WHEN MY FATHER DIED
The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (11/6/09)

My father died when I was eleven, leaving my mother with three boys in the Great Depression. Everything changed. The country club membership was terminated. We moved from a large Spanish style house in the foothills to a small bungalow in the old part of town.

No longer "Dr. Tom's son," my biggest change, as I look back, was Oedipal. I drew closer to my grandfather Brynjolf, an intellectual mystic, and my uncle Rolf, an outdoorsman and mechanic. My mother heroically held the family together. I had to pay for my college education, cobbling together the G.I. Bill, savings, scholarships, loans, and work.

In college, a houseboy for a wealthy, elderly woman, I swept leaves and shoveled snow on her sidewalk, down from Albert Einstein's house on Mercer Street, named after General Hugh Mercer, killed at the Battle of Princeton (1777) and one of Johnny Mercer's forbearers.

I made sure I was on the sidewalk when Einstein took his walks. At first, he paid me no mind, then he nodded, after a few more times he smiled, and then he asked me if I were a student. Replying that I was, he asked me about my courses. I said, "Physics, Greek, Shakespeare, Plato, and Medieval history." "Ah, Greek?" he asked. "Yes, sir," I said, "With Dr. Goheen to read the New Testament." He smiled and said, "You tell Dr. Goheen that you can learn just a much about God from physics as from the New Testament."

Dr. Robert Goheen was a considerable person, OSS officer during World War II, Professor of Classics, President of Princeton University, and then United States Ambassador to India.

Dr. Einstein walked on, head bowed, and hands clasped behind his back, leaving me with the question, where is God encountered, or more accurately, where does God encounter? I was fired for spending too much time on the sidewalk.

Dr. Goheen once replied to a question about finding God, "My dear fellow, God is not lost. We are. God finds us, not we him."

After sixty years, I've concluded "everywhere," Jesus' point in Matthew 25, especially where least expected, not shrines or holy places, unless the poor, sick, and dying are holy places. It's not so much a finding as it is an awareness of having been found.

After spending six months off and on in a Dominican monastery
and a Jewish Seminary and studying with Jungians, Buddhists, and Native Americans, I found I meditate best when I'm working in a garden. While gardening is therapeutic, more importantly, it's spiritual, not so much centeredness, but a connectedness, an awareness of a presence.

Soil flowing through one's fingers, plants brushing against one's legs, watching budding seedlings, abiding the withering and death of a treasured plant, admiring a delphinium's beauty, and tasting fresh vegetables are all experiences of vitality, the vitality of God's Presence. Gardens abet an awareness of a Presence, not as an object, but as an aura, a shadow, a Presence, not specific or concrete, but a milieu.

Beyond syllogisms and complete sentences, God is neither an object nor a subject. Any such mindset is an attempted deicide, a fool's errand. What better place to experience the Presence than in a garden, enmeshed in life, the place to which Jesus repaired.

As humans we are limited to our five senses. The spiritual is experienced through the carnal. Gardening's carnal experience uses all of our five senses. It is difficult to walk through a garden, much less work in it, without seeing, tasting, hearing, smelling, and touching, all those carnal experiences freighted with the spiritual.

Some might say this is merely imagination. Albert Einstein would reply, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Imagination is what makes a caress the experience of love. "How weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable" would life be without imagination. My mathematics professor, Dr. Alonzo Church, a deeply spiritual man, in an offhand remark after a class on symbolic logic,
said, "Mathematics demands clarity, especially the clarity to know there's mystery." We wonder as we wander out under the sky, holding infinity in the palm of our hands and eternities in an hour.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

A SCRATCH ON THE FACE OF ETERNITY

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (7/29/09)

"A scratch on the face of eternity" was the phrase William Faulkner of Yoknapatawpha County used to describe the arts and artifacts of human civilization, such as the petroglyphs left by the "Ancient Ones" on the Colorado Plateau.

As a phrase, it well-describes gardening because gardening is a human artifact, an activity beyond merely hunting and gathering, something human beings do to alter the creation, to leave a scratch on the face of the earth.

Ralph Baierlein is leaving a "scratch on the face of eternity" by leaving some scratches on the face of the earth. A retired professor of physics from Wesleyan University in Connecticut with a doctorate from my alma mater, he lives in a fenceless Continental neighborhood where he grows magnificent tomatoes which may be the crowning achievement of his life. For the clueless, growing tomatoes that mature in the middle of July in Flagstaff is a crowning achievement and seemingly defies the laws of nature.

One would expect a professor of physics to be thorough, physics
being the kind of enterprise that doesn't allow for messing around. From a distance, something that looks like a space station which has lost its way in the galaxy and mistakenly landed in Ralph's backyard is, in fact, his tomato patch.

First of all, the raised bed is protected. It's surrounded by a stout wire fence to keep away deer, elk, and other tomato eating varmints like raccoons. Ground squirrels have been a nuisance some years, but this year, a pair of gray foxes, raising a family under a neighbor’s front porch, eliminated the problem.

The frame—8 feet by 12 feet—is constructed from pressure-treated 4 x 4 inch lumber, joined at the corners by a reinforcing bar. On the inner sides of the frame, a layer of roofing paper and then sheet aluminum keep the chemicals away from the tomato plants.

After the roots of a nearby cottonwood invaded the garden in search of water, Ralph disassembled the frame and added a layer of galvanized sheet metal between the first and second 4 x 4’s.

The tomato bed, about a foot and a half high, is filled with custom soil with annual doses of compost and horse manure. A drip system, controlled by turning on the water at the other end of a garden hose, waters individual plants. Lest the various metal sheets produce a swimming pool, five perforated PVC drainage pipes cross the garden deep underground but on top of the sheet metal to provide drainage.

Ralph's enterprise starts around May 18th with gallon-container-sized tomato plants surrounded with Walls o' Water. The soil is covered with black weedcloth with holes about a foot in diameter for the tomato plants. Planks provide a footing for working around the plants without compressing the soil. An exercise in the conservation of energy, it pays off.

Growing tomatoes in Flagstaff is chancy, and successful tomato gardening reduces the chances of failure. As such, it is a mirror of life. Ralph prepared the soil, protected the tomatoes, fed and watered them regularly. The result has been bounty in some years and disaster in others. Tomatoes “by the bucket daily” in 2004. Curly-top virus killed almost every plant in 2005.

Scientists keep records, not relying on memories which tend either to exaggerate or fade. Ralph has a well-thumbed record book, dating back to 2001, recording the earliest appearance of a fine, rich red tomato and, then, the quantities, like baskets, of fruit he's reaped. Sometimes the tomatoes hit near the middle of July, and more often just after the 20th. This year he began harvesting on July 12th, but productivity has been slow.

Meeting a physicist can be daunting, especially for someone who's messed around in sloppy disciples like literature, theology, philosophy, and psychology, but Ralph's basic pleasantness seeps into the conversation with tidbits of dry, wry humor. He's a New Englander, no frills, fundamental decency, deeply-set integrity, thorough capability, and a bit flinty. A clue is the floor of his and Jean's house, an old-fashioned beautifully kept solid oak floor. Ralph's "scratch on the face of eternity" just might be his backyard tomato patch.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

A GLEAM IN HIS EYE

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (7/18/09)

"A gleam in my eye" is the way Virgil Frye describes his feelings when in late February and early March, he starts planting his tomato seeds. In his mind's eye, he sees them maturing through spring and early summer, and then later in the summer he sees himself savoring their luscious fruit. His relationship with his garden is not mechanical and distant, but immediate and simpatico. His garden is family.

A longtime widower whose grief is near spent, traces remain, a catch in his throat, misted, down cast eyes, but, happily, he's soon to wed again. Something of a recluse, living near the edge of nowhere on the outskirts of Winona, he's fashioned a place of peace for himself on a slope of land in a forest of junipers at the end of the road. For him gardening's a solitary sport. "Group gardens, like communes, fail because some people work hard but most don't." He believes in self-reliance.

At the entrance to his land are the ruins of the original settlers' cabin, the place they chose because the Ancient Ones had chosen it before them. Occasionally, he finds shards of the Ancients Ones' presence. His place has an aura of history. Virgil believes that present-day inhabitants of the Colorado Plateau would do well to follow the Anasazi in the way they use the land. "We like to think we're just too smart," he says, "and sometimes we pay for it."

Authenticity is his watchword. He didn't haul in dirt to make his garden. He cleared the land of rocks and added organic matter to make the soil. Then he built a walled enclosure of plastic sheeting with a roof he can cut way when the danger of frost is past. Next, he covered the soil with straw which he keeps damp, "a tomato swamp cooler."

He begins his tomatoes from seed because, "boughten tomato plants" are strangers, not family. Using pint-sized containers, he covers the seeds with a few inches of soil, and when the plant emerges, becoming a few inches high, he adds more soil to develop the root system. "I grow root systems not stems." He's committed to what the eye doesn't see, rich, deep soil and roots.

A son of the soil himself, he grew up on a farm in northwest Iowa. A self-confessed vagabond, he settled for a time in Oregon but migrated to Arizona to get away from the wet and rain. One senses he's found a home on that slope once farmed by the Ancient Ones.

As always, the proof is in the pudding. His tomatoes are
spectacular. It's like an alternate reality, once a person steps over the threshold into his large plastic enclosures. Row upon row of tomatoes, some shoulder high, laden with fruit, some as big as baseballs, all in the middle of July. He fusses over his tomatoes as though they were his children. "I want to see my tomatoes progress, rather than just staying alive."

Virgil plants by the moon and credits it with his bumper crop of tomatoes, but he also carefully composts his soil, using only a little synthetic fertilizer at the beginning of the growing season to give his tomatoes a "jump start."

Once a visitor has recovered from the shock of stepping into his first plastic enshrouded tomato Eden, Virgil opens up a second, similar in structure, identical in horticultural opulence, hidden down slope behind some junipers. When asked if he planned to sell his tomatoes, Virgil, stunned in quizzical disbelief as though he had just heard an unspeakable sacrilege, finally replied, "You don't sell your children. This is food, not some old washtub. It's too important for money."

He gives much of it away, but he also cans his own tomato juice and tomato sauce, keeping some of his family around him during winter's cold fury.

Virgil won the "Special Interest" award in the contest of gardens by
the Arizona Native Plant Society and the Flagstaff Xeriscape Council. A tour of all the gardens is from 10:00 am to 2:00 pm, Sunday, July 26. A map is available on line at www.thearb.org.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

Photographs courtesy of Tom Bean

RONALD REAGAN AND TOMATOES

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (7/12/09)


An unintended of consequence of President Ronald Reagan's foreign policy was a boon for tomato fanciers in the High Country. When he demanded on June 12, 1987, at the Brandenburg Gate that President Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union "tear down this wall," he was referring to the Berlin Wall, but the consequence was "glasnost," an opening up of the Soviet Union which, heretofore, had been a closed society. Actually, under Gorbachev's leadership there had been a gradual glasnost earlier in the 1980's.

"Glasnost" meant, amongst other things, an opening up of Soviet agriculture which meant in turn an opening up of gardens and gardeners in Siberia. Russians have long been known as excellent gardeners, but Siberian gardeners were a special breed of Russian gardeners.

While President Reagan had hydrogen bombs and an end to the Cold War on his mind, a result was the discovery of Siberian heirloom tomatoes. For decades the Soviet Union had been a closed society, especially after the end of World War II, but long before that. Winston Churchill in 1946 said, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent." Actually, an iron curtain had descended soon after the Russian Revolution of October 1917. This meant that the Soviet Union had been a closed society for about 70 years.

During those years of isolation, Siberian farmers had slowly, year after year, developed superior heirloom tomatoes, taking the seed from the best tomato plants and planting them the following year, developing hardy tomato plants with a short growing season. There had been no artificial hybridization from Western capitalist commercial agribusiness, but just natural selection, producing strong, reliable, heirloom tomatoes.

Soviet paranoia about Western imperialism kept the agricultural capitalists out of Russia, leaving the Siberians to themselves to develop robust heirlooms. The Siberian tomatoes are amongst the ironies of horticulture, the blessings of a communist blowback.

Of course, tomatoes that would do well in Siberia would certainly do well on the Colorado Plateau. One of the problems for gardeners in Flagstaff is that many of the old favorites have a long growing season. The famous heirloom Brandywine takes from 80 to 100 days to mature, leaving the Flagstaff gardener feeling the nip of frost before the first tomato.

Sad it is, but most commercial nurseries don't stock these Siberians, preferring to merchandise the old reliables of Better Boy and Early Girl, which are great early-producing tomatoes. However, the variety has been limited, except for Stupice, another early producer (52 days) from Czechoslovakia.

Perhaps, the most delightful of the Siberians is the Galina with a vine that resembles an adolescent in the throes of growth, all arms and legs. An ungainly vine that is easily espaliered, the fruit comes in clusters of golden cherries, so sweet of taste that they seldom reach the kitchen. Unlike our loppy capitalist adolescents, the Galina is productive, being both early (59 days) and abundant.

Another pleasure is Sasha's Altai which hails from the Altai Shan mountains near China. So remote, that it was considered terra incognita by Renaissance cartographers and was even designated by Medieval cartographers as hic sunt dracones (here are dragons.) Sasha, a barefooted Siberian gardener, walked, unshod, eight miles one way to give Bill McDorman, the tomato seed hunter, seeds from his own heirloom tomato plant.

The plant isn't loppy as is the Galina, but compact and bushy, reminding one of a short, sturdy, hardy Siberian gardener. An early producer (59 days), it is prolific with a prize-winning taste. Unlike Galina which falls out of a cage, Sasha's Altai can easily be contained in a medium sized cage. They are sort of the Mutt and Jeff of the Siberians.

Two other Siberian good-producing cultivars are Perestroika and Glasnost, but if one is looking for a replica with taste of those round, full-figured tomatoes in the supermarket, another Siberian, "Market Miracle," is a good bet.

President Reagan can be forgiven trying to palm off ketchup as a vegetable in school lunches because in his Cold War triumph he opened up Siberian tomatoes for High Country gardeners.

Copyright (c) Dana Prom Smith 2009

GARDENING IN COMPLETE SENTENCES

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (7/1/09)

"Grandpa, you should talk to Roxie in one word commands." Our granddaughter and my namesake, Dana Marie, heard me talking to Roxie, our three-legged, pink-nosed, aging yellow lab, in complete sentences. A third year student at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, she's inclined to rational thinking, evidence, and analysis. A tall, blue-eyed, neocortical blonde, she owns a steel-trap mind.

I told her that my relationship with Roxie is more collegial than patriarchal, saving the patriarchal stuff for human beings.

She continued, "Gretchen says that you even talk to plants, birds, squirrels, bees, and skunks in complete sentences." I replied, "Not always. Sometimes, I curse them, but I remain engaged. A garden isn't a machine with interchangeable parts like cars and wind turbines. It's an organism. Everything affects everything else internally. A garden is better off with tender mercies instead of syllogisms.

A self-confessed technophile, she drifted off by the fireplace using
Roxie as a pillow, fiddling with one word messages on her Blackberry, never mentioning Gretchen's conversations with the television set.

Gardening's a relief from the soulless "I-It" formulaic relationships of answering machines' disembodied voices, ideologically driven decisions, and digitized human beings. Gardening's "I-Thou," "up close and personal," if a little chaotic. Gardening's largely limbic which, as one widely unaccepted theory has it, is that middle layer of the brain we share with other mammals, not the neocortical which we, as humans, keep to ourselves, except perhaps for an occasional anthropoid and extraterrestrial.

The neocortex is the brains' newest evolutionary part, giving us the ability to think rationally, to solve problems, and, also, to lie. Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness wrote, "bad faith is a lie to oneself" which is hiding from the truth. The neocortex also gives us the capacity for self-consciousness, like talking to ourselves, as in "why did I do that?" However, it comes with the price of inner internecine conflicts. As with Shakespeare's Brutus, we're at war with ourselves, "forgetting the shows of love to other men."

Dogs, birds, squirrels, and plants don't lie. Often a puzzlement, they're never deceitful although Roxie has a way of sneaking off when no one is looking.

Gardening's limbic, an emotional experience. Some people love life, some don't, and some aren't sure, but a committed gardener is a lover which, as we all know, is both an emotion and a virtue. Gardeners love to watch things grow, fret over plants that don't thrive, grieve at a plant's death, and, most of all, celebrate the flowering of life. In short, gardeners embrace the chiefest of virtues and the finest of emotions which makes them out of step with much of the reptilian, the lowest brain layer, in modern American life.

Also, gardening is alien to the frenetic, fast-paced quality of modern life. Soil may be enriched, watered, and cultivated, but nothing changes the sequences of time. As with Ol' Man River, gardens just keep "rollin' along." They can't be hurried. No fighting time. With the rhythms of nature, gardeners are in tune, if not with the "music of the spheres," with the harmonies of the earth. Gardens, just as does time, have no fast-lanes.

Gardening may seem absurd to many people, but cold, impersonal, fast-paced rational, formulaic modernity doesn't seem to have done much for human equilibrium either. Putting it plainly, the neocortex enables us to stress out. Getting in sync with nature's beat works by relaxing us and, thereby, allowing our neocortex to function efficiently without mauvais foi gumming it up. Our senses relax us. Gardening is about those senses.

Drifts of daffodils and the elegant beauty of bearded irises, the aroma of roses and lavender, and the taste of tomatoes and snap beans just off the vine connect us with the rhythms of nature, regaining our emotional balance and relieving our inner conflicts.

Torqued by their presuppositions, rationalistic ahedoniacs, people who don't relish their senses, stress out with unintended consequences, blowbacks, absurdities, and ironies. Gardeners, on the other hand, know that the best antidote for stress is the scents, scenes, tastes, and sensations of a garden in bloom. They enjoy life for having touched it.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

QUANTUM UNCERTAINTY IN THE GARDEN

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (6/11/09)

Albert Einstein, uncomfortable with quantum uncertainty, wrote that "God does not play dice with the universe" to which the famed Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, replied, "Quit telling God what to do." Theirs was a difference between the theology of being and that of becoming. Apparently in sub-atomic physics, variability is the watchword with no quid pro quo, tit for tat, cause and effect certainty. Einstein sought to find some certainty behind the uncertainty while Bohr accepted uncertainty. Psychologically, the issue is closure.

If physicists are looking for uncertainty, they should try growing tomatoes in Flagstaff with variables upon variables in summers of uncertainty. The French physicist, Bernard d'Espagnat, writing about the implications of quantum uncertainty, said that there is a "veiled reality" in the mystery of uncertainty akin the emotions evoked while listening to Mozart, like "faint glimpses of ultimate reality."

I once asked my late brother, David, an agnostic and professor of humanities at Caltech, why physicists seem to sit more easily with a sense of a divine presence than social scientists. He replied, "They're closer to the ultimate mystery. The closer you get the more God makes sense."

Getting down and dirty on one's knees in the garden is a sure-fire way to get close to those "faint glimpses of ultimate reality." The ultimate is always veiled, only the preliminary and the penultimate are revealed.

But back to the mystery of tomatoes. They came to us from the Incas by way of the Aztecs, Spanish, and Italians. The Incas' tomatl was a small many-seeded, acidic berry which they fed to the Conquistadores, hoping to kill them by acidifying their alimentary canals. Making its way from the Incas to the Aztecs, the tomatl was introduced to Europe by Hernan Cortes after subjugating the Aztecs. Initially rejected by the Europeans because of its bitter taste, the Italians developed the tomatl into the tomato which was subsequently used by the French and Spanish.

In addition to writing The Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, by way of his fondness for French cuisine, was an early proponent of the tomato in America, calling them tomatas. Our late president, John F. Kennedy, when hosting a dinner for American Nobel Laureates at the White House, said: "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when President Jefferson dined alone."

Ironically, beginning as a poison, tomatoes became a prized fruit, classified by the Feds as a vegetable. Jam-packed with nutritional goodies along with being toothsome, it's a gift from the Renaissance Italians.

The horticultural uncertainty of tomatoes in Flagstaff is two fold.
First, there are various afflictions to which tomatoes fall heir, both air and soil borne. Secondly, Flagstaff's growing season is relatively short, say, compared to Florida, but we don't have hurricanes and muggy summers which are hard on tomatoes, too.

As to the first uncertainty, the best thing to do is to widely space
tomato plants so that air easily circulates amongst them and rotate their plantings every year for three years. They are best planted in sterilized soil and containers. Soil can be sterilized by putting it a container and then enshrouding the container in black plastic for about two weeks in the sun. Also, no overhead watering. Tomatoes don't like wet leaves which make them prone to blights.

As for the short growing season, ingenuity dictates planting fast-
maturing tomatoes, such as the Siberians, Better Boy, Early Girl, Stupice, and Prairie Fire. Sasha's Altai matures in 59 days and Stupice in 54. The 90 day heirlooms of those fabled grandmothers in Oklahoma will be frost-bitten before producing.

As a busboy at the Princeton Inn in 1947, I met Niels Bohr while he was having lunch with J. Robert Oppenheimer. Clearing his table for dessert, I tried to remove his nearly empty wine glass. He looked up at me, smiled, and held up his hand to stop me, saying, "In vino, veritas." Alas, the Romans didn't enjoy tomatoes, coming 1,500 years too late to the Italian peninsula. With no Latin word for tomato, it'll have to be "in home-grown tomatoes, truth."

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

THE SLOTHFUL GARDENER: TARDY GARDENING

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (5/26/09)

While waving a wooden spoon at me, my great aunt Marie Aslaakson often said, "Never put off to tomorrow what you can do today." As a boy, I thought "Auntie" was slightly amiss, believing, as I did, that mañana offered more opportunities than today while freeing today from irksome entanglements. Tomorrow opens new possibilities that weren't imaginable yesterday. Sloth is a vice with rewards.

Sadly, with procrastination tomorrows snowball as postponed tasks accumulate even though some are winnowed by time into insignificance.

Procrastination in gardening isn't wise because gardening requires lock-step obedience to a euphemism, "the rhythms of nature," especially in the restricted climatic confines of the Colorado Plateau. With no "Long, Hot Summer" in which to dally, Flagstaff doesn't even have the "dog days of summer." As with dusk's short twilights, there aren't any lingering days of summer. Slam, bang. The hymn reads, "Fast falls the eventide." So does the growing season.

What to do for the lethargic, slothful gardener who hasn't gotten
around to timely planting?

Surprisingly, there are several fall-back, plan B, opportunities. Pansies and violas do well in the early spring when the temperatures are cool but fade away when everything else does well in the warmth of summer. However, they can be planted later in the summer when the weather is cooler, lasting into through the cold snaps of fall. When the slothful gardener rouses from his "dogmatic slumbers," feeling refreshed by his hibernation, it may be pansy and viola planting time. Also, if they aren't buried under six foot snow banks, pansies and violas may survive the winter and greet the slothful gardener with their cheery faces come spring. Procrastination has its rewards.

Next are onions. As with pansies and violas, onions are planted early in the spring with onions sets planted in the middle of March. In short, they're cold-weather plants, meaning they may survive the winter's cold and snow. Whether seeded or in sets, onions can be planted later in the summer when there is still time for them to establish themselves.

When winter sets in, they hang on until spring. Long before most anything else shows any sign of life, onions are growing in the lingering cold of spring. Given to sloth myself, I failed to pluck all of my 407 onions from the earth by last fall, and in May I discovered that I had mature onions where I had abandoned them to winter's cold fury the autumn before. Now and then, sloth pays.

Snow peas, those wonderfully crunchy pods that are delicious eaten off the vine or in salads, are another cold weather vegetable that defy Flagstaff's straitjacketed 90 day growing season, extending it by another two months. This means that snow peas can be sown in midsummer for a fall crop.

And so is a less appealing but nutritious vegetable. Kale is a vegetable whose culinary use is not immediately apparent, but since it is so nutritious, virtuously minded cooks devise creative ways to use it, sneaking it into soups and other gustatory subterfuges. Even Martha Stewart has an odd recipe for kale, combining it with pearled barley. The nice thing about kale is that it continues to grow after the first frost and even tastes sweeter for having been nipped. Kale is a chance for the slothful gardener to go virtuous and redeem himself from public opprobrium.

Although beets have been banned from the White House's vegetable garden, they're nutritious, even called by the New York Times "the new spinach." Coming in many colors, their roots and leaves are easily used in the kitchen. As a cool weather vegetable, they can be planted later for a fall crop. Also, they can survive the first frosts of autumn. With beautiful foliage, they're also useful for decorative planting before being plucked for eating.

Some say that nature is not forgiving. Not so, it provides times of mercy and grace for the slothful to redeem themselves, even in the stern climate of the High Country. The moral: although sloth is a vice with several rewards, slothful gardeners miss the joys and bounties of full season gardening.

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2009

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