When we were little, my dad used to grow potatoes and store them year-round in the crawlspace under the floor. My two sisters and I would fight when it was time to fetch taters, because the whole thing felt almost-exotic enough to be a C.S. Lewis fantasy childscape: we’d pull up the secret floor boards in the living room, lift up the second layer of plywood, and the dark, dank smell of the crawlspace would rise up. We’d assume the position: standing bolt upright with our arms straight up overhead, so my dad could grab us by the wrists and lower us into the darkness below. When we finished passing up potatoes, we’d then extend our arms overhead and get plucked up out of the potato cave and placed ever-so-gently back into the living room.

We never did find Narnia, but when I opened a mail-order box of seed potatoes today, the powdery, almost moldy-but-not-quite smell of cellared potatoes rushed out of the box, and it was as powerful of a portal back to my childhood as any magic wardrobe could ever be.

Don't get me wrong. I fed cows that became hamburgers without much heartache when I was little. So I'm not naive about food. But there is something heartbreaking about thinning seedlings, like these ghostly carrots-in-the-making. Barbara Kingsolver calls it the "virtuous green silence" of plants in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. And I totally get that.

But it works. Here's the last of the potatoes, first of the new lettuces:

 

 
 

 

Finally home for a weekend to tackle the garden. The potatoes are all that remain from the winter crops, but they’re blighted and spotty so I pulled the worst-looking one up because my curiosity got the best of me. Lo and behold, they worked! I forgot that potatoes are the most fun crop to harvest ever, because it’s like a treasure hunt under the soil. You dig around with your fingers or a fork or a trowel and scoop up earth and soil-crusted potatoes, and you never know how many are down there.

So after that episode of potato joy, we went to work irrigating. Our raised bed is about 5x10’, so we didn’t need much in the way of supplies. This local store is the holy grail of information on irrigation systems, and they were great with us because we had no idea what to do. The idea is that the drip irrigation delivers water right into the root zone (unlike overhead watering), so the soil is kept pretty consistently moist, instead of going through swings of wet wet wet from a big watering, then dry dry dry while I sometimes forget to water. We'll see.

And I highly suggest some refreshments throughout the project: 1) Mason jar with half beer, half ginger ale, 2) and jar with slices of oranges, limes or whatever you have on hand, stuffed with a bunch of fresh cut herbs. 

I love the misleading simplicity of fava bean recipes: Peel beans. Parboil for 1 minute. Rinse in cold water and slip beans from outer shell.

As if.

In reality, it took about 45 minutes to finally tease out a few tablespoons of glossy beans. They’re the vegetable equivalent of Russian dolls, if the dolls took months of sun and rain and then dropping them into a pot of boiling water to open.

Regular beans and strawberries and tomatoes all offer themselves up naked in the garden. But not favas. Their goodness is buried deep inside a foamy pod, and then inside a tough shell.

Pests stay far away. But not me. After shelling, I stewed these up with a little rosemary, garlic, olive oil. There wasn’t enough for a proper side dish, so I whirled it up in a food processor and dropped dollops on top of fish that my brother-in-law and sister made.

It's a crazy proposition, and surely wouldn't add up under the sensible scrutiny of a return-on-investment spreadsheet. But it was worth it. Because yesterday getting dinner ready, gratitude smelled like sun-warm vines in the garden and dirt caked to new leeks.

 

Forgive me, cat lovers. I respect the cat. But I don't respect the cat that doesn't respect my garden. Michael Pollan's article in yesterday's NYT magazine has inspired me to try and push my little veggie patch to greater productivty, so I meandered downstairs to take a gander this morning. It had been a week since I was away, but apparently that's plenty of time for the neighborhood cats to claim a corner as their new toilet.  The smell hit as soon as I stepped outside. I think it permanently nestled into every  fold of my brain. And little Almond Roccas clustered in the empty corner where I had already ripped up some bolted greens.

These cats will make way for the embolded urban garden. The litter box effect does not jibe with the vision I have of buried irrigation, copper flashing, and a luciously productive year-round garden. So they better step off the soil.

 

Hardy winter fava beans, leeks and beets are almost ready to be harvested and swapped out for the delicate spring stuff. I love the plants now that the rows are spilling into each other, looking bountiful just like Mr. McGregor’s garden.

But no little rabbit shoes amongst the cabbages and potatoes.

Off to Virginia with the sisters to see our parents for a few days.

Is there anything more alive and sunshine-y feeling than mist rising up when you're watering the veggie patch out back and the spring light hits green leaves so new and so tender that they're almost transparent?

More examples of being alive:
Mike to our little mutt puppy with her bright eyes:

Look at you, you're so alive right now you could fell an antelope.