grace.
I keep telling my melon vine that her day will come; we develop differently, that’s all. It’s basic biology, nothing to fret about. Some vines sprout early, requiring wires and string to hold up their bulging fruits sooner than others. Not to worry, Watermelon Vine, soon you’ll need your own wire and string, and your melons are going to be waaaay bigger than Tomato
’s. Trust me.
I know she looks smug, what with her perfectly rounded bounty that everyone admires while you’re just a skinny vine without so much as a bud, but believe me, Tomato will be yesterday’s news once your sweet fruits develop. I’ve seen the gene pool you came from; the future looks bright for you, WV. Your kind grows them big. (If you want, we can get you a wire and string like your more developed garden friends so Basil will quit mocking you; like he’s so awesome—he’s just a bunch of leaves.)
Parenting my garden requires way more emotional energy than I expected. It was easier when they were just little seeds and all they needed was water. Sure, I worried about them in their infancy, but at least it was simple. Now there’s all this drama and competition: who’s sprouted, who hasn’t, who is independent, who is more—how shall I say it nicely?—needy? Wow. It’s a good thing we don’t know all that is involved in raising a garden when we first conceive it, or none of us would bear any fruit.
Day 8
So, one car.
I realize 86 percent of the world does not even own one car to squabble over, but we have been a two-car union since our dating years when my hair took over the entire cab of my bad-to-the-bone RX-7.
When my friends and I were in Manhattan last year on a girlcation, we took public transportation everywhere, and it was both invigorating and slightly stinky. I like the idea of public transportation, the efficiency of it, the urban lure. Next to our mortgage, cars and their upkeep comprise the biggest slice of the budget pie. I’d gladly kiss gas stations, Jiffy Lube, and the DMV good-bye forever. If I never drove on I-35 in bumper-to-bumper traffic again, you could color me happy and maybe declare a moratorium on my little road rage problem.
But those urban transit alternatives do not transfer well to suburbia. We’ve made our Master Planned Community bed, and now we have to drive to it. Our suburb is not concentrated with little bodegas and boutiques within walking distance. We have big-box grocery chains. We have landscaping. We have a Cracker Barrel. We drive eight hundred yards to our neighborhood pool, for the love of the land. The American urban exodus came at a cost, and commuting was certainly on that bill.