HER OLD NOSE

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (4/25/09)

"She should've kept her old nose," meine Überfrau opined as she inspected photographs of her fellow retired flight attendants from the glory "champagne and chateaubriand" days of first-class on TWA. When asked what she meant, she said, "She went too far." Apparently, the poor woman in her zeal for a pert, upturned nose ended up with a flute too small for her face, a puny button on a fine, full-figured, glamorous Mediterranean mug. "It's too bad. She was really a beautiful woman." So much for rhinoplasty.

H.L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore of several generations past, made the same point in The American Language about the Anglo-Saxon dominance of American culture, only about first names instead of noses, such as Wendy Liebowitz, Eric Balabanian, and Chauncey Gallucci, but not Ermentrude Smith or Yankel Johnson.

The theory behind the Anglo-Saxon cultural dominance is that immigrants, after the arrival of the initial British immigrants, wanted to fit in and tried to adopt the facial characteristics and names of the first-arrived, adapting by adopting. Ironically, we now have a mixed race president with three non-Anglo-Saxon names who speaks in elegant English and thinks with the sophisticated complexity of an Oxford don.

Gardening on the Colorado Plateau speaks to the same complexity, what fits in and what doesn't or the wrong horticultural nose on Flagstaff's cultural face. In extremis, a friend sports a plastic palm tree on his back deck, decorating it each year with Christmas lights. For him it's a memory of things past and, I suspect, a modest defiance of Flagstaff's horticulturally correct.

Pity the poor person who paid big bucks for a nose that didn't work cosmetically, and for the gardener who bought a plant that didn't work horticulturally. Rhododendrons come to mind. All that glitters is not gold.

Plants have minds of their own and are stubborn about it. If they don't like where they're put, they'll pull a tantrum, withering rather than thriving. Nearly everyone knows people who are inclined dig in their heels no matter what, suffering their own peril to prove a point, however modest. Lots of plants are like that, especially the ones we love.

Ponderosa pines apparently thrive in lots of places, but not
rhododendrons, camellias, and azaleas. I know, I bought a rhododendron five years ago and, since then, have watched it gradually wither while my ponderosa thrive. The ponderosa didn't cost me a dime, either.

As always, there are the purists who want nothing but native, opposed, as they are, to horticultural immigration. They want concrete walls topped with razor wire, and they have a point. Everytime a foreign plant is introduced into a balanced eco-system, of necessity, it changes the system for either ill or good, sometimes sending it into a tailspin. Of course, the irony is that if the purists really wanted to go native, they wouldn't be here in the first place because there is no species quite as invasive as human beings. Purity may mean "get outta town."

Oddly, many think of Hopi corn as a native because it has been grown on the Colorado Plateau for a several centuries which is to raise the question of the length of time it takes an import to go native or adapt.

Socrates in the Cratylus quoted Heraclitus to the effect that all things are in motion and nothing is at rest, comparing them to a river or stream, and saying that no one can go into the same river twice.

In Flagstaff, the first thing to consider is a native plant or a plant that can adapt to the High Country, no matter how much a plant has been loved elsewhere. Noses don't always travel well. Secondly, choose water-wise plants because guzzlers are threats to balance, sucking up everyone else's fair share. And, finally, don't mess around with plants that look good but insidiously want to take over. "Frienemies," they're invasive species, the opiates of gardening, invading, corrupting, and weakening a garden and with it the eco-system. As long as human beings have intruded, we're responsible to keep an eco-system in balance while it evolves.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

GARDENING IN THE DEPTHS

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (4/18/09)


My grandfather, Brynjolf Prom, was a Norwegian ship's master who left the sea after his brother washed overboard during a Caribbean hurricane. Using his skills as a navigator in the late 1800's, he surveyed the route for the Great Northern Railway across the northern plains through the Rockies and Cascades to the Pacific.

I remember him vividly when he was about my age. On a family vacation to Lake Arrowhead, he watched me swim. I stayed in the shallows, telling him that I felt safer when I could touch bottom. Under a thicket of eyebrows his deeply set, steel-blue eyes fixed me with a laser-like gaze. The old Viking said, "Ach, Dana, you'll only be safe when you can't touch bottom, when you're beyond your depth, else you'll run aground and founder."

On hearing my account of the day, my mother said, "Poppa, you'll only be teaching Dana to swim, not circumnavigate the globe." He replied, "Well, do you want the lad to play in the shallows the whole of his life." At that she touched him on the arm, "No, I don't, but he's just learning." The next day under his fixed gaze I swam beyond my depth.

Gardening in the High Country is not for those who want to garden
in the shallows at gravel depth. It's for those who want to go beyond their comfort zones, who see challenges as times of opportunity, and adversities as occasions for ingenuity. If the growing season is too short, extend it. If water is scarce, save it. If the soil is inhospitable, enrich it.

Enriching the soil is a matter of depth, fertilizing deeply and organically. Generally, there are two types of fertilizer, organic and synthetic. Organic includes compost and manure, but only from grain-fed animals. Compost is best made at home in the yard. Commercial compost often has filler, such as sawdust, just like "store bought" meat balls are often heavy on bread crumbs.

Manure is best measured initially with the nose, not in the manure, but in smelling its aroma. Good manure stinks. As Samuel Johnson said to the woman who complained to him that he "smelled," "Nay, madam, give me leave to correct you: you smell, I stink." Chicken manure at first stinks big time but begins to lose some of its stink with the passage of time, as the uric acid decomposes into ammonia. It's expensive commercially, so count as a BFF anyone raises chickens.

The same can be said for steer and horse manure, horse manure being the most plentiful and least nutritious. In the High Country nearly everyone knows someone who has a horse or horses and a stall. Steer manure can be bought, but it's pricey. Cattle ranchers are harder to find than chicken keepers as BFF.

All manure should be vintage. Fertilizer, as with wine, should never be "served before its time." The reason is simple. Animal urine and feces are mixed together and need time to be leached. Wine softens as the tannins are precipitated, and manure matures as the harsh elements, such as salts and uric acid, are precipitated by rain, snow, and air. Desiderata: smooth wine and maturated manure.

Two expensive but useful organic fertilizers are blood meal and bone meal. Blood meal is high in nitrogen and useful for onions, grasses, and other leafy plants. Bone meal is great for bulbs.

And then there are the ambiguities of synthetic fertilizers. If used widely and often, they impoverish the soil, obliterating the microorganisms, such as mychorizzae, needed in a nourishing soil while dehydrating the soil with salt. Used sparingly, they can increase productivity, such as a synthetic fertilizer high in nitrogen makes for large onions, but, sadly, it makes for abundant tomato foliage with little fruit. Synthetic fertilizers are useful if appropriate to the plant and used frugally.

In the "Allegory of the Cave," Book VII of The Republic, Plato drew the distinction between appearance and reality, appearance being the shadows and reality in the sunlight. In gardening, appearance is in the sunlight while the reality is hidden deeply in the soil's darkness.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

RACHEL EDELSTEIN: Fungivore

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (4/14/09)

Rachel Edelstein of The Aboretum is a bit of a foodie as well as being a fungivore. As a fungivore, she's an herbivore, and, maybe, a carnivore, too. However, when she goes hunting, it's not with a gun, but a paring knife, stalking fungus, edible mushrooms in particular.

This coming August she will even help throw a sumptuous feast of crepes with mushrooms and chicken in a cream sauce at the Wild Mushroom Retreat at the Hart Prairie Lodge. Sponsored by The Arboretum and the Nature Conservancy, the Retreat features fine cuisine prepared by French chefs Nicole Bauge and Rachel while another chef, Gay Chanler, offers appetizers of sautéed mushrooms, shallots, and herbs served with cream cheese on crackers.

In addition to fine dining, the Retreat also offers a program led by two local wild mushroom experts, Mary Lou Fairweather of the Forest Service and Ed Smith of The Nature Conservancy. The program will consist of finding, identifying, cooking, and eating wild mushrooms. Hart Prairie is thought by many to be the wild mushroom capitol of Arizona. Beginning on Friday evening and ending on Sunday at noon, the Retreat is a weekend of forays into the forest, education about mushrooms, cooking demonstrations, and culinary adventures for budding fungivores.

Neither haute cuisine nor nouvelle cuisine come immediately to mind when thinking about The Arboretum, but the fact is that The Arboretum also offers another gustatory event. It's the elegant Summer Soirée on July 11 which celebrates the life and food of the Southwest.

The Wild Mushroom Retreat and the Summer Soirée are but two of the many programs offered by The Arboretum. Tucked southwest of Flagstaff down Woody Mountain Road, The Arboretum is a cornucopia for those who want to know more about the land on which they live so that they may enjoy it all the more.

With attractions not only to the palate, it also offers something for the ear as well with a series on concerts sponsored jointly with Flagstaff Cultural Partners during the summer on the first Saturday of the month.

Beginning with the simple pleasure of walking, The Arboretum offers programs for those who want to look while they walk. In addition to treats for the palate and ear, The Arboretum's offers treats for the eye with guided bird walks and wildflower walks, teaching walkers when and where to look. This means that The Arboretum needs volunteers and docents so that it may offer many of its programs.

One of the most exciting programs is the Live Birds of Prey Demonstrations every day from April to October. It's an up close and personal experience of raptors, not an everyday experience.

The gardens expand the consciousness of gardeners in Flagstaff by demonstrating plants that work. The Arboretum offers classes in gardening as well as offering the experience of working in the gardens. For beginners, these classes and experiences are some of the best ways to learn how to garden successfully in the High Country.

With its birds, wildflowers, mushrooms, raptors, gardens, haute cuisine, music, and walks, there's no better place to have classes in painting en plein air than The Arboretum. Happily, it has them.

Two of the events at The Arboretum which gardeners in Flagstaff anticipate are the Plant Sale and the Penstemon Festival in July. It's a time to open the pocket book to get real bargains while learning about the varieties of a plant that does well in Flagstaff.

Behind all of these programs is the heart of The Arboretum, research. It is a first-class horticultural research institution.

But back to Rachel, the fungivore's favorite foodie. Her day job is the Director of Public Programs at the Arboretum. Raised in Quebec, a former Peace Corps Volunteer in Africa, and a school teacher on the Hopi Reservation, she's a graduate of Northeastern University and has an M.A. from NAU. For old-timers and newcomers in Flagstaff who want to know more about life on the Colorado Plateau, The Arboretum's the place to go and Rachel's the person to see. Her telephone number is (928) 774-1442, ext. 110 and
email address is rachel.edelstein@nau.edu.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

GARDENING101: Compost

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (3/27/09)

As a boy during the early 1930's, I often went with my father in his 1933 Franklin into San Fernando Valley to fetch large burlap bags of oak leaf mold for his camellias and roses. San Fernando Valley then was a land of farms and ranches dotted with a few small towns. Along with selling fresh fruits and vegetables at roadside stands, the farmers often sold oak leaf mold they'd gathered underneath their live oaks trees which were perpetual composting piles.

Composting is recapitulating the wisdom of those live oak trees, taking the things we no longer use, dropping them and letting them decompose into useful nutrients for the garden. With the exceptions of meat, oil, metals, pet and human feces, and plastic, almost anything organic can be used in a composting pile although some things decompose faster than others. Pieces of wood, tree branches, large stems, avocado and citrus skins, fruit pits, and newly dropped pine needles take a long time decomposing.

Fundamentally, composting is a disintegration of organic material, decay and rot, into nutrients for plants. In addition to organic material, aeration and oxygen are necessary. Aeration is a fancy latinate word for airing, turning compost with a pitch fork so that air and oxygen can get into the pile to fuel the microbes. Also, aeration removes heat, water, and other gases from the pile.

In addition to oxygen, compost requires heat, and, generally speaking, the most efficient temperature for composting is around 110º F to 150º F. The higher the temperature the more pathogens, diseases, weed seeds, and insect larvae are destroyed. Thermometers are available. A hand will do, stuck in the compost. If it's too hot for comfort, turn it with a pitch fork. No big deal.

Sometimes the compost pile heats up to 160º F. When that happens, the heat may cause the microbes to go dormant or die which means that the composting process will stop because the microbes do the decomposing. They're the worker bees in composting.

Heat as well as moisture can be controlled with the pitchfork. The most useful instrument for moisture assessment is the human hand. If
it's waterlogged or dripping, it's too wet. The easiest way to find the proper moisture level is to squeeze the material in a bare hand, if it doesn't drip but feels moist like a wrung out wash cloth, the material has the right moisture. Hands can always be washed. Besides, if people don't like to get their hands dirty, they shouldn't be gardening and are probably avoiding life anyway.

If the material is too dry, add a little water while turning the material. If it's too wet, add dry material while turning the pile.

As with cooking in the kitchen, cooking compost in the backyard requires the right recipe, a 30:1 ratio of carbon to nitrogen. When the ratio is less than 30:1, such as 15:1 in table scraps, the material is called green and more than 30:1, such as 80:1 in old leaves, it's called brown. Examples of brown materials are dry leaves, sawdust, bark, straw, dry bread, egg shells, and shredded paper, of nitrogen materials vegetable and fruit scraps, tea leaves, coffee grounds, grass clippings, and manure. Since almost all organic material contains both carbon and nitrogen, probably the best measurement at the composter is 3:1 of brown to green. A good measuring instrument is a shovel.

If nothing happens, as in no heat in the compost, that means too much carbon material. If it begins to stink and go putrid, that means too much nitrogen material. If nothing's happening, a trip to a local coffee house to fetch a bag of coffee grounds will help the pile to become a microborama. If the bin begins to stink, throw in some sawdust or dried bedding from a horse stall. When using manure, as in wine, use only vintage manure, never serving manure before its time.

The equipment needed is a pitchfork, a hand, and a shovel along with a bin. The material needed is water, air, and organic material. In a few months, compost. Décadence joyeuse.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

GARDENING 101: Gardening Counter-intelligence

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (3/22/09)

As young soldiers, really adolescents, trained in counter-intelligence and covert operations, we were tutored in surveillance, a watch and ward vigilance for espionage and sabotage. Such training has been invaluable in gardening, surveilling pests who sabotage a garden.

I can still hear the captain. "The quiet ones, the ones to whom no one pays mind, the ones that slip by unnoticed, they'll bear watching." Aphids don't call attention to themselves, slip by unnoticed, and bear watching. Sucking the life out of a plant, they're found on the underside of the leaves, not on top where they can be easily seen.

He also talked about twitches, furrowed brows, and squints, the small signs signaling the stress of risk. In gardening it's a leaf's curl, a slight discoloration, and a stem's canker. Signs of a far deeper and far more devastating threat are eyes turned glassy and pupils narrowed or leaves dropped, stems withered, and plants suckled dry by parasites.

Surveillance is one of the gardener's first responsibilities, every morning and evening patrolling the garden with eyes peeled, looking for the quiet ones. On these patrols through the garden, it's best is to poke underneath the leaves while sniffing out lurking culprits . Check litter, such as small piles of leaves or pieces of wood. Scatter them, bend over to peek underneath, and then dispose of them. A principle task for a gardener is to snoop. Enjoying a garden isn't enough. Inspecting it is crucial because only an inspected garden will thrive to be enjoyed.

At the first hint of sabotage, don't hope the problem will take care of itself. It won't. It'll get worse which means that the gardener on patrol must come prepared, as in well-armed with a spray gun and a hose equipped with a nozzle. Never allow the enemy an avenue of escape. Ne pas faire de quartier.

Two sets of eyes are better than one so, if possible, take along another snoop while on patrol.

Never use ammunition that afflicts the garden, such as friendly fire poisons. Human beings are singular amongst animals in that they foul their own nests, such as spraying poison on their gardens and food. At the first sign of under-sided sabotage, turn the nozzle down to a sharp stream and wash the insects into oblivion. If they appear again, spray them with insecticidal soap, offing the under-sided saboteurs without poisoning the garden. If they appear again, off'em again until they are no more. Sans merci.

Saboteurs surprise, striking from secluded and secret lairs, so it's important to find their hidden cells and destroy them. Grasshoppers lay their eggs underground in the fall so that they can strike by surprise in the spring, suddenly flying out of the sun, like dive bombers in a blitzkrieg, devouring a garden.

Turning the soil with a spade helps expose the nests of eggs to the air, destroying them. But spading is not enough. Nests of eggs will always be missed. Happily, grasshopper nymphs have a thing for wheat bran, and if the wheat bran is mixed with NoLo, their voracious appetite will be their undoing. Always encounter enemies at their weaknesses. The grasshopper's vice is gluttony.

NoLo is short for Nosema locustae spores which are fatal to grasshoppers but harmful to no one else. NoLo can be purchased in the armaments section at local nurseries or over the internet.

Finally, in the fight against sabotage, allies, such as, green lacewings, lady bugs, and praying mantises are always useful. More eyes and mouths will find and devour more saboteurs. These allies can be bought, but as with all bought friends, they're fickle and tend to fly away. So release them at dusk so after a night's rest they can ravage at first light. These fickle friends can be kept in a garden with the hospitality of such plants as dill and yarrow.

The captain, a classics scholar in civilian life, often quoted Demosthenes warning the Athenians of Macedonian perfidy, "There's one safeguard known generally to the wise. What is it? Distrust." Vigilance is one safeguard known to wise gardeners keeping their gardens safe from saboteurs.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

A PEACEABLE KINGDOM

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (2/17/09)

James Reeb, a social worker in a Boston slum and Unitarian Universalist minister, was clubbed to death by racist thugs in Selma, Alabama, March 9, 1965, as he left a restaurant on his way to a meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., at the Brown Chapel. He died in a Birmingham hospital on the 11th, forty-four years ago. The Greek word martur means "witness." Jim bore witness.

We'd been in the Army together but had seen each other only once in about twenty years until that day in Selma. We spoke briefly and went our ways. Then down the street I heard a commotion and saw a rush of people and police. Jim was being beaten to death. As I tried to break through the crowd, the police hustled me to the jail and then the bus station and told to get out of town.

The thugs were later tried and acquitted to the cheers.

I remember the eyes of death in faces of the crowd and the police. The same eyes of death afflict our modern culture, the racial wisecrackers, the denigrators of women, the purveyors of hate and violence. However, we seldom see them in the eyes of gardeners. The reason is simple, gardeners love life. Now, there are a lot of nut bags, cranks, grumps, ditzes, and scolds amongst gardeners, but behind their often odd behaviors is a love of life, else they wouldn't plant and seed year after year. Theirs is "a peaceable kingdom."

Not only to do they plant and seed, they also care for living things as well, but beyond that they deal with death as lovers of life. Lovers of death don't deal well with death because they don't believe in life. Inexplicably, growing things die, and, as such, there is always in a garden the mystery of death. Gardeners never quit, they just seed and plant again. Never forsaking hope, abiding in faith, they love life.

The lovers of death tend to get fixed on things past, arrested in the recesses of their own histories, hoarding their grievances, treasuring their indignations. The lovers of life move on, aware that they are writing their own histories in the moment. They move forward. If a plant doesn't thrive on one spot in the garden, gardeners find a new spot. If it doesn't thrive in the new spot, they'll try a different plant.

Lovers of death have difficulty with nature's inevitability and divine irony. They have trouble with brick walls. They like to run into them head first. They believe the old adage, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." Gardeners will more than likely rewrite the old adage, "If at first you don't succeed, find out why, and then do it smarter the second time." Plants cannot be forced to thrive where they don't want to thrive. Not many people realize it, but plants have choices, too, and some of them don't it like it high, dry, cold, and windy. They like it low, humid, hot, and still. Some like swamps.

Gardeners not only love life, they like to share it, always trading and sharing seeds, plants, and tips. They push their cuttings on their friends and neighbors, giving them flowers and vegetables, often times more zucchini than their neighbors ever want to see again. They're always happy to talk with total strangers about their flowers and vegetables, even inviting them to tour their backyards. Sometimes, they look a little zany in their enthusiasms.

Also, gardeners thrive in adversity, else they wouldn't garden in Flagstaff'. Very little daunts them, be it weather or pestilence. They rise to the challenge, believing in life in the face of adversity, as in growing tomatoes in the High Country.

The Church of Scotland's prayers of thanksgiving at a funeral read, "We thank Thee for the goodness and truth that have passed from their lives into the lives of others, and made the world richer for their presence." Gardeners make the world richer for their presence with goodness and truth as well as beauty and life. The proof is in their eyes. They're bright with a love of life.

Copyright© Dana Prom Smith 2009

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.
--Reinhold Niebuhr--

GARDENING 101: Manufacturing Soil

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D (2/16/09)

The author of such popular phrases as "the medium is the message" and "global village," Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media wrote that a medium is an "extension of ourselves." A medium could be a hammer, fork, cartoon, rifle, fishing pole, tennis racket, motion picture, or even soil. It's anything by which people extend their ability to affect their environment, empowering themselves to bring about a cascade of changes.

Soil is the gardener's medium. Without it, save for hydroponic gardening, there's no gardening. Soil is the medium through which gardeners extend themselves to affect their environment, and, as such, soil is the gardener's message.

Dirt isn't the same thing as soil. Soil is manufactured by gardeners using sand, silt, clay, and organic matter, in short, enhancing what has been given them. In Flagstaff, we also have limestone, sandstone, and volcanic debris.

The ideal soil consists of 40% silt, 20% clay, and 40% sand in addition to organic matter. Sand is gritty and can be seen with the naked eye. Both silt and clay are finer, so fine that their particles cannot be seen with the naked eye, clay being the finest.

The problem with clay, of which there is an abundance in Flagstaff, is that when it dries, it hardens, so hard that most of the garden plants wither because their roots cannot penetrate the clay. However, it holds moisture well while sand doesn't. Mixing sand with clay loosens the clay while keeping its ability to retain moisture.

Alas, sand is scarce in Flagstaff, but we have a good substitute which may be better than sand. Volcanic cinders are everywhere and are about 2/3 sand and 1/3 geochemical nutrients. Mixing volcanic cinders with clay loosens the clay. Weathering, such as harsh winters, howling winds, and torrential rains, gradually releases the nutrients from the cinders.

Forget about silt which occurs in washes, along stream beds, in certain meadows, on alluvial slopes, and on deltas. It's of no practical value since most of it occurs somewhere downhill from Flagstaff.

The next step to a nascent soil of clay and cinders is adding organic matter. Organic matter is important because it positively affects the mycorrhizae already in soil, making them more effective. Mycorrhizae are fungal middle-men or brokers, transferring nutrients from the soil to the plant's roots. The soil may be loaded with nutrients, but without mycorrhizae they aren't transferred to the roots.

Obviously, the best organic matter is decayed organic matter because the nutrients are in the decay. Also, organic matter aerates the soil as do the cinders. Organic matter turns the clay and cinders mix into what might pass for clay loam. The best kind of soil runs through the fingers. If it clots and doesn't flow, like blood in the arteries on the way to the heart, it ain't so good. Clots, clods, and clumps are signs that the nutrients aren't flowing as well as they should, a gardening mycrocardial infarction.

Digging kitchen scraps (no fat, meat or oil), manure, and decayed pine needles, fallen leaves, clippings, even shredded newspapers, into the soil is good, but compost is better because as the name suggests, it's already decomposed. Compost is simply a pile of organic matter with a 3 to 1 ratio of carbon material to nitrogen material in which the carbon material is broken down by the nitrogen material, releasing the nutrients. Carbon material is often called brown while the nitrogen material is called green, although coffee grounds are green horticulturally if not visually.

Composting is best done in bins and large containers, but our homesteading ancestors did it in piles, usually several paces from the cabin. In a way, the modern composting movement is a return to the past as a way of finding the future in a horticultural time warp.

Compost is the heart of the medium of soil. It's the difference between a garden that thrives and one that withers. Thriving gardens are the message of the medium, a message with a cascade of consequences, beginning with food and beauty and extending all the way to a habitable planet.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

MISHMASH GARDENING

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (2/5/09)


A conversation with Pat Pedersen, a self-avowed mishmash gardener, brings to mind Proverbs 17:22, "A cheerful heart is a good medicine, but a downcast spirit dries up the bones." Pat is a good medicine, especially for those with dried up bones. She embraces life amidst all of its chaos.

She loves color, bright colors. She plants, hangs, and pots all kinds of plants that bring color into her life, resulting in a house and yard that appear a mishmash, a chaos.

Her love of color may be rooted in her father's automobile accident.
A marine veteran of Midway during World War II, he was struck down in his prime by an automobile driven by teenagers. Crippled, he lost much of his sensory awareness, depriving him of that verve so closely tied to smell, touch, taste, hearing, and sight, isolating him in a chasm of sensory oblivion and despair.

Thrust overnight into a private wilderness, in her childhood Pat became her father's caretaker. Amidst that chaos, that void, and perhaps because of it, she grew aware of her senses, particularly sight, loving colors, especially bright colors. Not only that, she came to treasure them.

Many gardeners like order, everything in its place, a place for everything, neat and tidy. Others favor systems, organizations in which everything has a function, using words like "communities" and that particularly dreadful word "interfaces."

Mishmash gardening may appear willy-nilly, even hurly-burly, with no sense at all. Not so, its meaning is elsewhere.

In his book Chaos, James Gleick writes about the first theorists of the new science of chaos, "They had an eye for pattern." "They had a taste for randomness and complexity, for jagged edges and sudden leaps." This could well be a description of Pat's garden, a garden of brightening surprises, of unpredictable delights, of beauty over classification. For those addicted to order and organization, it may offend, but beyond the offense there is a pattern of vivacity, a love of life, not merely predicable and expected, but "surprised by joy."

Chaos is a Greek word, not meaning disorder, but rather primal emptiness, a chasm, a void, an ultimate yawn. As such, it was the opposite of an orderly universe. The poet Wallace Stevens wrote, "The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind." The French existentialist Albert Camus picked up the theme and extended its consequences into Absurdité which best describes the anti-meaning of her father's tragedy.

The rational and the orderly are human attempts to fix meaning on the unpredictable and the absurd, an urban grid on a random wilderness. Those attempts aren't the reality. Life is not tidy, nor is Pat's garden. She's filled her corner of that primal emptiness with color, with peonies, dahlias, and begonias. That's been her pattern, ever since the chaos of her father's tragedy. For those who look for straight lines and perfect curves, her garden is "randomness and complexity," "jagged edges and sudden leaps" filled with color.

She says that Martha Stewart would call her garden a "bad thing," but rather than listening to Martha Stewart, she hears Frank Sinatra sing, "I did it my way." The secret to her patterns are, in her words, "Plant what you love." Her love of color even reaches to her "passion for purple potatoes."

She hopes "for her garden to become totally coherent," and as she waits, she dances with her pots and hanging baskets, looking for coherence in a world "without form and void." In other words, the pattern to her garden is a dance of color, not idée fixe but danse de joie.

Alfred North Whitehead wrote in Science and the Modern World that religion is "something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest." So with gardening. Meanwhile, out on the edge of the wilderness in Mountainaire with her great Pyrenees, Mr. T. and Poofy B., and her companion, Tom, Pat's dances the dance of faith with her pots and planters amidst the chaos, much like Brother Lawrence practiced the presence of God in a 17th century monastic kitchen with his pots and pans. As faith and hope abide, she believes, "gardening is about love."

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

GARDENING 101

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (1/22/09)

While visiting my children in California for Thanksgiving, we visited the Temecula Olive Oil Company. I casually asked, "How's business?" The reply was quick, "Just great, ever since the recession hit. People are cooking more at home now."

Also, people are growing more of their own food which presents as many challenges to novice gardeners as home-cooking does to novice cooks tackling their first cheese soufflé. While the recession is bad, growing fresh vegetables is good. They taste better than "store-boughten." They're more nutritious and good for the soul and as well as the body. Some people claim they don't have souls, but even though they don't know they have any, it's still good for their souls.

The first issue is soil which has to be prepared, as in turning
organic matter into the dirt with a spade. Our dirt in Flagstaff lacks
organic material which is crucial to fertility. Most veteran gardeners have found that raised beds are efficient for both watering and soil preparation. For fertilizers, "a wide spectrum" fertilizer is useful. If the vegetables are leafy, it's best to use a fertilizer high in nitrogen, and if they're fruits, a fertilizer high in potassium and phosphorus.

Since this is Gardening 101, it's easy-to-grow vegetables. Tomatoes which require lots of attention probably belong in a 501 graduate seminar.

Kale is easy to grow, nutritious, and culinarily adaptable. As a cool season vegetable, it's suited to Flagstaff's climate. There are several types of kale, Russian, Italian, and Scottish. Foodies favor the Italian. Scottish is pleated and attractive, like a kilt. Russian has broad leaves. The Italian is the touchiest to grow. Kale seeds can be sown a few weeks before the last frost and throughout the growing months. Kale plants last well-beyond the first snow fall and are oddly sweetened by a freeze.

The next easy-to-grow vegetable is the prolific zucchini which has many varieties. Unlike kale, it wilts with the first tinge of frost. However, while it grows, it produces a host of succulent fruits which have a wide variety of uses in the kitchen. The easiest way to prepare zucchini is slice it in disks and sauteé it in olive oil, salt, and oregano. Its flowers can even be eaten. (Cf. Hattie Braun's recipe on http://oldfartskitchen.blogspot.com.) It's best to seed it just before the last frost June 15.

Surprisingly, onions, as a cool season vegetable, are easy to grow. Since they need plenty of water, it's best to plant them in trenches. The easiest way to grow them is in sets which are really small onion plants. They can be planted in Flagstaff as early as March 19. A couple of favorites for sweet onions are the Hybrid Candy and Hybrid Superstar. Although onions look like a fruit, they're actually a ball of leaves and need nitrogen fertilizer.

Another vegetable that's easy to grow are snap beans also called string or green beans. Rather than mess around with lattices, poles, etc, growing bush beans is easier. Again, the varieties are many. A few old favorites are Kentucky Wonder, Beurre de Rocquencourt, and Blue Lake. There is a new heirloom from France, Triomphe de Farcy, which produces long, thin pods. After blanching, they can be frozen.

Next in line are beets which are easy to grow, wonderfully nutritious, taste good, and are easy to cook when roasted. They come in white, red, pink, and yellow. Also, their leaves can be used in salads, especially the leaves of the Bull's Blood. They store well and can be frozen after being cooked.

Finally, a word for lettuce. It's a cool season vegetable and is easy to grow in Flagstaff, and its varieties are seemingly endless. The easiest lettuces are the loose leaf varieties because they can be harvested gradually as they develop. Three favorites are the chartreuse Black-seeded Simpson, the red-fringed Lolla Rossa, and the speckled Forellenschuss.

Veteran gardeners, like military veterans, often boast about their hardships in the field. That's too bad, because gardening is a happy experience and not all that hard if the gardener uses a little gardening moxie and is touched with patience. Bon jardinage and Good Eats!

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

THE TAMED CYNIC

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (1/14/09)

Reinhold Niebuhr, the great American theologian, in his lectures on homiletics said, "If your sermons don't anger ten percent of your congregation at any given time, you've not been preaching the gospel. Just make sure it's the right ten percent, and that they're angry at you for the right reasons. Remember, your chief function in the pulpit is to afflict the comfortable and to comfort the afflicted." In terms of the earth, it's time to afflict the comfortable.

In his Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, he wrote that the disillusionment from which idealists often suffer is only useful when it comes full circle from disillusionment with others to disillusionment with themselves. Sadly, many "true believers" are seldom disillusioned with themselves. It might be added that the politically-correct, the neo-Puritans of today, are also seldom disillusioned with themselves.

A possible consequence of disillusionment, other than cynicism, is looking at things in a new way, such as an awareness of where one is in the scheme of things, an awareness that the earth is a gift given by God in trust, not as an object of exploitation, and that we're the trustees of that gift.

One of the first acts of thanksgiving is cherishing the gift. The earth isn't a throwaway, disposable toy, as if we were "legacy children" whose only purpose is to consume what has been given us. The earth is all we have. There aren't any spare earths, as Terri Swearigen said, which we can inhabit if we ruin this one. Rather than exploiting the land as does much of modern industrial agriculture and corporate America, gardening begins by cherishing the land.

Cherishing the earth is sustainability which is, sadly, a lame word burdened with connotations of minimalism, just getting by. Renewing or enriching are better words because they imply increasing the value of the gift as in plowing the profits back into the business. An effective trustee increases the value of the trust, and gardening is one of the best places to increase the earth's value.

The prevailing attitude toward the earth by our culture of consumption has best been epitomized by mining and drilling, that is, the exploitation of the earth's finite resources rather than a renewal of those resources. It has been, in fact, a kind of functional atheism in which we vainly kiss off the presence of the divine, behaving as though we have taken possession of the earth to do with as we please. If the earth is a finite system of resources, it cannot sustain an indefinite exploitation without collapse.

Aldous Huxley, the early twentieth century novelist and critic and author of Brave New World, wrote "Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant."

It takes no wit to see the future of the earth if we keep on conquering it as an overweening tyrant. A good place to start is tailings from mines. I remember as a boy the mountains of rock and sand left from the gold rush miners on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada: beautifully fruitful land forever turned into a wasteland. Those images are child's play compared to the scrofulous lethal uranium contamination of modern tailings in Arizona.

In The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot wrote:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.

Gardeners are the front line in reversing this trend towards oblivion because they work directly with the earth. First, they bring the beauty of flowers and grasses and then the taste of fresh vegetables, all of which flourish in a rich soil. Gardening begins enriching the soil by that unromantic but necessary activity called composting. It's the first act of thanksgiving, cherishing the earth, enriching it by plowing the profits of the land back into the land.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009