• Saturday night feast
• Roasted Bell Pepper Salad Dressing
• Eggplant Parmesan
• Recipes of the Week
• Spicy Lentil Soup and Cornbread

•Recipes
•Nutrition
•Psychology
•News Bites
•Cooking Tips
•Musings
•EpiCourier
•Slow Food Piedmont Triad
•The Mock Turtle's Song
•Greensboro Is Talking
•The Daily Nice
•The Hunger Site

---

My sad history of gardening failures started with a cactus, a proud sentry of a Sanita cactus that stood in a grey whale-shaped planter in the family room of my childhood home, keeping watch over the French doors leading to our deck.  It thrived so effortlessly that it blended into the background of the décor along with a portrait of an old man with suspenders and an undone top pant button.  My mother passed the cactus along to me when she left for a two-year working adventure in Manhattan; the cactus immediately wilted as though it missed her.  I moved it into my college-kid hole of an apartment where I made the cactus as comfortable as I could through its slow demise.   I carefully deprived it of water but then its pine-needle green flesh started to brown; I gave in with a few drops of water and the flesh rotted further.  Within a month, I was standing by the trashcan, saying kaddish and bidding this brave plant a fond farewell. 

 

Over the years, thoughtfully misguided friends gave me plants to spruce up my dark, hot apartment, and one by one I performed similar funeral rites, until plants started protesting as soon as they realized their destiny, lying limp in the buyer’s hands as their only means of peaceful protest. 

 

But age brings wisdom, or a healthy forgetfulness.  Last year, during the first full summer in the house I share with my husband, I decided to try my hand at tomatoes.  I went to a farmer’s market and was directed to a stooped, nearly unintelligible, neon-orange baseball-capped farmer and explained my plant plight.  He selected two medium sized plants,  a German Johnson and one for which his aged slur muffled the name, ready to bear fruit within weeks assuming I could manage the two simple tasks of planting and watering them.  I bought a bag of “vegetable soil” and turned it in on a small, sunny patch of my yard with one of those garden claws you see arthritic people happily using on commercials.  I bought wire hoops for staking the growing plants and even tried burying a perforated soda bottle for more efficient watering (which worked until our mischievous dog, Cosmo, unburied it, thinking it better for tossing around the yard than watering).  Amazingly, the plants grew and bore perhaps a dozen tomatoes which I ate greedily with fresh basil and garlic salt on 9-grain bakery bread. 

 

Inspired, my husband and I spent last winter planning this year’s garden which would be greatly expanded to include a variety of herbs, bell peppers, more tomatoes and perhaps even some corn.  Planning a garden is really easy to do when the ground is frozen and there’s hot chocolate with mini-marshmallows inside.  By spring, our grand plan had fizzled; not even a tomato plant entered the ground.

 

About a month ago, my mom and I were perusing the isles of the curb market for farm-fresh tomatoes and pattypan squash when we ran into a man selling herb plants, 2 for $5.  We left minutes later with rosemary and tarragon for my mom, lime basil and lavender for me.  Though wonderful, the distinct hint of lime in the basil wasn’t quite right for Italian dishes, so my mom and I headed back to the farmer’s market where we picked up a healthy sized sweet basil plant as well as chives for which I had recently spent an outrageous $2 for a grocery store pack which would almost definitely wilt before being used up.  I bought potting soil and knocked the spent dirt out of four oversized pots: two left by the previous owners and two that once held a beautiful array of plants, another of those notorious, well-meant gifts from a friend.  

 

I like the idea of growing herbs in pots because, theoretically at least, I’ll be able to move them inside this winter and have fresh herbs all year round – I try to keep my spirits up even when I look at the rotted stump of a basil plant still sitting hopefully in the living room window from last winter.  The added bonus had been easily controlling the direct sunlight they receive during theses stifling dog days which have wilted some of the lower leaves of the lime basil plant though hasn’t seemed to send any of them into their death throws… yet.

 

The agonized pot-moving and early morning waterings paid off last night, though, when I took my kitchen shears to the front yard to snip my very own basil for a batch of pesto pasta which tasted of garlic and gardening satisfaction.

---

---

---