I never managed to take pictures of the garden bathtub we’ve had for the last few months. Ours was no subject of a fancy realtor’s description but was actually a garden bathtub, with three waste baskets full of sprawling potato plants a sweet potato plant in a milk jug and a plastic bin of pea plants. Finally this past weekend, with Spring weather here (and hopefully here to stay for a bit), I moved all of this downstairs, some of it even outside.

The potatoes may be a wash. One potato had begun to stick out of the top of the soil, but there were no more in shallow soil. There may be many potatoes lower in the container, but we decided just to leave them be for now, after adding a little more dirt. If they don’t grow, there’s really not much harm done. We planted the last few potatoes in a batch of Yukon golds that seemed near the end of life anyway, so it was a crap-shoot anyway.

The sweet potato I grew from the end of a potato that had a couple of purple-tipped eyes on it. It started out in a little ramekin on our kitchen counter and ultimately grew well beyond the capacity of a topless gallon milk jug, fanning out its broad green leaves and digging its roots to the bottom of the jug. I planted it in a deep pot on the front porch yesterday. Even if it yields nothing, it’s been fun to watch it grow. Sweet potatoes really are lovely plants, especially early in their lives.

I think the peas too had outgrown their container. They crept throughout the shallow bin, a tangle of delicate stems and leaves, and I finally transplanted them tonight, after giving them some time in the sun yesterday. I also dropped a dozen or so unsprouted seeds in the ground in a new bed along the lattice of our back deck. The bed is a yard deep by maybe 10 or 12 feet long. I’ve now got 8 or 9 pea plants ranging from 6 to 10 inches tall clinging tenderly to the lattice, with the others (with any luck) burgeoning underground. We’ll see how that works out.

My garlic is looking great! I’ve got 8 or 9 plants out under out trees in the back yard that I planted when I first got my garlic bulbs months ago. Then I’ve got maybe 20 plants I had planted more recently that really aren’t lagging that far behind in terms of growth. They’re 10 – 14 inches tall, and it’s hard for me not to go dig one of them up to see how far they’ve come.

I had started a few dozen carrots in egg cartons a month or two ago, and they were moving right along. I was worried about transplanting them because they’re absurdly delicate plants when young. I just knew I’d break them when I tried to remove them from the egg cartons. I was spared the agonizing task, though, as we stuck them outside for a bit a couple of weeks ago when we had company, and we forgot to bring them back in. So I sowed carrots to finish a half-row of garlic and planted a second row in front of them. I may plant a row in front of my peas as well, and we plan to grow some herbs in that bed too.

And finally (on the vegetative front at least), I have tomatoes coming up at last. I had winter sown 7 or 8 varieties in milk jugs and soft drink bottles weeks ago, but had written them off because there was absolutely zero progress. But when I returned this weekend from a week out of town, I checked on them and found that five varieties had sprouted. So I may have some tomatoes after all. The Brandywines, which I was the most excited about, have done nothing as yet. I’m holding out hope for now that they’re just late bloomers and will arise soon.

In digging our new bed, we used a bunch of homemade compost. Our bin had gotten pretty full, but we kept adding to it. A couple or three weeks ago, we decided no to add to it any more, so that what was in there could decompose without further disturbance. So I moved the bin out from around its contents. The dog was really interested in the newly exposed pile of waste, so I built a really ghetto enclosure of chicken wire and 2-foot wooden stakes (three panels hammered end-to-end in a rough circle around the pile) to keep him out. We watered the pile and let it sit for a few days. Then I watered it again before heading out of town for a week. When I got back, it seemed pretty darned close to ready for use. So we folded it into the new bed we made. Here’s hoping it’s not so hot a mix that it kills the plants. It’s mixed with a lot of clay, so I think it’ll be sufficiently diluted that it’ll work out.

Our next-door neighbor has an impeccably-kept lawn. While I go out to mow my lawn as if I’m going to battle, with the blade adjusted as low to the ground as possible and heaving the machine about the yard, almost audibly roaring at times while I do it (I hate the task so), my neighbor trims his lush yard delicately and uses a fancy edging tool and all but whispers sweet botanical nothings to it as he communes with the grass. He chalks the quality of his lawn up to having inherited a sodded yard, but I know it would have gone to pot like mine had he not shown it the loving-kindness he has. Which is fine. But it has always bothered us that he fills 6 or 8 garbage bags per week with clippings that go to the landfill. So Mleeka went begging for grass this week, approaching his wife and telling her that we’d love to have all that grass for our compost and saying what a shame it was that it was going to the landfill (I’m sure her approach was less cumbersome than how I’ve portrayed it). And lo and behold, when we got home from an afternoon engagement on Saturday, we found that he had filled our newly-emptied compost bin with fresh green grass.

We caught him out in the yard later (whispering sweet nothings to it under the guise of trimming his bushes), and he said he had more but didn’t want to overload us. It turns out that bagging the stuff is a real pain for him, so he’s happy to dump it in our bin. Symbiosis achieved! He had several bags more of grass and then a bunch of bags of what would be considered browns in the world of composting, straw-ey, weedy type stuff. Heretofore, we’ve had mostly kitchen scraps and leaves. This season, I get to experiment with high-mass green content (which I’ve wanted because it gets really hot and apparently makes for great compost) and lots of brown content, which is apparently good for providing aeration for the green content. Since we used up our dumped pile in our new garden patch, we’ve now got a cube bin and a ghetto chicken-wire bin full of alternating layers of green and brown matter. I stuck my hand down into a grass layer of one of the bins today and it was good and warm (I’d guess 105 – 110 degrees). Can’t wait to see how it turns out (though I guess I’ll have to). My prediction for the moment is that I’ve got too much brown content right now, that it will provide good aeration for the green but that it won’t break down very well itself.

And there you have it. Two or three months’ worth of gardening packed into one probably very boring blog post. The next few months should be lots of fun. I finally bought a battery charger to replace the camera battery charger I’ve lost, so maybe my next report will include pictures.

The night before Thanksgiving, I cooked a batch of rolls using a recipe from a paperback Betty Crocker cookbook we’ve had for years but seldom cook out of. It seemed a quick, easy recipe for simple dinner rolls. The bread book I typically use (The Breadbaker’s Apprentice) is more of an artisan bread cookbook. The breads it provides formulas for are yummy, but they tend to be a multi-day pain to actually make. I don’t know what I did wrong, but my rolls would not rise. After much longer than it should have taken (and with all sorts of coaxing), they nearly doubled in size, so I popped them in the oven and crossed my fingers they’d do the rest of their rising in there. They did not. They tasted more or less ok, but they were small and hard and ugly.

Yesterday, hankering for some rolls for turkey sandwiches, I decided to try the fancy cookbook recipe for white bread rolls. I’ve used one of the three very similar formulas for white bread to make loaves, and they didn’t turn out as wonderfully as expected (they were fine sandwhich loaves but not the kind of bread you go out of your way to eat for its own sake, like the brioche). But confronted with the small hard ugly rolls or a perfectly servicable but not outstanding white bread roll, I opted for a do-over. And the results, as you can see from the picture, were rather better.

The rolls are made, although they’re an unequivocal failure. I just couldn’t get them to rise. They’re hard, brown little things, and most of them will land in my compost pile, which frankly is ok by me.

The turkey is on the counter, covered in cling wrap. A friend assures me that non-factory-produced turkey can be left out overnight because it doesn’t have the bacteria that turkeys raised in stiflingly close quarters have. My turkey’s liver and heart and neck and gizzard have been boiled with aromatics and herbs to make a broth, and those organs (except perhaps for the gizzard, which has a surprising and to my mouth most unpleasant texture) will be incorporated into tomorrow’s gravy.

The herbs I’ll mix with butter and garlic to rub into the turkey tomorrow are painstakingly picked and chopped. I had to buy expensive oregano and thyme from the grocery store to get fresh (“fresh” — probably shipped cross-country three weeks ago). The rosemary I stepped barefoot out into my backyard at 10:00 p.m. to pick. Note to self: I’d like to grow some thyme. Plucking tablespoonsful of little leaves from these plants tonight (the thyme in particular) makes me really appreciate the herbs, which I’ve so often been content to sprinkle from a costly little glass jar. I spent nearly an hour tonight preparing the herbs for the herb butter.

Good food is an investment, and it should be. We comparison shop to find the cheapest food we can without regard to the fact that it’s not just some throwaway thing — it’s our sustenance, one of the very few things without which we cannot actually survive. You are what you eat. This is not to say that expense for its own sake is worthwhile. But to drink milk that separates into cream and not-cream (what is the name for the not-cream?), to eat an animal that was raised in a way that allows that animal to grow more or less as it would in nature — these things are increasingly important to me, and worth more money. If the body is a temple, you shouldn’t fill it with shit.

It’s hard to pay four or five bucks a pound for turkey when Kroger has it for $0.79 a pound. What do I gain from doing this? Well, there’s a sense of eating more ethically. I’m eating a bird that has lived roughly as a bird of its type should (compared to a bird crammed with a dozen others in a tiny cage). I’m also supporting a local economy. I have spoken face-to-face with the person who raised, killed, processed, and sold me this turkey. The people I bought this bird from appreciate my individual contribution. Butterball really could not care less whether I buy their bird or not.

I wish more of my Thanksgiving lunch was created from local food. Much of it is, but I’ll do better next year. I’ll have aromatics and more herbs from my own garden at least. I may not ever raise turkeys, but I’m thinking I might have some chickens in the not-too-distant future. And surely I can grow my own potatoes (we’ve already got some started). In the mean time, I’m thankful to have local farmers to fill in the substantial gaps.

We’ve been sort of feinting in the direction of composting for over a year now. I built a handy dandy compost bin that’s basically four square frames with wire siding. The bin breaks down into two pieces, each composed of two of the frames hinged together. To set it up, you make a cube of the two pieces and attach them via eye-and-hook hardware. It’s sufficiently sturdy to hold a fair amount of compost, but it breaks down easily and is pretty easy to move around.

So we’ve been throwing vegetable matter into the composter for over a year now. This year, we accidentally grew a bunch of tiny pumpkins from last year’s jack-o-lantern guts. The seeds had settled into the ground before we moved the composter a few feet away to turn it, and the soil I guess was pretty fertile. We haven’t given our compost much real thought, though. We haven’t tried to make any really useful garden material from its contents. It’s been more a waste vanisher than a composter.

As my interest in the quality and origin of the food I’m feeding my family grows, naturally my interest in growing some of my own grows, and so this week, I began to pay a little better attention to the composter. I moved the bin this weekend for the first time since the move that resulted in our pumpkins. When I removed the frame, here’s what I saw:

I have a similar picture from last year (half of the composter is visible in this one, in case my description above falls short), though the leaves aren’t piled nearly as high. To give the stuff a really good solid turn, I set the bin up just to the left of the pile (its original spot and where the pumpkins had grown) and started inverting the pile back into the bin. To my surprise, when I got to the bottom of the pile, I found this:

That’s rich, bug-filled dirt-like compost! There were I’d say 4-to-6 inches of the stuff. It looked a lot like dirt, but clumpier, and if you examined some of the clumps, you could tell they were really compressed rotted leaves. I enriched part of one of our beds with this and planted some garlic in it. The rest I spread in another bed that I’m thinking I might plant some herbs in (our sprawling rosemary plants are lonely).

With this minor, accidental success, I’m now more interested in composting for real. The plan for the moment is to water and turn the stuff twice a week. I don’t know that I need to do the full move and turn each time. I think that if I just give a good solid stir and then add some water to keep it moist, the stuff will take care of itself. Guess we’ll see.

It’s interesting to be a meat-eater when your children begin to have questions about meat. Especially when in general you’re a pacifist type who tries to gently persuade flies to exit the door you’re holding open (all but wearing a jaunty bellhop cap) rather than swatting them, who will chase a spider or silverfish down with an index card to scoop up and gingerly deposit on a nice comfy looking blade of grass rather than getting a big fluffy ball of toilet paper to sort of anonymously swoop in with and squish with a little quiet gross crunch and then drop into the toilet.

So but then as you begin to think a little more about what you’re eating and to consider the animals themselves, not only for their own sakes but for the sake of your family’s very own health, and you look at pictures of cows being slaughtered with their baleful eyes cast skyward and bled and hung and butchered and cooked and yet you persist in eating meat, well, it makes for something of a conundrum.

One of the funniest hypocrisies I’ve seen parents commit is to spank or swat their children for hitting another person.

To be such a kind of wuss about hurting creatures who don’t have baleful eyes makes it seem all the more hypocritical to not only kill but to tear with your teeth and consume the very flesh of creatures who do have baleful eyes. It occurs to me that this is sort of like the conservative interpretation of the liberal worldview wherein (the interpretation seems to figure) you think it’s ok to murder innocent babies with rusty coat hangers but not ok to tenderly and with great concern for their comfort put hardened criminals to death. And when you look at either case in monochrome, I suppose the respective cases can be made. There’s nuance in both cases, of course.

The modern food industry makes it easy to distance yourself from the murder of meat because what we eat doesn’t in any way resemble the creatures it comes from. (Conservative right-to-life groups do the reverse by showcasing the gruesome physical realities of abortion in brochures, on posters, and I think even on vehicles.)

We have long shielded Lennie from unpleasant or over-complicated things, but I’ve recently tried to shelter her a little less, lest she grow up to be a complete Pollyanna. So I’m more open these days about the fact that the chicken substance we’re eating is an actual chicken that at some point said bock bock and scratched around in the dirt and maybe had what turned out not to be a legitimate concern about the sky falling. And she’s skeptical, saying things, even as I show her the naked pimply little broiler chicken I have seasoned and am about to put into a hot oven, like “we don’t eat a chicken, we eat chicken,” as if removal of so small a thing as the indefinite article somehow separates the food substance from the animal. If you let it remain an abstraction, maybe it’s not real!

Trying to figure out how to talk to your kids about what you’re eating really makes you think about what you’re eating. Trying to resolve the ethical conflict of not liking to kill things and yet being happy enough to kill not only sentient but in some cases beautiful, in some ways thoughtful, personality-endowed creatures, well, let’s just say it’s kind of an uncomfortable place to find yourself in. Trying to resolve this in an internally consistent way for yourself is hard enough, but trying to boil it down to the level of a 4-year-old is an even harder thing, and something I’ll have to continue to work at, both for Lennie’s sake and my own.

I had a dentist appointment yesterday with a cleaning and some fillings on the docket and a lunch break scheduled between the two procedures. While I considered trying to find some place nearby that had a really leafy, stinky salad to treat my dentist to the remnants of during my fillings, I could find no such place. There was a KFC around the corner, though, and I had recently had a hankering for that anyway.

What a huge disappointment it turned out to be. The biscuit tasted like buttery sweaty socks (I have tasted sweaty ones but not buttery ones, so I’m sort of projecting), the mac and cheese smelled vaguely vomity, and even the mashed potatoes and gravy failed to live up to my memory of them. But worst of all was the chicken. Oh, the breading was tasty enough, but if you got a bite of chicken without any breading, it was dry and basically tasteless.

For reading material, I had brought The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and I had just begun the section on fast food. It’s possible that reading some of that prior to lunch colored my perceptions, though I think maybe not, as I’m really not all that suggestible. One thing I couldn’t help recalling was the statement by the author of my other big meat book I bought recently that when taking the life of a sentient being in order to eat it, you shouldn’t do so lightly. I can say confidently that the chicken I had for lunch yesterday was not worth taking the life of the animal I ate, pitiful though that life may have been.

This experience puts me one step closer to foregoing any meat but that which seems to have been raised well and fed properly, even if it’s more expensive. There are plenty of vegetarian options I’ll gladly eat to balance out some of the increased cost of meat.