onions and tears

Today I put in a few hundred seedlings from the onion family - four fifty-foot rows, including leeks, shallots and red and white onions. Got the first little break-in sunburn of the season.

It was an appropriate day to plant onions. On Friday I found out about the death of my childhood best friend, Sara's, daughter Anna. A beautiful 23-year-old who was studying dentistry (going into the family business, as it were), I hadn't met her more than a handful of times. It was horrible news to hear. Sara and I haven't been been in each others lives for years, not since she moved up to the junior high and left me behind in sixth grade. Kicked me to the curb like dirt off her shoes. But our families went to the same church and were bound together by a web of shared experiences - childhood joys and secrets and grievances.

Dottie, Sara's mother, was for many years my personal definition of beauty. I had wanted to be as gracious and artistic (and tall) as she was, without any real hope of attaining any of those characteristics.

So the news was heart-stopping. I have a daughter, too. How would I feel if the unthinkable came to pass? Behind the profound sadness for Sara's loss, I clutched to my heart a pathetic, secret gratefulness that my daughter was okay.

As I planted these onions in the garden I knew, with the certainty that every mother has, that Sara would have changed places with Anna in a heart beat. That's how long it would have taken her to decide, the time between one beat of her heart and the next. If she could call Anna's life back and replace it with her own I know she would.

I always hated onions as a child; they were too sharp on my tongue. As an adult, I've learned to love the way their sharpness adds contrast to the foods I cook. Some may say that the sharpness of grief and loss brings greater meaning to life, spices the stew. The coward in me would gladly embrace a bland, tasteless and safe life rather than one in which a daughter could be lost.

a garden begins in the dead of winter

Oh, it took so long to publish that first post! The photos didn't quite work the way I wanted and I kept thinking that I'd figure it out, but no. Now the garden is frozen over; the poor kale plants stand out there in their shrouds of snow, the only things not laid low by winter. Our cats (six of them) are spread out all over the couches, sleeping with an abandon I envy. Nothing sleeps more thoroughly than a cat. So while I sit up, awake, they mock me with their snores.

Little is left of last year's harvest - three pumpkins, which have finally(!) turned orange, wait for me to sacrifice them for their hull-less seeds. And maybe pie. I've been hoarding them for a day when I need a boost from the garden. Quite a number of small, very sweet potatoes remain in the pantry where they keep company with a motley selection of squash. And the shelves hold jars of canned tomatoes, green beans, fruit preserves and my first ever fruit butters. (Oh, the apple-plum is everything I hoped for!)

Now (later) the pumpkins have been cooked, pureed and frozen and the seeds dried enough to store. I think I'll save them until the first garden working day. I'll toast them in a dry cast iron pan until they pop (almost like popcorn) and sprinkle them with tamari. It will be a way to connect last season with the new one. I cooked some of the puree into a crustless pie and discovered why some pumpkins(not this one) are specific for pie. The flavor is thin and the texture is light weight

I'm behind in ordering seeds for this year. After an unprecedented vacation that took me all the way back to my freshman year in college, there's a lot of catching up to do. And I need to come up with about $400 to get the main order placed. I want a whole weekend by myself to curl up with the Johnny's catalog. When the cold winds blow I need to look at some of that garden porn: full color pics of perfect vegetables. I will probably order most of the same varieties, but I have to work on this year's crop rotation and work out quantities. Seems there is some software I could buy to make this easier; just have to remember where I read about it.

Half a dozen seed catalogs lie around the house, filled with tempting, full-color pictures and mouth-watering prose. My favorite one is Johnny's - they're fast, the phone staff knows their stuff and they have great pictures. My friend, Laura, loves Fedco - they are something of a seed savers cooperative, which I can respect, but the catalog is in black and white and their listings are in an arcane order which makes things infuriating to look up. They don't take credit cards and you can't order by phone. In other words, they are purer than God. This keeps costs down, but you have to be methodical and well-planned to make good use of them. Not so great for the impulse buyer who needs those great pictures to kick her into gear.

This weekend, when I should be ordering those seeds, Ken and I will be witnessing Clifton & Jody's wedding. They're getting married on Valentine's Day, in the woods, on horseback. I'm looking for Carharts to borrow. We'll all spend the night at the Double JJ Ranch (Are they over compensating here? Maybe they should call it the Double JJ Ranch Ranch) Clifton and Jody are honorary members of our family; they come to Thanksgiving, spend the night on New Years and are members of the garden. They've been together for fifteen years. When they told Jordan, Jody's son who is studying in Japan this year, at first he thought they were joking.

Now that my winter vacation is over it's time to get in gear. The seed order awaits!

pick a place to start

The garden is almost done for the growing season. There's still plenty of food, like two rows of small potatoes, hardly worth digging up except that then I'd have to (heaven forbid) BUY potatoes. The red and green romaine lettuce is small, but there's 150 feet of it. Even after a dozen mornings of frost the broccoli is still kicking out shoots. Broccoli is my first garden love; it's the hardest worker and keeps going right up until a hard freeze. And there are a few scraggly leeks and scallions, itty-bitty cabbages and lots and lots of kale.

Kale was the stepchild of the garden this summer. There was a period between the time when it got too hot for the lettuce and spinach and the point when we were 'rolling in zucchini' when kale and broccoli and green onions were the main deal. Everybody loves broccoli, green onions are great to cook with, but no one knew what to do with the kale. We asked each other for recipes without success.

Years ago, when taking a class called 'Your Creative Process,' one of my granola-eating, new age teachers told me that the perfect recipe for kale was to saute onions and garlic in olive oil, throw mounds of chopped kale into the pan, cover with a lid, lower the heat and let it wilt for 20-30 minutes. Since this person liked collard greens and mustard greens and all those other icky, bitter greens, I never worked up the nerve to try it. I talked the recipe up to all the members of the garden, hoping someone would cook it and tell me how it really tasted, but no matter how enthusiastically I promoted no one ever reported back. As soon as the other vegetables started to kick in, Terrie and Amy whispered that I could skip the kale in their shares. Poor kale, all it did was grow like crazy.

Later I came across David Leite, food blogger (leitesculinaria.com) and author of The New Portugeuese Table. Turns out kale is the national food of Portugal! It's a key component in their famed Caldo Verde (green soup) and much more. Next summer there will be Portuguese recipes galore and root vegetables ready to pick up the slack so the kale doesn't have to take such abuse.

The garlic's in for next year. You plant garlic in the fall, the full moon after the first frost, usually October in Michigan. On the last group day of the season, while the rest of us pulled up plastic mulch, Helen and Ann planted garlic: twenty bulbs of hard necked cloves, twenty bulbs of soft neck cloves. About one row's worth was left to plant at the end of the day. I said I'd finish up later in the week, but when I went back out to look (ok, two or three weeks later), I couldn't see where the rows were. There'd been days of rain so I couldn't see where the dirt had been disturbed by planting. Ann said they'd put in five or six rows, but I could only find flags marking a possible two.

I thought I'd gotten plenty of garlic for next year, but I started to panic that we might run short. If you mess up on garlic in the fall, there's not so much you can do about it in the spring. If we had three 50 ft rows, cloves 6 inches apart, for 100 plants per row, that would only make 300 bulbs for next year. Divide by 12 shares and that's a maximum of 25 bulbs per share if everything comes up. Take away 40-50 bulbs to have seed for next year and it's only about 20 bulbs per share. I'd wanted to have much more. A couple of weeks later Helen came and put the last row in (Yea, Helen!) She says she thinks there are at least 6 rows, but I can only see where three are sending up sprouts (not counting the last one planted). Well, 400 plants is a little better.

There's lots left to do in the garden. Matt, my nephew, is spreading composted cow manure (the good stuff) and will till it into the soil next week. The place to start for a good garden is always 'in the dirt'. Without strong soil the plants can't thrive. My garden has large grained soil, low in organic matter, poor at holding water. I never have to worry about too much rain because it flows right through, a benefit last spring when we had water up the wazoo. Most problems with vegetable production come back to a lack of nutrients. (I'm embarrassed to confess that I've never had a soil test done. Next task on my list: find the soil test box I bought in the spring and use it.)