Gardening, Anne Lamott and the Apocalypse
or "Are You in Tune with the Rhythms of the Earth?"
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Gardening, Anne Lamott and the Apocalypse
“The garden is one of the two great metaphors for humanity. . .
Because in the garden, the enemy is everything: the aphids, the weather, time.
And so you pour yourself into it, care so much, and see up close so much birth, and growth, and beauty, and danger, and triumph.
And then everything dies anyway, right?
But you just keep doing it.”
―Anne Lamott,Bird by Bird
Fortunately, the grid did not go down while we lived in Costa Rica. We never lost contact with the American banks. I never had to live without the internet or skin a leopard to make a loin cloth, or hunt an iguana for my food.
I learned to successfully forage some things like the cashew apples that grew in the yard of the abandoned house next to us. I picked jacote from the lot on the opposite side of us. Next to the pool a giant Tamarind tree grew and kept dropping pods of its sweet and sour sticky fruit onto the cement, and I learned how to take these apart and eat them like candy or else soak the fruit in water and turn it into a cold fresca to drink in the hammock on hot afternoons. (And all the afternoons were hot.)
All of this foraging and connecting with trees and sunlight and spending time out of doors with the bright and sugary things made me think, I must be some kind of miracle green-thumbed earth goddess. The kind of person who belongs in the wild, who touches the trees and makes them bust into blossom. The truth is, I had grown up partly in a farming community. I had watched my mom plant corn one year and then sunflowers the next. I had harvested zucchini and eggplant and cucumber, and I knew the taste of a vine ripe tomato cannot be compared at all to the cold, juiceless flavor of one grown in a hothouse or bought at the store.
I’ve always felt sorry for people who couldn’t grow their own food.
I’ve always felt sorry for people who don’t know how to grow their own food, people who were so disconnected from the rhythms of nature. People who were born and raised in cities.
Once, when I was teaching at a private school I read a short story about apple picking with a boy who had never left L.A. We were trying to answer some basic questions about the story using context clues. I asked him what time of year does the story take place if the narrator says the apples are ripe and the boy was very confused.
“How can I figure that out?” He asked.
“Well,” I said, “it’s simple isn’t it. When do you see the blossoms on the tree? When do you see the fruit getting ripe?”
He looked at me both puzzled and annoyed and said “What are you talking about? Apples are ripe all the time. I just saw a bunch of ripe apples at the store.”
I shook my head, and silently pitied him for not knowing what I know about where our food comes from and how it grows.
So, in the event of a coming apocalypse I decided that I would be ready to survive down here. I would learn how to grow, find, forage and prepare local food so I could eat no matter what kind of downfall we faced.
Here is a list of things I killed while living in Costa Rica.
Tarot root - planted it during the rainy season. Got two inches tall before it drowned in the flood.
Beet greens - Grew to three inches then whithered in too much heat.
Coffee beans - just never sprouted, don’t know why
Cilantro - Just don’t get me started on all the ways I’ve killed cilantro. Cilantro is suicidal and simply wants to die.
Not everything died outright. Some plants actually thrived and became quite beautiful. I grew a sweet potato vine from a jar of water which took over the whole patio. I eventually transfered into a bucket of dirt, hoping it would grow roots and more sweet potato, but when I finally tried to harvest it I found there was nothing but shallow roots. i grew a pumpkin vine that likewise took over our patio and started fruiting some beautiful little gourds that I fantasized about turning into pie. Then the bugs came and ate them while they were still green. Probably the most heartbreaking failure for me were the pineapples.
Every time I ate a pineapple I put the top of the pineapple in a jar of water to watch it grow. I’ve loved pineapple my whole life. My grandma used to tease me… I always thought they grew on trees until I moved to Costa Rica and saw they are actually, technically, a thistle and they grow on bushes, starting with one small purple flower and grow and grow until they become a fruit. Incidentally, it takes 16 months to grow a pineapple and they are, I think, appropriately, the international symbol of friendship.
I loved my pineapple plants. I took them from house to house with us whenever we moved. I watched them grow. I watered them every day. I even sang to them. But after 16 moths they had grown tall but had not flowered. I put dying green apples at their roots because that is what the internet told me to do to get them to bud. But nothing helped. Eventually I accepted them as simple decoration to make the kitchen look more tropical. Like me they only had the appearance of being magical elements of nature, but they had no real ability to recreate themselves.
It makes me think how much I’ve taken for granted those who produce food. We tend to think of it as the kind of work anybody can do. In fact, nature does it for us, on its own, with very little help. We often take our food growers for granted, expecting our produce to be cheap and our labor to be cheaper.
Farming isn’t unskilled labor. It’s science.
But farming is science. I mean SCIENCE with a capital SCIENCE. It’s not just putting seeds in the ground and adding water and sunlight and waiting while you play volleyball with your friends.
It’s knowing what plants need shade and which ones need direct exposure, and which ones can weather a storm and which ones are easily drowned. It’s knowing the seasons and predicting the rains, and making little grooved irrigation canals to chanel water in the right direction, and get it draining when there’s too much and pooling when there’s too little. It is part physics, part luck, part pure magic, and mainly it is a mystery to me.
Eventually I do take a small amount of solace in my tiny successes, and they are tiny. One inch of ginger, and one papery little leek.
I used them to make a soup and realized that I added too much sesame oil and it just didn’t taste right. I was too stubborn to throw it out immediately I put it in the fridge, where, eventually it grew mold and I pour it into a pile of compost out behind the house.
It is where all the abominable things go. It is the one thing in all of my efforts that truly continues to grow.
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There's nothing like a homegrown pineapple. It's literally eating the sun. It sounds like no one told you how long a commitment pineapples are. They can take up to 3 years to give you fruit. Mine have all done better in the ground than in pots too. In case you ever go back: https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/MG055
The bunnies got my first vegetables this year. Had to cover the beds with netting. Now the okra gives me flowers and memories of Mardi Gras