Abundance

Well, it's day three on Mommingblog and already I'm having the urge to write about something that has nothing to do with my child. Or does it?

I'm from the East coast, and while I love the East coast, and think about moving back there often, one thing I would really miss about Northern California is the abundance of delicious food. I'm one of those types who wants organic vegetables and meat and eggs in her life, and we're lucky to live in a place that has a very small gardening space. When we initially moved in, I think we pictured a tomato plant and a few heads of kale.

But after attending a lecture and presentation by urban farmers Novella Carpenter and Willow Rosenthal, who wrote The Essential Urban Farmer, I realized that I could plant my 6-foot-by-3-foot-bed to full capacity.

Witness: we now have collard greens, chard, Chinese broccoli, a small crop of green onions, a Lilliputian field of salad greens, a tomato plant, lots of parsley and arugula, a cucumber plant, two pots of squash, some anemic beets, and a miniature field of carrots which we have begun to harvest!

It occurred to me that the yield we might get from this small urban garden would be enough to trade. So I promptly put up an ad in the "barter/trade" section of our local list serv, and two--TWO!--people want to trade organic eggs for whatever we've got in our garden. And, in putting the offer out there, I also received:

1. An email from a woman who said she too wants to trade for eggs, and to let her know if we have too many (yeah right) because she has Meyer lemons; and

2. An email from a woman asking me to come by and help her with her garden.

The latter is sort of funny, since I am very much making this up as I go along; to #1, though, I responded, "what if we traded Meyer lemons for preserved Meyer lemons?" My husband B and are I eager to make some more of the delicious, salty, tangy, outrageous preserved Meyer lemons we made last year. It got to the point where I was eating them with every meal, in hummus, in lentil soup, in my pasta--yowsers. But we don't have any lemons. And this woman said yes.

I'm kind of an old-fashioned person and an old-fashioned mother, and I love that L. is growing up with this kind of abundance, and this kind of community, around him. In fact, just this morning, on his way to the bagel shop with his Dad, the neighbor stopped him and asked L. if he wanted to pick some boysenberries. The father-son team returned home with two punnets of fuschia melt-in-your-mouth berries. I think we'll enjoy them for dinner--along with a bunch of carrots, a few anemic beets, and a small salad.




--Susie