I have a Black Thumb, but a Green Hammer

The whole question of becoming more resilient always seems to start with growing our own food. With good reason, since without water and food, everything else is eventually moot.

But I am not a gardener. And no matter how many times I have tried, I have not learned to enjoy growing plants, or gotten any better at it.

I often believe in a natural division of labor. It certainly worked for my late wife Trish and I: I built her gardens, she grew stuff in them, I cooked the stuff, and together we ate it. (And evaluated my experimental recipes for disposing of the inevitable garden excess, such as the Twenty Pounds of Green Tomatoes Salsa.)

We were both seriously satisfied, and grateful to each other. I still can see Trish bent over in between her rows of plants, happy, involved and grounded in a way I never understood. I enjoyed helping her harvest, but she was nourished by all the parts of gardening.

(So much so that I got Trish her own chipper shredder for an anniversary present, and she was deeply pleased. Now she could make her own mulch!)

Well, I am not nourished by gardening. It actually drives me a little crazy. Which is why it will not be one of my contributions to resilience.

Oxalis

Because I have realized that I work best in a 1:1 ratio of physical work and result. When I lift up a big rock and carry it across the yard, I am happy that it stays put until I choose to move it again. When I cut a board and nail it to another board, I am truly pleased that they stay together, unless I screwed up and need to redo the joint. When I demolish a wall, I am so satisfied that the drywall and lathe and plaster stay in the debris bags and don’t climb back onto the walls overnight.

My experience of gardening is that crook neck squash that you spend weeks growing, that look so healthy and perfect for picking tomorrow, can become shriveled gray blobs by dawn. That when you (naturally) fertilize and feed your soil, oxalis invites itself to the feast, turning your garden green--but not in a fun way.  That your hours of weeding are rendered useless as soon as you water your garden again, given the regenerative capabilities of oxalis. And that basically, nature loves a stockpile, so the more you grow, the more bugs and slugs and invader plants and fungus and deer and not-so-cute-bunnies come to eat it and undo all your work.

Please believe me. I know we need to grow our own food, and that gardening is a challenging, essential task for resilience.

But it isn’t going to be my challenging, essential task.

***

So as part of this project, I will be blogging about my search for how my passions and skills can be as effective and useful as growing food.

Because I can’t be the only terminally non-gardening person concerned about self-reliance and resilience.

Right?

If At First You Don't Succeed -

There are lots of folks out there who love to garden. My partner TJ and I have really bad joints, and never developed the love of it. Still, we are drawn to the idea of using our large corner lot for food production, and we very much want control over what we eat.

Six years ago we reached out and found nine other folks to share a garden effort here. We hoped that scale would allow us to make a great wonderful organic garden, and offer some gardener a part-time paid position. We all chipped in and set up a large 6-bed garden with a landscape gardener's help. We convinced a horticulture prof at a local community college to use us as a "how to double-dig" field trip, and our beds were ready!

But despite its size and everyone's enthusiasm, we went through 5 gardeners, and wound up struggling to do the tending, and harvesting ourselves. TJ mostly. They tell us it was one of the worst growing seasons that year. Even experienced gardeners were wringing their hands.

Sigh – our lovely first effort went to seed - oxalis to be precise.

Take two - 
Then we met a young guy in a garden group who worked with a small urban farmer in the outskirts of Richmond, and wanted to start one of his own. The idea of using our yard as an urban farmlette intrigued him and he agreed to do it all for both his household and ours.

A local gardening group member "lent us her chickens" to clean the areas of weeds, while "the girls" got their healthy greens. It seems a lovely date. We'd get to hear the lovely burble of happy chickens grazing.  Seems the ladies didn't feel secure enough in the new yard to eat, but it was a try.

Then we gathered some strong arms and they hand turned large long rows and deep beds. We installed a drip watering system and timer. But in his inexperience, he had turned the oxalis in deeply, and then watered it. As the veggies stuck up their meek tiny heads up, the oxalis overwhelmed them and took over. Try as he might, he could find no way to get beyond them. He slipped away in disgrace and left us with a thick lawn of weeds.

We collected cardboard from recycling bins and free chips through Christmas, and after four months, hired  a team to cover the oxalis with 6" of  interlocked cardboard and another 5 or so inches of chips.


Neat chip covered yard again, but empty.

Take three – ( It's important to us, you see.)

We found a new neighbor couple that love to get dirt under their nails, but don't have any dirt where they live a block away. So we are starting a simple, simple garden - a sunny box and a shady box with recycled wood, city compost and seed. Perhaps a worktable and a cold frame too. We provide water, and land, they take the lead as designers and stewards. Our food wishes are similar and we're all excited about it being sweet and small, ... and do-able.

The four of us toured some gardens and saw lovely flowers and herbs. Such color, texture and variety of heights and views... with bits of art throughout the yard. At one place they showed us a terrific water catchment system and we know just where ours could live discretely tucked away.

I'm excited.

Wait, wait. Start simply. It will come, Loni.

We sometimes dream of our own chickens and plan where the coop might be. We see a place for more beds and a future spot to sit in the sun amongst the lovely food and watch it grow.Play some music.

But later, Loni. Later.
Simple will be lovely.

Well the couple backed out last week. Sigh. Not even the start of a simple garden. They were just too concerned they'd get overwhelmed since they both has brand new jobs and didn't know the demands. We understood. Gardens can do that. We know.

Take four - 
Will we find a housemate who loves to get into the soil? Will someone  intertwine what our yard can offer with their love of warm earth and baby sprouts?

But later, Loni. Later.

In Search of an Honest Man

Okay so we’ve determined a miniscule budget on purpose - $25,000 -  to be able to add three housemate to our household!

I’m determined to save the rest for my business' growth. I also need to see if I can really squeeze the dime as we all must these days. DIY time wherever possible. We will do all the priming, painting and finishes and reuse everything we can. Good for the planet, good for the pocketbook.

But still we must move a laundry, split the great room into new work studios  for TJ and for me, add a new bath and master closet, renew an upstairs tub, add cabinetry and another fridge to kitchen for the housemates, relocate hallway and pantry storage, add a new deck railing and roof, and spruce up the outside. Oh, and also cordon off a section of the backyard with a low fence for our pooch Dash, so a housemate doesn't inadvertently let him out of our gate when they park their bikes. Oh, a lockable bike rack too.


( add planned AFTER house sketch)

I no longer have the shoulders or knees for rehab myself though I tell you, I yearn to do a little tear-out. Oh the pleasure of a wrecking bar. You can’t imagine how just plain good it feels to yank a wall down! Plus I no longer have my hubby General Contractor/builder to coordinate the order of workmen. Or a sense of what this all would cost here in the Bay Area. I need a GC. 

Sigh.