A Place in the Sun
When I was a kid my best friend’s mom planted a vegetable garden. I wanted one so bad. But it required two things my parents didn’t have: time and money. So I hung around Timmy’s house and peppered Mrs. Albonetti with questions about why she planted what and how she knew what would grow in the red clay soil of suburban Memphis. Talk about a garden pest—doh!
Over the following half-century my desire for a vegetable garden has never wavered, nor has my ability to plant one. My various urban dwellings haven’t been conducive to an aspiring green thumb. Still, every deck and many a window sill beckoned. Any patch of outdoors with the slightest tinge of sunlight was subject to my inspection as a suitable locale for the potted Safeway herb purchased at double the cost of a freshly cut bundle (savings in the long run!). But Nick’s repeated rejection of my soot-covered basil and mildewed mint as woefully ill-suited for our dinner table finally did me in.
And so I turned my horticultural attention to the long-standing gardening feud with my San Francisco neighbor, Mavis. Our collective front yards are about the size of a Hummer — just large enough to wage war. We began this competition twenty-six years ago as I was jackhammering the concrete “terrace” of my new home. Mavis, elegantly donned in suade gardening gloves and wielding her take-no-prisoners pruning shears, complimented my manly efforts (one that landed me my third hernia, which shows just how far I’m willing to go to till the earth) and welcomed me to the neighborhood American Beauty style. Let the games begin!
Over the years, I’ve attempted several garden designs from Dutch sculpted (alas, tulips require a hard freeze to regenerate) to French countryside (lavander needs more sun) to the current instantiation of Candadian forest (a soothing salve during the Trump years). Mavis, on the other hand, has remained true to her Georgian roots with ever-evolving variations of Southern floral. She’s won year after year.
Defeated, I shifted my attention once again. This time to my back garden which is barely big enough for one person to stand in with outstretched arms. It’s literally 8’ x 8’. Still, I’ve managed to fit in a pond where I battle racoons for dominance over the fountain, a paving stone path, two trees, and a profusion of other plants including a red trumpet vine that has the growth gene of Seymour from Little Shop of Horrors. Mavis’s backyard, tucked out of sight beneath her deck, has never attracted her gardener’s eye, so in this domain I have finally bested her fair and square.
So thoroughly had I abandoned my hopes for a veggie garden that I never considered planting one in our new Baja home. It could be because Baja is a desert and we built on a rocky hillside without a stepping stone of level ground to be found. Still, we’re in an oasis of sorts — a farming community where the pungent scent of fresh basil mingles with that of burning garbage and wafts over the land. But it wasn’t until an associative trigger plus fifteen months of lockdown rekindled my long-suppressed yearning.
One day midway through the seemingly endless post-build punch list, I stopped on “Fix the irrigation system” and thought, “Why didn’t we put in a vegetable garden?” I immediately scoured our property for a suitable location. Given the house was designed to take advantage of every square inch of buildable land, finding a solution was not so easy. But I’m nothing if not persistent. So I identified an unlikely spot and devised a plan, though it required not only building a garden but a path from the house to it as well. Also, it faced west, which meant that the plants would be exposed to the intense winds that regularly blow in from the ocean. I asked around and nobody there knew if vegetables could grow in such an environment. But I wanted to try and thankfully Nick and Monica — our friend who we built the house with — let me. I found a builder and convinced our gardener to haul a cubic meter of sand and soil down our steep hill.
Once the garden enclosure was nearly complete and the path forged, Nick and I flew down to plant our crops. (To be honest, Nick is still a bit of a skeptic. Where he grew up, a backyard garden was often a thing of necessity, not a fun hobby. I don’t think he will ever view a tomato grown by my hand in the same light as a store-bought one — especially if that store is Bi-Rite, although he makes an exception for a super cute farmers’ market with handsome farmers. It fascinates me that this simple difference in a child’s perception — me: veggie garden = wealth; Nick, need — can have such a lingering impact.)
Over the course of our 3-day trip Nick kept his skepticism to himself and was a real trouper, listening to me blabber on about soil levels and windbreaks. He even stayed up into the night and helped me plant the garden in the light of the full super flower blood moon (explaining why we were planting at night is presaged by a single word of the above paragraph — nearly complete — and would require a much longer post). Irrespective of this doubt, planting this garden together on a full moon plays directly into our relationship narrative, so inconvenience or not, I loved every minute.
Introducing our new “Margarita Garden”—growing fruit / veggies needed for a margarita drink or a margherita pizza.
