By six weeks its heart will have swollen and enfolded itself in layer upon layer of crisply crinkled leaves, brittle as French pastry and juicy as a peach. It will be, say, half the size of a bowler hat and a lot better looking-and in flavour, if you have paid attention to what I said about chopped chickweed and groundsel and a scatter of sawdust, it will taste of walnuts and ambrosia and even, faintly, of lettuce.
—On growing lettuce, ETHELIND FEARON, The Reluctant Gardener, 1952
The compost made all the difference. I fed all my plants with generous handfuls of dried organic fertilizer, and I “side-dressed”—I learned this term from the Sunset book—the shrubs with my new Organic Soil-Building Compost, going from plant to plant like Florence Nightingale bringing medicine to the troops. They looked better right away. Even though I’d scattered the plants all over the yard, with no particular plan or structure in mind, the garden looked a little less chaotic thanks to the smooth dark dirt around every plant. It made the whole place look orderly, tended, cared for. I kept adding to the garden, buying young lettuce seedlings, thin purple onions, and blue-green cabbages. They sat in my newly restored dirt, looking strong and robust and much happier than anything I’d planted in my garden so far. I hovered over them, watering them, looking out for snails, and raking the soil smooth whenever LeRoy walked across it.
The one plant that didn’t seem to need any more help from me was the catnip, which was thriving in its chicken wire cage, poking silvery gray leaves out in every direction. LeRoy seemed to spend most of his time hovering around it, but it managed to get a little bigger each week in spite of him. There was also plenty of catmint, which sprawled along the ground and which LeRoy could be seen rolling in occasionally. Gray didn’t get outside much to visit either plant, but I noticed that when LeRoy came inside for the evening, she hobbled over to him and sniffed him excitedly, licking him anywhere she seemed to smell catnip, while LeRoy just stood there, letting her do it, with a faintly embarrassed look on his face.
IT WAS ALMOST APRIL. The days were getting longer, and it became a regular part of my evening to walk around the garden and tend to the plants before dark. It was starting to become an interesting place to be. Thanks to the compost, my vegetable seedlings thrived. The salvia and the lavender starting blooming, returning to the healthy state they’d been in when I brought them home from the nursery. The catnip put out a spray of faint pink flowers, and finally, a few Shasta daisies sent up white blooms. The garden still had a long way to go, but there were these little bright spots, these little islands of springtime that cheered me enormously. Flowers were blooming and it was because of me and my good dirt. We had made something grow.
Still, these little triumphs brought with them a whole new set of responsibilities and worries. A growing garden requires skill and attention and I often wondered if I was up to the task. Maybe I wasn’t watering enough. Maybe it needed more fertilizer. At night I sometimes woke up convinced that there were pests circling my house like enemy squadrons waiting to attack.
One day I got the idea to cut a few flowers and bring them inside. Even this made me a little nervous: What if the plants reacted badly? What if I sent them into some kind of state of shock and they quit blooming altogether? I also wasn’t sure how to cut them. Should they be cut at an angle? Is it better to cut the stem all the way down to the base, or could I just chop it off to any length that suited me?
There is an art to picking flowers, as it turns out. The gardening books that kept accumulating on my shelf offered instructions on cutting flowers and treating the stems, all of which I ignored at first. You’d think I would have learned from my compost experience that the advice in the gardening books was usually worth following, but it all seemed like so much trouble for just a few flowers.
For instance, there were all kinds of rules about where on the stem to cut the flowers. Carnations should be cut above the node. Calla lilies prefer to be ripped out at the root, then cut to the proper length later. Woody stems like lilacs should be cut at a 45-degree angle and then bashed on the cut end with a hammer so they will absorb water. Hollow stems such as poppies should be seared with a flame to keep the flower from losing the milky white fluid that is, apparently, its source of nutrients. Once inside, the flowers should be kept overnight in a cool, dark spot like a cellar to “harden” them and make them easier to arrange.
Was picking flowers always this complicated? I didn’t think so. I remembered picking wildflowers by the lake where my grandparents lived. I pulled enormous grimy handfuls of them out of the ground and ran up the stairs to my grandmother’s front porch, where she would find an old jar for them and suggest kindly that we keep them out on the porch so everyone could admire them. They always wilted the next day, but I blamed it on the Texas heat, not on my own flower-picking skills.
So I didn’t bother with any of those fancy techniques from my gardening books. What worked at the lake twenty years ago would surely work now, I thought, as I stepped outside with a tall, skinny olive jar and started picking flowers. I didn’t even bring a pair of scissors along. When I saw a flower I wanted, one that I thought the plant could do without, I tugged, I bent, I twisted. Somehow, the flower came off. I did this over and over again until I had a jarful of them, all mixed together in a bright, mismatched jumble of deep blues, fiery reds, assertive yellows, and pale, translucent pinks.
The flowers only lasted a few days, not much longer than the ones I picked for my grandmother’s front porch. But pretty soon, flowers were finding their way into the house regularly, and eventually, I started paying more attention to the advice my gardening books gave. After all, why go to all the work of growing flowers, only to bring them inside for a few short, doomed days on my kitchen table?
Besides, I didn’t want to injure my new plants, just when they were starting to forgive me for planting them in my awful dirt. I went out and bought some flowercutting gear so I could do it right: sharp kitchen scissors so the plants would heal where I cut them, metal gathering buckets to keep the flowers fresh, and flower frogs to hold the stems in place at the bottom of the vase. I learned to cut the stems at an angle so they wouldn’t rest flat on the bottom of the vase and not be able to absorb water. I stripped off all the leaves that would be below the water line. I even added lemon-lime soda to the water once, which is supposed to make them last longer because the sugar provides nourishment and the lemon/lime acid lets them absorb more water. But this may have been taking things too far. I felt a little silly, offering soft drinks to my flowers. What would they need next? A shot of Canadian Club?
I WAS STARTING TO FEEL like a real gardener at last. Those early visions of me in the garden on the weekends, hauling buckets of freshly cut flowers inside, were starting to come true. But I still hadn’t had a single meal from the garden, not one pea, not one onion, not one leaf of lettuce. After all the work I’d put into the garden, I knew I’d feel more like a real gardener when I actually got to harvest something for the table.
It happened one night when we were in the kitchen making dinner. I was grating cheese for Scott’s famous homemade macaroni and cheese and he was rummaging around in the refrigerator. “What are you looking for?” I asked.
“I thought we bought lettuce for a salad,” he said. “But I don’t see it,”
“That was a week ago,” I told him. “It got slimy. I tossed it out.”
“Oh. Well, do you want to go pick some of your lettuce out of the garden?”
My lettuce. It was a silly thing to get excited over, I suppose. Growing lettuce is a small accomplishment; the results are fleeting, perishable. And I only had one short row to show for three months of gardening: a dozen or so plants, barely enough for two salads. In fact, I almost hated to go after them with my scissors. I’d worked so hard to grow them in the first place. They were like little works of art, these lettuce heads in miniature. It was a shame to snip off even a single leaf.
But I did it, and on the way inside, I found a few more ingredients for the salad: a young purple onion, a few parsley leaves, and even a tough-looking lemon from the tree for the dressing. We were out of store-bought vegetables, so there was nothing else in the house to put in a salad, but that was just as well. I didn’t want to spoil the experience. While Scott’s macaroni and cheese was cooking, I whisked together olive oil, balsamic vinegar, lemon juice, and chopped parsley and green onions, and drizzled it over the greens. It took no time at all to pull together my homegrown salad. Although it was not quite warm enough to eat dinner in the garden, we took our plates outside and sat together on the back porch steps, where we ate our salads in a kind of appreciative silence. It was a small miracle, the first salad from the garden, and it was every bit as good as I thought it would be, crisp and wild and green.
A true California baby green salad is a work of art. It contains few ingredients because the lettuce is the main event, not merely a place holder for chunks of tomato or cucumber. Here in northern California, we like our salads to be both simple and unusual. Flowers, roadside berries, and even weeds are popular salad ingredients, as long as they are labeled organic and drizzled in balsamic vinaigrette.
Dandelion and wild arugula grew naturally in the lettuce bed my first year, so it didn’t take me long to learn to love them in my salads rather than do battle with them in the garden. I even went so far as to introduce a new weed to my garden—a cultivated variety of purslane, a low-growing succulent with thick, crunchy leaves.
Scott calls them my “weed salads,” these piles of spiky young greens. But isn’t eating one’s enemy for dinner the best revenge? Here is my recipe for a wilted dandelion salad, perfect for spring or early summer, when the dandelions look as if they might take over.
½ cup walnut pieces
3-4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2-3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 blood orange or grapefruit, sectioned and peeled
dandelion greens, enough for two salads
Toast the walnut pieces under the broiler until lightly browned, and remove. Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a large saute pan, add the garlic and simmer until translucent. Add the balsamic vinegar and allow it too cook until it is reduced slightly, about 2-3 minutes.
Remove the pan from the heat and add the dandelion greens all at once, stirring quickly to coat the leaves with the dressing, and heat them enough to bring out their bright green color. Arrange the greens on a plate, top with sectioned fruit and toasted walnuts, and serve immediately.