I read many books about food this vacation. It all kind of ties into my obsession with gardening. I think the whole reason I started gardening again (after suffering through dreaded chores in my mother’s garden) was because I simply was too poor in college to afford fresh herbs and unusual vegetables. I think the idea of really good food drives many people to garden.

But back on topic. Lot’s of books on food. I read The Nasty Bits by celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and Garlic and Sapphires by food critic Ruth Reichl and, as a very odd juxtaposition to those two, I also read The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. All had come highly recommended and I enjoyed them all, but how odd they were to read together.

On one hand, there was a glorification of food, no matter the cost, no matter the price. Descriptions of food that would have made Gandhi want to break his fast. Then to read about the real cost of the food. The cost that you don’t pay for in dollars or cents but rather in morals and health. Oddly enough, as well, all three books at least touched on both sides. It made me think and it made me realize that maybe I need to somehow get interested in Danielle Steele because that was too much thinking for a vacation.

I love food. I love growing food. I love cooking food. I love (and mean really love) eating food. But being forced to face where your food comes from and what the real costs are… Well, let’s just say grocery shopping today was not as easy as it normally is.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not naive. I did, after all, grow up in farm country. I did, after all, grow up eating bacon while staring at the fridge where there hung the picture of the previously whole pig and its proud but tearful 4-H owner. I know just how much fertilizer and pesticides get dumped on crops and I know just how much farmer’s sacrifice to grow those crops. I just normally choose to ignore it.

A girl has to eat you know.

But now I am thinking about it and I just don’t know what to do. I just wish I could grow all the food I need right here on this tiny plot of land. Unfortunately, I seriously doubt that city ordinance would allow me to have a flock of chickens and weeds taller than 6 inches high.

Leaving Cleveland Airport
Arriving Punta Cana, DR

Here I am on my first sunny fun filled day in the Dominican Republic. We are staying in an all inclusive resort due to the fact that my sister-in-law is getting married and my husband’s family never stays anywhere but all inclusive resorts. To tell the very honest truth, this style of vacation is not my style at all. Give me a back pack and $20 a day and I am happy as a clam. The $3K week vacation just makes me… I don’t know what it makes me.

I feel like I am missing out on something. I feel guilty. I feel like I went all this way and I should be able to see more of the culture than the cheesy girls in the airport in the “historic” cultural costumes. But I have promised my husband that I will make the most of it, and here I am, making the most of it.

The most is certainly enjoyable, let me tell you. But still, as the bus drove us from the airport to the resort and we passed house after house that had been cobbled together from naked cinder block, rusted corrugated sheet metal and weather beaten billboards, that little guilt just creeps back into my relaxing vacation. I just spent more on a luxury trip than these people make in months. What right do I have to traipse here under such pretenses?

I am also longing for the scenes that pass me by. A group school children all clad in matching blue school uniforms runs down the open-air balcony hallway of a slum grey apartment building. A fenced off street corner that serves as a plant nursery (I would be in heaven there). I see skinny cows and fat goats and bars where Presidente beer is served at plastic white tables with plastic white chairs. A group of handsome and dark skinned men play pool in an open front building. One waves at me as the bus glides by. I wave back because I want to be a part of that and instead the bus moves on towards a palatial resort where my every need will be catered to save this one.

The Dominican Republic is well aware that it is the pristine landscape that causes rich tourists to flock to their beauty rich but money poor country and they fight hard to protect it. Even in this resort where excess is the name of the game, there are signs asking that we not excess too much in deference to the surrounding environment and efforts to preserve it. And yet how can this place not with the air conditioners that run constantly and guests who are served every drink in disposable plastic cups.

And so all of these put forward the question, is it right. Is it right to visit these people who have so little and take advantage of their situation? Is it right to cloister myself away in the resort when there is so much to see out there? Is it right to travel so far to see such a beautiful place only to be slowly destroying it in making the trip?

In the end, the bus driver, Sal, assuages my guilt a bit. He says “On behalf of my people, I wish to thank you for coming to my country. You may have noticed that we are a poor people and we would be poorer still if not for you coming here to visit us.”

Even on vacation, you trade one negative for a positive. But at this point in time there is not anything I can do about it. Sister in laws must get married and this is where she will be married (and having been a bride, I know that it is a wise thing never to stand between a bride and what she wants. People have been known to lose limbs that way). I will have another drink and perhaps plan my escape in the morning.

Today I did a little plant shopping and I have come to the conclusion that I really need to avoid such places where plants are sold in bulk quantities.

I started out my morning at Home Depot. I did not go there to buy plants, but rather to buy a gigundous bag of my favorite container soil mix. I was going to fill all my containers today and Home Depot is the only place locally that sells the compact car size bags of this soil (and bonus for under $15).

Walking through the Home Depot plant section is a painful experience for me. Of all the big box stores in the world, Home Depot is the worse as far as less than helpful employees and plant care. I cringed as I hurried past a poor woman who was told by the clueless cashier that the entire cart of plants she had were indeed perennials (they were annuals). I shied away from the section that contained the bishop’s weed and English ivy. The temptation is too great to dash the whole shelf to the ground and declare that that I have saved the current customer from a fate worse than shrubbery.

Don’t get me wrong, I have tried in the past to interfere but it is never received kindly. You see, I don’t posses the all knowing orange vest that seems to imply knowledge of all things green and growing. I am just a lowly customer who surely is as ignorant as they are. Why else would I be in Home Depot? My advice is seen as a rude intrusion. I keep my head down and pay… quickly. The security guard has just informed another customer that applying twice as much fertilizer is sure to have only a positive effect.

My next stop is Pettiti’s. This is just evidence that my addiction knows no price tag. I need cool plants. I need unusual plants. Hirt’s, my previous supplier of unusual annuals, has not had any for two years now and I am a desperate woman. I simply can’t take another year of nothing but plain jane petunias and gaudy salvia.

So I cross the threshold of the Oakwood Village Pettiti’s and I am dazzled by the splendor. Massive, tall pots that sell for $200. Not one, but literally hundreds, all lined up and color coded for effect. Patio furniture that costs more than my own car. Statuary that you only find in Shaker and Hudson gardens is stacked carelessly along one wall like the $7000 price tags mean nothing at all. Oh my god, is this heaven or is this hell. I do not know.

My synapses are starting to misfire so I hurry past.

The plant section is not much better. Beautiful plants. Wonderful plants. Fabulous plants. The really wonderful annuals are not sold by the flat. They are only sold in 4″ pots. 4″ annuals are $5 each. Breathe woman, breathe. You can do this. You have to do this.

I rifle through each section of the annuals that I want to buy. I feel the stems and peek under the foliage. I am looking for the pots that have two or three plants each, a mistake made by some careless worker while they repotted the plants for resale. I can tear the bases apart this way and get a little bit more plant for my money.

The employees eye me sideways, the customers are oblivious. They pick out $200 pots and fill a single pot with $300 more in plants (they buy the 6″ pots at $12 a pop). I am a gardener and even I have trouble doing that. This is the frightening power of Pettiti’s gardening.

While standing in line at the register, I begin to suffer from sticker shock. I even slip enough to tell the cashier that the dahlia the woman in front of me is buying is indeed sold as an annual as they would otherwise need to be dug up each year. The cashier thanks me but sees the signs. Sticker shock in customers is contagious so she takes evasive action. She rings quickly and offers me a plastic sheet for my trunk. I say yes, then no, then yes. Oh, save me, I just don’t know! She hands it to me and gently pushes me out the front door. “Go home, ” she says, “Go home and plant your flowers. You will feel better.”

I do that. It’s the only thing I can do. I need to stay away from these places. They are just not good for my mental health.

I want to say right up front that I have no idea where this particular post is going (and I say this as if I ever know where any of my posts are going) but I figured I would be up front for this one. I just need to get this train of thought down on a track.

A few days ago, Billy Joe Kini left me a comment on a post I did several months ago. He berated my removal of some insidious quackgrass from a flower bed.

What’s wrong with quackgrass? It sounds like it’s a pretty beneficial species to have growing, as it can be used as a medicinal herb, aids in digestion for other mammals, and is a food source for caterpillars (according to the link you gave). You’re replacing all that with… flowers? Are the species of flower you’re planting beneficial to the local food chain? Or do you just prefer them because they look pretty?

He brings up an age old debate in gardening. So many of us will go on and on about the environment and unity with nature, but fact is by definition gardening is not a unity with nature but a conquering of nature. If prostitution can be counted as the oldest profession than gardening is most likely the oldest pastime.

We humans enjoy molding things out to our liking. I think it is part of our genes. While we can enjoy the grace of real nature, we take more pride in outdoing her at her own game.

Yeah, so… I prefer flowers. No, I have no idea if the flowers I plant are beneficial nor, frankly, do I care. Is that so bad?

Gardening certainly isn’t as bad some other hobbies. I don’t go wrestling poor alligators or polluting the sky with planes just so I can jump out of them. Gardening’s an honest hobby.

But like lawyering is an honest job, it doesn’t mean that what we do always the right thing to do… or the wrong thing. It is just what we do, is all.

Yesterday, in my lamenting, I mentioned that garden magazines were filled with the gardening success stories of wealthy women and gay couples. This statement stems from a joke that my mother and I have on the subject in that there must be a law that says a gardening magazine cannot be published unless it has a story about the garden of a woman who must wealthy because she always left her job to work on her garden or a story about a gay couple’s garden.

But while I may joke about it, I have always been fascinated and a bit proud about the total acceptance that the gardening media has for the homosexual community. I have been avidly reading gardening magazines and watching gardening shows for ten years, and passively doing so for many years before that. For as long as I can remember, gays have been totally and , more importantly, casually accepted.

Stories about gay couples and their beautiful gardens are common in gardening media and the producers of these stories are never coy about the relationship of the garden owners. The stories never come right out and say “These people are homosexuals!” but neither do they try to mask the relationship with words like “roommates” or “friends“. The couples are normally referred to as a “partners” and in the same sense and context that you would refer to a “husband” or “wife”. There is no lauding or apologizing for the fact that the couple is gay. It is a fact and a casual one at that.

I think this causal referencing is the part that is so important. Many other genres of media would be tempted to play up the homosexual aspect to show how progressive they are. Other genres would throw in a line or two, at the very least, applauding the couple for being gay. I am sure this makes the media feel very good about themselves, but the fact is that most gay couples really don’t want to be applauded for being gay. They would rather that the challenges that go with being gay were gone so that it was no longer a comment worthy fact of their life.

They simply want to be who they are and would much rather that you applaud them for what they do, like grow a beautiful garden. And gardening medias do just that.

I can not think of another industry that treats gays in the same way. Even the entertainment industry, a long held bastion for gays, still inflates with shock or pride in media references to the homosexual status of one of their own. Gay actors cannot be seen publicly with their partners without some great tado about the whole thing.

I often wonder if what seems like an extraordinary number of stories about gay couples and their gardens in gardening media is not actually the normal balance of the world. Perhaps it is just that this is the only genre that reports on what the subject is rather than the politics surrounding it.

Despite the best predictions of the weather men, the temperature today was 60F. The snow seemed to flee the vicinity and revealed the horror that I forgot was my yard.

All of the toys that the kids didn’t quite get put away before the cold weather struck. The two bags of leaves my husband conveniently forgot to take to the curb. Not to mention nearly all the Fall clean-up that I best intended but never actually did.

My yard is a wreck. I sometimes wonder if the burst of energy I feel in the Spring has more to do with abject embarrassment than warm weather excitement. How in the name of all that is good could I call myself a gardener when my yard looks like this?

The gardening magazines this time of year are no help. Much like fashion magazines prey on the self-image of young women, gardening magazines are created to do nothing but ravage the psyche of gardeners.

Here we are in early March and those darn magazines are screaming at me from the grocery checkout lane.

• Picture Perfect Perennials in Less Than 30 Days!
• How to Make Your Man Smile in Your Vegetable Bed
• How to Grow a Perfect Garden with No Work
• Why You Suck as A Gardener (and How We Can Help Fix That)

Wave upon wave of stories (with graphic photos) about wealthy women and gay couples who dedicated the entire last decade to creating a perfect garden. And I, like the sorry dope that I am, pile these magazines into my cart and gleefully head home with them like a crack whore with a rock.

And as I pull into my driveway, the devastation that is my yard rolls over me. How will I ever get my yard to look like those perfect chippy yards pictured in the magazines that I just paid a small fortune for?

It is then with a heavy heart that I bring those magazines into my home. Perhaps if I just read them carefully enough, I too can have a yard that others will envy, rather than call the city hall on, which is what I am sure some of my neighbors are considering now that the snow is gone.

I will faithfully read those garden porn magazines, consoling myself in that it is only for educational purposes. But it will be the pictures I see in these magazines that will drive me to spend more on my garden than some small African nations do in their whole fiscal budget.

My yard is a wreck. A mess. A disaster. Welcome Spring.

My friend, Rick, owns a Christmas tree farm in Ashtabula (for those of you not from Cleveland, that is a county or two over from where I live).

Rick’s farm is named Bender Tree Farm and we get our Christmas trees from there. Yes, it is a bit of a drive but I like to support (somewhat) local businesses and farms and plus I know that Rick takes good care of his trees. He trims them up nice and gives them alot of TLC. To tell the truth, I think Rick’s tree farm is really his personal gardening addiction. So, like any good gardener, I am more than happy to support a fellow gardener’s plant addiction.

Christmas trees can be a touchy subject in the enviromental/gardening community. On one hand, you are killing a tree and that can’t be a good thing… unless it is for making seed and plant catalogs, arbors, raised beds, seed packets, gardening books… Hmm… perhaps the thinking here is a bit flawed.

On the other hand, Christmas trees are no longer harvested wholesale from the natural landscape. These days, Christmas tree are grown on tree farms. The ones that are harvested are replaced and the cycle continues.

Beyond that, I have never heard anyone bitch about other plants that get wasted in the name of a holiday. When was the last time time you heard an enviromentalist go off on a rant about the disgraceful waste of pumpkins at Halloween or the deplorable use of Easter lilies?

I also have to wonder if these people have ever considered the fact that real trees can be mulched or at the very least will eventually break down in a landfill. Artificial trees… well, you are going to throw them out sometime. Last time I checked, they make really crappy mulch and they take an eternity to become compost.

I am of the belief that if you buy local and recycle your tree (many towns have a tree recycleing program), than you are not being any more damaging than if you buy annuals every year.

But not everybody buys local. As a matter of fact, nearly 33 million Christmas trees are sold annually and 60% of those are grown in either North Carolina or the Pacific Northwest. That is a whole lot of trees being shipped all over the US. I would hazard a guess that a large portion of those trees are sold from big box stores.

While these big box trees may be cheaper, you have to consider what exactly you would be getting.

At their very essence, Chrismas trees are really just giant cut flowers (er, plants). Would you buy a dozen roses that had been left on the counter without water for a day or two? Of course not! So why waste your money on a Christmas tree that has been sitting in a lot for days, maybe even weeks?

On top of this, anyone who has bought plants at a big box store knows how well they care for the plants there (and I use the word “care” loosly). Do you think they care for the trees any better?

At your local tree farm, you can cut your own fresh that day and some will even dig them up for you so you can bring it home live. Whether it lives until Spring when you can plant it is a whole other matter, but at least it would be alive when you brought it home.

In the end, the real question in the live vs. artificial comes down to “could you really convince yourself that the smell of dusty plastic is essential to Christmas?”

You may have noticed that while I mention in this blog that I have children, I don’t talk all that much about my children being in my garden. That would be because I have a pretty strict rule in my garden which says “This part is grass. This part is my garden. The only reason this grass is here is so that you have somewhere to play, so stay out of my garden.” I know, it doesn’t fit real well into the whole kids having fun gardening thing.

I have, in the past, attempted to make gardening “fun” for my kids but I have found that in the long run it just makes more work for me and the little darlings could really care less once the blush of it being new and different has worn off. I have enough things to do in my life without trying to make things fun that they show no interest in.

This is not to say that children do not have a place in the garden. They do. It was the same place I had in my mother’s garden, one of cheap (i.e. free) manual labor. My kids weed flower beds, they haul dirt, they rake leaves, they spread mulch and they hate every darn moment of it. And that is just fine by me. I hated it too when I was a child.

But, before you go writing nasty comments to me about how precious children are and how dare I do such a thing as making them *gasp* work, I want you to consider something… Maybe making children do work is not such a terrible thing. Maybe, by making them work, and not just work but use your muscles, damn tedious hard work, I am giving my kids something greater.

I am giving my children a sense of self esteem and accomplishment. The feeling you get when you do a hard job and you finish it. The idea that they are not just guests in this household but essential members who contribute rather than just consume.

I am giving them an understanding of how difficult it is to produce something from the ground. They might just grasp the physical value of the food that sits in front of them every day and how thankful we should be to those who are willing to do the physical work day after day to make it easily available.

I am teaching them the value of hard work and giving them a really good reason to consider hanging in there at school till they have a degree, because if they don’t at least have a high school diploma (and a college one as well, preferably) this type of work will be about all they will be qualified to do.

I am instilling in them the ability to empathize with those who are not as fortunate as them and who have to do this type of work, not because their mother told them they had to, but because they would starve otherwise. Hopefully, my children will never naively utter the modern equivalent of “Let them eat cake.”

I don’t make gardening fun for my kids. To them it is work and, some days, they wish that they never had to see another flower bed. But you know what, the amazing thing is that one day they will be all grown up and they will find that they miss having a garden to work in. They will feel the need to rip up a large swath of dirt and lay in it seeds and plants and will feel wonderful when they collapse on a couch, too exhausted to even watch TV.

Or, then again, they may never want to see another flower bed. But I get work done in my garden, so it’s a gamble I am willing to take.

For what it is worth… Thanks Mom. Thanks for making me work in the garden rather than just play in it. I promise I will try to make my kids work in the garden as hard as you made us work in your garden.

I find that it is a rare that my day job crosses over to touch my hobby. I mean, after all, the day job involves wires and motherboards and, according to some, tubes. My hobby involves flowers and dirt and worms. Computers and gardening only touch, they never talk to one another. And if they do, it’s expensive and messy and normally involves talking to technical support in countries far, far away from here.

But apparently Google has decided that matters of computer and matters of environment should be paying a bit more attention to each other. They announced that they would like to see the entire computer industry revamp the way PCs use electricity. Less electricity means less drain on the environment. And you have to admit that this is a good thing.

*sigh* I have a friend who just bought a Prius to help ease his environmental footprint. I was impressed by that. My city requires us to recycle. I compost everything that I should. I try to be a good person.

Now I find out that my very livelihood may be as damaging as the entire SUV industry. It is kind of depressing.

But the big G has a point. We have to find fixes where they present themselves. Computers are powerhogs and power takes resources. Google should know, they use several hundred thousand computers to power the great Google empire.

Makes me feel a little better about the three environmental resource hogs I have in my house.

I suppose this just brings one more thing that we need to be conscious of. Something else we can use to make sure that the footstep we leave are a little smaller than before.

I remember what I was doing at this very moment 5 years ago. I was laughing. Someone had stopped by my cubicle to tell me that someone had flown a plane into the World Trade Center. We were laughing because we thought “What kind of idiot accidentally flies a Cessna into a building that big?”

A few minutes later, someone else came by to say that a second plane had flown into the World Trade Center and we stopped laughing because suddenly we understood that it was not a small plane and it was not an accident.

The rest of the day went by as a frighteningly detailed blur. At first, I couldn’t get home. Flight 93 was over Cleveland airspace, downtown was being evacuated and both the airport and downtown were between me and my house.

By the time I did get home, later that afternoon, my only thought was to flee. I was afraid of what would happen next and I only wanted to pack my children in my car and make a mad rush for my parents’ house, which, being in the middle of nowhere and next to a cow farm and cornfield to boot, I figured was the last place anyone would want to attack.

That day, I took no solace in my garden because nothing could console me.

And here we are 5 years later. I still cry, which seems a little silly because I knew no one that died that day. But I can’t help but feel that those people died for me and they never had the option to decide not to make that sacrifice, so I still cry for them.

Today, I can take solace in my garden. I can look at beautiful flowers and taste the unbelievably good food that grows there and think that the world can’t be as bad as that day made me feel that it is. But I am angry that I must use the beauty in my garden to convince myself of this.

I could go on about how I feel on this all day, but that would be selfish. Here in the USA, we all have feelings about it and I should not supersede your personal memorials with my own. I just thought that today I should make note of what happened. Today, the world is not about my garden. It’s about 4 separate moments of silence, which will forever seem like too little.