Vegetable Garden digression

This is my shout out to the gardening nerds!!! 🙂  And a way for me to procrastinate on writing my novel…

Pictures from my vegetable garden…

This is an early Spring picture of the garden–sometime in early April.  I blurred out the face of the guy in the photo, so don’t even TRY IT! 🙂  The guy is included in the photo so you can have an idea of scale (he’s way down below).  One of those retaining wall blocks is the length of a wiener dog.

On the top (the nearer) tier is my overwintered french sorrel, a tiny rose geranium (smells great–and if you steep the leaves you can get some wonderful rosy flavors).  Plus some tomatoes in cages.  In the bottom right corner is my overwintered french tarragon.  Those little thing grassy things are garlic

We just put in the lower tier this year–so in this picture, all you see is fresh dirt below.

This is a shot of the garden from a second story window in April.

And here’s a shot of the garden from that same window in June.  Lots of potato plants, tomato plants, garlic up top.  Below you see lettuce and radishes and a triamble squash plant.

We’re sprawling in July!    The potato plants look scraggly but they’ve got potatoes underground!  And the tomato plants are going wild, as is the squash plant.  I can’t keep up with the lettuce.  And wedged in here and there you’ll see garlic, anise hyssop, korean perilla, chinese bellflowers (aka doraji or platycodon) and carrots and such.

(As of August 22, 2009)…

The chaos of mid-summer vegetable garden growth!  I can’t keep those tomatoes up!

In the lower level we have a sickly-ish momotaro tomato plant here but everything else is thriving.

Much to my dismay, the triamble squash plant aborted its first few squash, despite hand pollination.  But I kept watering, and fertilizing…and here’s one that seems to be past that “first trimester danger zone” of squash growth.  Keep your fingers crossed.

The garden, from the bottom up.  Isn’t it wonderful?  I doubled the size of my garden this year and I *still* don’t think it’s big enough.  There’s so much more I want to plant but I’m still happy with this. 🙂  I’m eyeing a lot of the green tomatoes–do I use them now or wait for my first red tomato?  I’ve got Black Krim, Siberia, Momotaro, and Early Girl tomato plants this year.  I’m dry farming the Early Girl (well, sort of–I have to water the other plants, but I just avoid giving the early girl tomato plant direct water).

My Berkeley

I know I write a lot about other places–about my love for London, my deep connection to/personality fit with New York City and my flirtation with San Francisco. And wanting to live in Seoul for a year to feed my psyche. Then there are all my vacations to places I want to visit again: Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo. And all the places I want to visit, like Greece. The world the world the world!

I thought I’d share a little bit of My Berkeley. Not all of it because I could go on and on as to why I choose to live here…but some if it.

I live in Berkeley and this has been my home more or less (I lived in Palo Alto for 6 months, and lived in Kensington for awhile, a little tiny town bordering Berkeley) for the last eighteen years. I have lived half my life to date, here. I met the love of my life, here. I learned to become an adult, here. I learned to be happy, here.

Some people might be surprised that I like Berkeley–I am no hippie. I am a moderate in a town of left wing activists who don’t believe in prisons (free the prisoners!), and protest at the drop of a hat.

(Though in college, I did participate in protests–my mom calling me frantically, “Don’t get arrested!”). I protested 187. I remember ruining a perfectly good suede coat protesting in the rain.

( And if you drive by campus often enough, you’ll run into a student protest every so often).

This town is good for me, and I hope I am good in return. I grew up with many many rules in a conservative town and Berkeley is like the good mate who is in many ways the opposite of me, helping me to move out of my comfort zone and embrace more of life. I love that the town keeps me in my place, that I cannot get groceries without running into a homeless person-when I give my change or dollar, I am paying my tithe to society, and I am consciously taking note of my own privilege.