Optimistic asparagus -- and a hornet's nest

Yesterday, the day before a storm that felt like winter blew into our valley, I was watering the kitchen garden. It was election day, and despite my nervous excitement, I wasn't glued to the news. Hanging out and tending my plants--those that survived the last few hard freezes--is much more soothing than constantly pushing the "refresh" button on my internet browser to check for news. It was too early for election results, anyway.

So rather than making myself crazy staring at my electronic connection to the virtual larger world, I went outside into the real larger world--nature--and spent time in the garden.

I was giving the asparagus bed what may be its last soak for quite a while when I discovered that the plants which I wrote about in a post about optimistic gardeners last May have apparently decided it's spring all over again. The two largest clumps of asparagus have sprouted shoots as fat as my thumb, and one shoot is already several inches tall. Those asparagus plants think it's spring, not a few short weeks from winter.

The way the asparagus life cycle usually works, the roots, which are the larder storing the sugars produced with the previous summer's sunlight, send up shoots as the soil warms in spring. These fat stalks emerge from the soil and turn green in sunlight, ready to grow tall and do their solar energy harvesting, using sunlight to power a chemical process of making sugar in order to replace the fuel used for the orgy of cell division that pushed them up from underground.

New shoots follow these pioneers, handily producing more food, and thus more fat shoots which eventually mature into tall and feathery stalks, until the days quit growing longer. Then the plant goes into pass-on-my-genes-for-the-future mode and the feathery branches sprout tiny flowers (males and females on separate shoots, relying on the wind to assist in the act of fertilization). About that time--early summer, usually--the plant figures it has stored all the food it needs, and its shoots brown off as the roots go dormant. The following spring, when the soil warms again, they begin the lickety-split cell division that pushes new succulent shoots up into the light and air.

But it's mid-fall here in the southern Rocky Mountains, not spring. I don't know if these asparagus shoots can survive the freezing weather ahead, but I know this. Their effort, optimistic as it may seem, is the asparagus equivalent of believing in a world of possibilities. And last night's election certainly demonstrated to me the power of seemingly small actions like cell division--or voting--to work miracles.

So I'm going to watch those asparagus shoots. They may have something to teach me.

Oh, and the hornet's nest? "The Patriotic Thing to Do," my latest op-ed for High Country News landed on the front page of their web site and stirred up quite a hornet's nest of comments. (It also went out to 80-some newspapers with their Writers on the Range syndicate.) Here's how it opens:

Maybe I’m crazy, but I think that paying taxes is patriotic. And I’m tired of hearing Americans, especially Westerners, whine about their tax burden.

What does that have to do with the community of the land? Read it and see! (Here's a clue: it's about the nature of community.)

Finding comfort in the garden

Driving home from Denver on Wednesday afternoon following Richard's second round of surgery for his "beautiful carcinoma" (the tumor that revealed his bladder cancer), I was numb, so exhausted after nearly eleven hours at the hospital the previous day that I couldn't even get excited about the good news: his surgeon reported no sign of tumor regrowth, meaning July's surgery may have removed the entire carcinoma. I knew that was good news, I knew I should feel relieved, but I couldn't. I just didn't have relief in me.

The weather was blue-sky balmy, the aspens were glowing in the shafts of light slanting through the gathering cumulus clouds, and the dotted mosaic of shrubs, the wild roses, currants, sumac, raspberries, chokecherries, and thickets of shrub oak had tossed off their summer green pigments, revealing the season's accumulation of sugar-synthesized colors in burnt gold, scarlet, rust, crimson, lemon yellow, burgundy, bronze, and orange.

This has been the most glorious fall for leaf color in recent memory, and our route home took us through some of the classic leaf-peeper drives at the height of the season. And I didn't care. Oh, I went through the motions. I looked, I exclaimed; I pointed to particularly picture-postcard perfect mountainsides. But I couldn't muster the energy stop the car, get out and collect a few leaves, listen to the sounds and sniff the smells, compose and shoot a few photos. I just wanted to get home to my garden.

I usually spend our two-and-a-half-hour commute to and from the urban part of Colorado delighting the wildness: watching eagerly for red-tailed hawks and golden eagles spiraling high overhead on long wings, scanning for antelope, prairie dogs, and migrating long-billed curlews in the high-elevation prairie, and searching for bighorn sheep on the rocky cliffs and wildflowers the whole way.

Not Wednesday afternoon though. I just wanted to get home to the reclaimed piece of industrial property near downtown in the small town where we live, unload the car, put away the groceries, and go outside to the kitchen garden. I needed the company of the plants I've nurtured from tiny seed to sprawling adult, the lives I tend every day and whose leaves, seeds and fruits nurture us in our daily meals.

As I moved among them, watering the sun-dried soil, discovering that the deer gate had blown open in the prints in the gravel path and the downed tomatoes that bore the unmistakable marks of mule deer teeth, finding a striped Romanesco squash ready to pick, a golden beam of pumpkin nestled among dark leaves, and sweet strawberries, I began to settle. I don't know what it is about the company of the plants that calms me, but it does. It as if being at home in my garden returns me to myself, slides my fretting mind back into the familiar case of my brain, my troubled emotions back into the soothing pulse of respiration and heart-beat, and returns my restless spirit to the comforting embrace of muscle and and skin. Back at home with my plants, I am once again at home in me too.

As I watered, Richard came outside with a bowl to help harvest. We picked up half-eaten tomatoes, plucked more ripe ones from the vines, gathered strawberries and squash, and went inside, holding hands. I took a deep breath, and let the air out slowly, feeling myself relax. I smiled.

Home at last in the familiar community of our own landscape - and best of all, home together.

Heritage plants—here after we're gone

June is peony season in the domesticated part of our yard, and this June, despite a cold and dry and windy spring, our peonies have outdone themselves. Here in the high-desert where water is short, I use garden water carefully (we get an average of ten inches of precipitation a year, rain and snow included, and this year's total so far has been a measly 1.84 inches). My priority is our kitchen garden, a set of raised beds that currently is producing more bags than we can eat (to our friends benefit!) of French Market and Monet's Garden lettuce mixes in an array of shapes and flavors from tangy and spicy to licorice-sweet, plus the wrinkled dark green leaves of Catalina spinach, City Lights chard with its stems in neon-bright colors, sweet and juicy Fort Laramie strawberries, and enough cilantro and dill to share with a local restaurant. (Thank you, Rene Shepherd of Rene's Garden Seeds!) The only other part of the yard that gets regular water is my peony bed, a raised bed that lines one edge of the wall containing the kitchen garden.

Why peonies here at 7,000 feet elevation in a valley so dry that cactus and fringed sage are more at home than trees? Because these long-lived plants take both Richard and me back to our childhoods--and earlier. They are part of our gardening heritage. When I advise gardeners on what to plant, especially those new to the arid, high-elevation West where the weather can range from hot and dry to a hard freeze to wind gusting with near-hurricane force to deluges of hail--and that's just in June--I always suggest they walk their neighborhood and see what is growing in the long-established yards, the neglected corners, and the old farmsteads where the houses are long gone but a few plants may remain outlining the foundations. If lilac shrubs still thrive, for instance, or banks of daylilies, or ranks of bearded iris, you know those plants will grow in your yard. The plants that have out-lived us, or the ones that live on because gardeners share seeds, cuttings, bulbs, or rhizomes are the heritage plants of any given place, the domesticated species that have made themselves at home in that particular climate and landscape.

But peonies in the high-desert? These perennials sprout clumps of leaves so early in spring that they come up tinted red to protect them from sun and frost, gradually push upwards on graceful stems, and then sprout buds oozing nectar from their seams and promptly attracting ants by the score. Helped by the ants in ways we haven't yet figured out, those buds bloom into fist-sized and larger masses of petals in white and pink and deep rose-red. Peonies bloomed through the springs of my childhood, their sweet scent drifting across the back yard into my bedroom window. And they bloomed in spring in Richard's childhood, including at his Grandma Lizzie's farmhouse near Possum Valley, Arkansas. They are rooted plants, each tuber capable of living a century or more, and they sulk when transplanted, taking several years to store enough energy to bloom again.

So when we settled here in south-central Colorado, in the town where Richard lived in early childhood, and my brother, Bill and sister-in-law Lucy gave us a gift certificate to White Flower Farm, the mail-order nursery whose catalog is a wonderland of plants, I knew where that gift would go: peonies (with a backdrop of summer-blooming lilies). I ordered a collection of unlabeled varieties harvested from the fields of a peony grower going out of business. Richard built me the bed, and I planted the tubers that fall. And Miss Alice, my mother-in-law, gave me a tuber from the peonies that grew at her childhood home in rural Arkansas. Putting those knobby brown tubers into the soil was one of my ways of rooting: as I patted the earth around one, I promised them silently I would stay to watch them bloom, spring after spring.

Just last week, my writing buddy Janet Riehl of the blog-magazine Riehlife mentioned that her father, Erwin Thompson, grew up on a farm that produced peonies. So I sent him some shots of our blooms. He wrote back a vivid remembrance of farming from the days when peonies were the market flower for Decoration Day, the June holiday when families brought cans of flowers to the cemetery to decorate the graves of their dead. On Decoration Day, we tidied up the cemetery, cutting back the long grass, trimming the shrubs, cleaning off the stones, and placing cut flowers--especially the blowsy heads of peonies, which loosed their sweet scent on the air. And had picnics. Decoration Day is long-gone, as is the farmhouse where my mother-in-law grew up, but the peonies I call "Old Home Place" bloom in white profusion in our garden a thousand miles from southern Arkansas (and 6,900 feet higher) in company with a whole bed of other peonies in blush-pink and vivid rose-red.

There's a vase of peonies on the dining table near where I write, including the pink ones pictured above. When I pass by, they loose a trail of sweetness with a hint of spice, that fragrance that only peonies can make.

Making lemons into lemonade

Richard and I drove to Denver last Tuesday to prepare for his surgery for bladder cancer. First came a day at the VA Hospital--a wonderful place despite the many difficult cases it serves, because the staff has a culture of caring and competence. (It's what healthcare should be, with equal emphasis on "health" and "care.") After six hours and lots of tests, we found out that he's very healthy, but for that "beautiful" carcinoma with its filmy petals waving gently in the current of his bladder and for the fact that his blood is too thin--it's not clotting well. So he's got to give up his daily pot of green tea and give his blood time to thicken up, and his surgery has been rescheduled for July 1st.

Hearing his surgeon say that she was pushing back the surgery for a month was like sucking on lemons. We just wanted it over with. But you can only feel sorry for yourself for so long. So we made lemonade: We spent the rest of the week we planned for his surgery in Denver with my folks and Molly, our daughter, who had already flown in from San Francisco. It wasn't a vacation. But we did take all five of us in our Subaru Forester on a picnic to Barr Lake, northeast of Denver, where we walked a boardwalk over a lapping marsh--my Mom clumping along in her special boot after foot surgery and my Dad spotting birds passing on the breeze. We saw more orioles in the spring-green cottonwood trees lining the shoreline there than I've ever seen at one time in my life. And Molly and Richard spent a morning exploring art galleries. We took walks through the Capitol Hill neighborhood where we stayed, admiring the architectural details in the old stone mansions and 1920s apartment houses. We smelled irises and roses and lilacs in gardens growing from spring into summer.

And when we returned home, our kitchen garden was bursting. We picked a huge bag of spinach along with the first harvest of mixed lettuce. When we sat down to dinner that night our thoughts were not of bladder cancer or postponed surgery, but of the culture of caring at the VA Hospital, the chatter of orioles, and of tender new greens flavored by our very own patch of ground.

It seems to me that being healthy is not just about the technology and pharmacology of modern medicine. It's about how you take what comes, whether you use the lemons for lemonade, or let them lie bitter on your tongue. It's about taking joy where you can, and never forgetting to stop and smell the lilacs drooping over the garden wall, to walk hand in hand with the people you love, and to savor the taste of new lettuce, fresh from the soil.

Gardeners: optimistic by definition

"It's easier to deal with crises like this in the spring," a friend said today after hearing about my husband Richard's cancer. "It's such an optimistic time."

I puzzled over her remark all day. This evening, I stepped out into the kitchen garden. The wind was blowing hard up the valley, the air temperature was plummeting, and the storms that might have brought us moisture had passed without dropping the rain or snow we sorely need. It's been an extraordinarily spring dry so far. Today marks seven weeks since our last measurable precipitation--and two weeks since the doctor scoping Richard's bladder said cheerfully, "And that's a big carcinoma."

There's nothing optimistic about this spring, I thought with distinct grumpiness.

Then I looked at the asparagus bed--and counted six fat new spears poking up through the dry soil.


Not only is our valley sliding into drought, the season has been bitterly cold too. Last week the nighttime temperatures dipped to 22 degrees F--twice.

And still the asparagus spears are pushing up from their octopus-like skirts of roots a foot deep, headed unerringly toward light and the chance to produce more food and make new life as surely as their kind have done every spring for millions of years.

As I turned to head back into the house, I passed the tomato bed. One of the plants cocooned inside the insulating tepee-shaped walls-o-water caught my eye--a costoluto, for you heritage tomato fans. It boasted half a dozen tiny flower buds, readying itself for the warmer weather and the buzz-pollinating bumblebees it is sure will come.


I shook my head in wonder. That's optimism, I thought.

And then, as if a light had switched on in my brain, I understood my friend's comment. Spring is an optimistic time: here in the temperate latitudes of the northern hemisphere, life awakens from its frozen slumber, and pushed by instincts far more experienced than mine, sprints into the lengthening days, aiming for light and renewal.

I'm a gardener: I should understand optimism. I'm the one who presses tiny tomato seeds into damp soil of seedling pots in early March, when here at 7,000 feet elevation in the Southern Rockies, the days are still short and dark, and the nights long and frozen. I'm the one who watches the rows of pots each day for the first sign of green, exulting when the pairs of slender cotyledons push their way out of the seed. I plant in the belief that spring will come. And it does.

It occurs to me that I can rely on that same optimism that leads me to plant tomatoes in late winter to cope with Richard's cancer. Only in this case, it's not a seed I want to sprout, but a carcinoma I hope will be destroyed. I'm after stopping that growth, not encouraging it. But that's gardening too: cutting off a diseased limb to save the tree it grows from.

The optimism my friend meant, I think, is about believing in the continuing cycle of life. It's not hard to apply that to Richard and his bladder cancer. He's blessed with caring people dealing with him and they're upbeat about his prognosis. So I'll just press my seeds of hope and rejuvenation in the soil of the universe, in the belief that spring will flower for him, time and again.

Spring spinach for localvores

It didn't snow today here at 7,000 feet in the southern Rockies, so after last night's silvery coat of frost burned off in the morning sun, we took the row covers off the spinach in our kitchen garden. The crinkly green leaves are just starting to lift off the warm surface of the soil, but they're not quite big enough to pick yet. After an unusually long and cold winter, I'm eager to get back to eating food grown from my own soil.

I planted the spinach last fall just in time for them to sprout and grow a few tiny leaves before the weather got too cold and the days too short for them to do more than hang on under the insulation of the row covers. But now that the equinox is almost here, and the days are lengthening relatively fast, my spinach plants are perking up. I'll thin them this weekend, and by next week, I'll pick a few leaves for our lunch time salads. The localvore in me is getting impatient to taste my terroir again!

It's time to plant the sugar snap peas too, plus some other spring greens. Last year we discovered chervil with its lacy leaves and delicate licorice flavor - it's a wonderful addition to sandwiches and salads. This year I'm going to plant tat soi (also called bok choi), turnips (I'll pick them tiny to steam greens and all), and I'm trying gala mache, also called corn salad or lamb's lettuce as well.

As always, I rely on plantswoman and cook Renee Shepherd of Renee's Seeds for my gourmet kitchen garden seeds. She knows gardening, and she knows flavor and cooking, and the combination makes for unbeatable seed varieties and prodigious and yummy harvests. Thanks for satisfying this localvore's hunger, Renee!

Anticipating spring in the kitchen garden

Another winter blizzard has just blown right over our valley, leaving ten inches of snow at Monarch, our local ski area, but none here in town. We only got the wind, huge blustery gusts lofting dirt and trash into the air as the storm blew down-canyon and out onto the Plains.

No matter the weather, I'm thinking spring. I've ordered seeds for our kitchen garden from my favorite seed purveyor, Rene's Garden Seeds. You can buy cheaper seeds, but if you love the flavors and colors and textures of food, you can't go wrong with Rene's seeds. She's a cook as well as a horticulturist, and she picks her varieties for the table and the garden.

Last year we grew three varieties of tomatoes from Rene's offerings: small, sweet red and yellow pear tomatoes, Romas for cooking, and crimson carmello, a heritage ribbed type with gorgeous crimson flesh that is low in acid and bursts with flavor. At the end of the season (late September here in the Rockies at 7,000 feet elevation), we brought in 72 pounds of tomatoes off of eight plants to ripen in the house. We were eating fresh tomatoes until December. This year I'm going to grow those three varieties again, plus Rene's new "Summer Feast" trio of heirloom tomatoes: 'Black Krim,' 'Sweet Persimmon,' and 'Italian Costoluto.' I'll start the seeds indoors in early March in flats on a heat mat in our bedroom, my defacto greenhouse because it gets the best sun. By late April, those sprouts be ready to go into the garden, each protected inside the insulating cone of its own wall-o-water.

Last year's kitchen garden got a little out of control (that's our Great Dane in last summer's garden above). Besides the tomatoes, we also grew three kinds of basil, tri-color beets, 'City Lights' chard with its neon-bright yellow, orange, pink, and crimson stems, peas, cilantro, four kinds of summer squash, including a buttery pale green hybrid between yellow crookneck and zucchini that was delicious even when the squashes hid from us and grew huge, broccoli, crisp and mild Mediterranean cucumbers, dill, mesculn lettuce blend, spicy stir-fry greens, spinach, pak choy, rhubarb, and strawberries. (We had asparagus and raspberries as well, but neither yielded much last year. It could have been the hot and dry spring followed by an unusually wet late summer.) We ate from the garden every day, savoring the treat of simply walking out the back door and picking our dinner, fresh and fed by the sun. (We don't use pesticides or synthetic fertilizers.)

When people ask me why we go to all the work to grow a kitchen garden, I want to take them outside and pick a sun-warmed yellow pear tomato and hand it to them. "Close your eyes and just taste it," I would say. Then 'd the smile grow on their face as the flavor explodes on their tongue. "That's why." It's not work, anyway. I do it for love: love of the smells and sounds and tastes of the food the garden produces, and of the community of plants and their partners - the swallows, hummingbirds, butterflies, native bees, and even the garter snake that burrows into the cool shade under the raised beds and eats the slugs and earwigs - that bring our garden alive.

I can hardly wait until those seed packets arrive. I can almost smell the tomatoes ripening.