One Saturday the Quiblers got to a project they had been planning for some time, which was the installation of garden beds in the backyard. No more suburban lawn wasting their land!

And indeed it was a great pleasure to Charlie to cut big rectangles of turf out of the backyard and wheelbarrow these out to the street for disposal by the composting trucks. He was sick of mowing that yard. There was some old lumber stacked at the back of the garage, and now he and Nick laid lengths of it down in the remaining lawn to serve as borders. Then they transferred many wheelbarrow loads of expensive amended soil from the pile in the driveway where the dump trunk had left it, around the house to the rectangles, dodging Joe at many points along the way. The resulting raised beds were loamy and black and looked highly productive and artificial.

Nick and Anna were now working the soil in, and planting their first vegetables. It was full spring now, middle of May, steamy and green, and so they planted the usual summer vegetables: tomatoes, zucchini, strawberries, peppers, pumpkins, melons, basil, eggplant, cilantro, cucumbers.

Nick stood looking down at a broccoli plant, small and delicate between his feet. “So where will the broccoli come out?” he asked Charlie.

Charlie stared at the plant. It looked like an ornamental. “I don’t know,” he confessed, feeling a little jolt of fear. They didn’t know anything.

Nick rolled his eyes. “Well, if we’re lucky they won’t show up at all.”

“Come on now. Broccoli is good for you.”

One of their agreements was that they would plant vegetables that Nick and Joe liked to eat, which was a severe constraint, but one they had agreed to, because it was not exclusive; they were planting for Anna and Charlie too. But for the boys it was down to potatoes, an entire bed of them, and carrots. Joe would eat some other vegetables, but Nick would not, and so he was put in charge of the carrot bed. These were to be planted from seed, and apparently the soil had to be specially amended. Sandy soil was best, and white cloth laid over the soil during germination was recommended—by Drepung, who was serving as their consultant on this project.

“Although it shouldn’t be me,” he kept saying, “I don’t know anything about gardening really, it’s all Qang at our place, you should have her over to do things like plant carrot seed. That one is tricky. She would do a fire puja.”

Still, he helped them to get it planted, on his hands and knees digging, and showing worms to Joe. After the planting it was mostly a matter of watering and weeding. Also removing snails and slugs. Joe carried these carefully to the back of their lot, where they could start life over in the weeds bordering the lawn.

“Don’t overwater,” Charlie advised Nick as he sprayed water from a hose. “You have to be precise in how much you water them. I estimate this much, if you want to be accurate,” waving the spray back and forth.

“Do you mean accurate or precise?” Anna asked from the new flower bed.

“No quibbling allowed.”

“I’m not quibbling! It’s an important distinction.”

“What do you mean? Accurate and precise mean precisely the same thing!”

“They do not.”

“What do you mean,” Charlie was giggling at her now, “how so?”

“Accuracy,” she said, “means how close an estimate is to the true value. So if you estimate something is five percent and it turns out to be eight percent, then you weren’t very accurate.”

“This is statistics.”

“Yes. And precision refers to how broad your estimate is. Like, if you estimate something is between five and eight percent, then you aren’t being very precise, but if you say between 4.9 and 5.1 percent, then it’s more precise.”

“I see,” Charlie said, nodding solemnly.

“Quit it! It’s a very important distinction!”

“Of course it is. I wasn’t laughing at that.”

“At what then?”

“At you!”

“But why?”

“Oh, no reason.”

“It is a real distinction,” Nick pointed out to Charlie.

“Oh of course, of course!”

This then became one of the recurrent motifs of the Quiblers on patrol, a distinction applicable, once you agreed it existed, to an amazing number of situations. Precise or accurate? Well, let’s think about it.

On the way to the garden store to get more stakes and other supplies, Charlie said, “I wonder how many cubic feet of compost we need if we want to cover all four of the beds, let’s see, they’re six by twelve, say a foot deep in compost, make it simple…”

“Mom can tell you.”

“No that’s all right, I’m working on it—”

“Two hundred and eighty-eight cubic feet,” Anna said, while driving.

“I told you she could.”

“It isn’t fair,” Charlie said, still looking at his fingers. “She uses all these tricks from when she was in math club.”

“Come on,” Anna objected.

Nick was helpless with laughter. “Yeah right—she uses all these clever fiendish tricks—like multiplication,” and they laughed all the way to the store.

—

Unfortunately their new spring quickly became the hottest and driest on record in the Potomac watershed, and soon, it having been a dry winter also, the region had to resort to water rationing. Between that and the mosquitoes, everyone began to reminisce with affection about the long winter, and wonder if it had been such a good idea to restart the Gulf Stream, since cold winters were so much preferable to drought. Crops were dying, the rivers falling low, streams drying out, fish populations dying; it was bad. A bit of snow and cold would have been easy in comparison. You could always throw on more clothes when it got cold, but in this heat!

But of course they didn’t have a choice.

The Quiblers did what they could to micro-irrigate their crops, and they had enough water for such a small garden; but many of the plants died anyway. “We’re only going to have about a fifty percent survival rate, if that!”

“Is that being accurate or being precise?”

“I hope neither!”

Anna was going to websites like safeclimate.net or fightglobalwarming.com and seeing how they rated when she entered their household statistics on a carbon burn chart. She was interested in the different methods the sites were using. Some accepted general descriptions as answers, others wanted the figures from your heating and electric bill, from your car’s odometer, and its real miles per gallon. Your actual air travel miles, with charts of distances between major flying destinations there to make the calculation. “The air travel is killer,” Anna muttered. “I thought it was a really energy-efficient way to travel, but not really.”

Giving her numbers to play with was like giving catnip to the cats, and Charlie watched her affectionately, but with a little bit of worry, as she speed-typed around on a spreadsheet she had adapted from the chart. Despite their garden’s contribution to their food supply, which she estimated at less than two percent of their caloric intake, and the flex schedule for power that they had signed up for with their power provider, still they were burning about seventy-five tons of carbon a year. Equivalent to eight football fields of Brazilian rain forest, the site said. Per year.

“You just can’t get a good number in a suburban home with a car and all,” she said annoyed. “And if you fly at all.”

“It’s true.” Charlie stared over her shoulder at her spreadsheet. “I don’t see what else we can do here either, given the infrastructure.”

“I know. But I wish there was a way. Nick! Turn that light off, please!”

“Mom, you’re the one who told me to turn it on.”

“That’s when you were using it. Now you’re not.”

“Mom.”