Trying New Things - Part II - One Thing Leads to Another

They say the garden is a metaphor for life.

I'm convinced that pie was invented by a gardener who had too much ugly fruit about to spoil. 

Last summer, I planted three tomato starters and finally had success. I had an abundance of cherry tomatoes at my community garden bed and a coworker who brought shopping bags of her tomato harvest to the break room. We also started to have heat waves of 110 degrees and I began to wonder: how do you sun dry tomatoes?  Next thing I knew, I was watching YouTube videos of handsome Italian chefs preserving tomatoes many different ways. I experimented with some of them. Them meaning tomatoes...not Italian chefs. 

My preferred method was to dry my tomatoes in the oven overnight. They taste like candy! Once I learned that dehydrating is so easy and brings out such intense flavor, I started to dehydrate everything. You almost can’t screw it up.  It’s a great way to not waste fruits and vegetables that are starting to wilt. And the flavors are much better than packaged store-bought. 

Once I had all this dehydrated food, I looked for ways to add them to recipes. My favorite recipe was to sauté zucchini, peppers and garlic, then put them with the dried tomatoes and a little olive oil into the food processor. 

Then came the office plants. Mid-summer, my desk moved next to a window in the office. The first thing I did was to  buy a few indoor plants. This was new territory for me. At first they all thrived, then they began to fail. To save them, I clipped a healthy part and stuck it in water. Roots sprouted quickly and suddenly I had new "free" plants! This is propagating - another new thing! The minute I discovered free plants, I began to carry scissors in my purse so that I could take clippings of anything I wanted along the road or from other people’s gardens. 

If you can picture me collecting clippings everywhere and sticking them in yogurt containers and empty bottles, you may wonder: what will you do with all these plants? Rogue gardening. I will stick a plant in the ground anywhere to see if it will grow. You can fill in empty little spaces with cute plants. You just have to be OK with going out of your way to water them and to experience a lot of failure. 

And then....somewhere in the middle of all this propagating, planting and harvesting, we adopted a load of carnivorous plants when Greg’s niece and her husband moved out of state and had to leave them behind. We had no idea what we were taking on. We got two trays of plants, books and a shopping bag with accessories (magnifying glass, watering bottles, misters, etc). We immediately learned that these sensitive plants don’t like the chemicals in our tap water, so I buy them filtered water at the grocery store. They want to be misted as often as possible and they are the thirstiest plants you’ve ever seen so the filtered water goes fast. 

Fortunately Liane worked with these plants at the Conservatory of Flowers and gave us lots of good advice. The plants are doing really well, which is ironic. I quickly killed the hardy indoor office plants that supposedly needed little light or water. But these sensitive high maintenance carnivorous plants are very happy. We are doing our best to give them a rain forest environment in our dry California living room. 

Yes - I shop and water and mist so that Larry, Moe and Curly can enjoy a spa and gourmet meal every day.  I don't have a spa. I don't even have a bathtub in our new house, just a shower. Technically we do have a bathtub, but it's outside in the middle of the garden near the hose. Wait...my tub is outdoors but my plants get to bathe indoors. Something is wrong!

So the garden is a perfect metaphor for life. You start with one plot with a few outdoor plants and next thing you know, you've got plants and food all over the place and all kinds of things that keep them alive or make them taste good. One thing leads to another. Some things thrive, others wilt. You tackle the pests. With stupidity and perseverance, you move the same compost pile four times to get it to the right spot. You try to control the weeds which will never be under control. You pride yourself on growing the best tomato you've ever tasted and you realize you just killed your cucumbers. And you can't wait to start all over again.