Comma Dot Comma

Tending a vegetable garden is a soap opera. Since I planted my 2×2 raised-bed kitchen garden in late February, I’ve been swept to the heights of triumph and the depths of despair multiple times. I’d gotten tired of the old broken concrete paving stones lying around the yard in little piles so I decided to buil them into a garden wall. I lined it with plastic and filled it with store-bought dirt, manure, and organic fertilizers (I have bone meal, liquified fish, and liquified worm poo, all of which work well if stinkily).

The strawberries were the first plant to bear fruit, within a week of planting! Since then it has been a race between me and some small animal that takes a bite out of every strawberry the moment it is ripe. I think the animal gets about half, and I get about half– my share comes out to two tiny strawberries, the size of my pinky tip, a week.

The two cilantro plants burned in the sunny garden bed so I moved them to the side of the house, where they immediately went to seed, dashing my tender dreams of 100% garden salsa. The Jalepenos are getting there, though I don’t see how that spindly little plant holds up those fat peppers. It’s a marvel of vegetal can-do attitude and I try to congratulate its fine efforts whenever I’m out there.

The other herbs are doing just fine– basil, oregano, thyme, and feverfew– though I made the mistake of putting a gob of feverfew leaves in my mouth raw. This is not an activity I recommend to others, unless you like lemony-paint-thinner flavored things. I planted it because it is good for migraines, but even tea made from the dry leaves is pretty bitter.

The stars of the garden are the tomato plants. I have two. Well, three, if you count the two intertwined ones I accidently planted together back when they were babies. I wash them with soap and water to keep down the flies and use a dry paintbrush to spread pollen from flower to flower (New title: Tomato Artist?) I’ve planted poles from the now defunct bamboo patch to create a makeshift burlap awning so the they don’t get too much sun (we broke 105 degrees yesterday) and spent a week anxiously tending a plant that turned half-yellow overnight. There were two possibilities: A root fungus had attacked, or I had broken some of the main roots off in my rough anti-fly maneuvers. If it was the former, the whole garden was probably doomed. If it was the latter, I was a bad gardener but at least my two weekly strawberries would survive. After days of mooning about and watching, I declared brute force the culprit. Yay! The tomato plant is recovering.

Yesterday I went out to do some therapeutic tomato-squeezing, as is my wont, and just as I was reaching toward a juicy red tomato, I spotted a scorpion resting on a leaf. Scorpions are not tomato eaters (they like crickets), so it was probably attracted by the shady dampness of the garden on a hot afternoon. But it creeped me out! I ran away. It was still there a few hours later. I hit it like a baseball with a stick for my bat and it flew out of the garden I know not where. In theory I don’t begrudge a scorpion seeking a little soothing garden time, as I do myself. Pragmatically, I don’t want to lay my hand on one as I putter in the garden. That would really hurt.

I’ll be teaching two online creative writing courses through the Piper Studio this summer, starting June 2. Discount summer rates of $100 for an eight week course. Same ones I mentioned earlier this spring, and still buckets of fun!

I’m suprised by what a fan of online writing courses I’ve become over the past four years– before I started doing it I wondered if you could create online the “warm fuzzy” atmosphere needed to encourage new or sensitive writers. As it turns out, you can. The trick is in the persona– the teacher has to have a very strong presence that sets the tone and erases the antiseptic feel of plain black letters on a white screen. Some people go the mothering route; others the philosophical route; I go the zany-yet-thoughtful, faux bossy route. It’s sort of like blogging in that you take some true version of yourself, and highlight/intensify certain aspects of it so they carry through a two-dimensional medium. Or like public speaking, where you still speak from the heart but change your pacing and volume from normal conversation. The teacher has to be the leader in humanizing the environment, and then the students usually follow suit. The medium itself becomes a way for everyone to develop his or her writing.

The other thing I’ve noticed about online teaching is that you need so many more instructions! We have no idea how much information we exchange via eye contact, tone, and body language. In a face-to-face classroom, I can give a one-line verbal assignment (“Write a poem in which an inanimate object complains”), judge from people’s expressions if they understand what I’m asking them to do, and follow up with just the right amount of explanation. Online, obviously, that does not work at all. I’ve been on the receiving end of opaque instructions and find the experience exasperating. “Answer the review questions.” What review questions? Where? Do I just answer them in my head or is there a screen where I must enter the answers? Online teachers, do not exasperate your students. Sometimes the poet in me cringes at the wordiness of online assignments, but if the person can just get straight to work without feeling confused about what needs to be done, every word is worth it. Even if there are very few requirements, I write that down: “Choose any subject, style, and length that you want.” I want my students to spend their energy on the creative process of writing and not on mindreading.

Most of my thoughts are related to dirt. The backyard and a few unsightly portions of the front yard are full of pits, trenches, and heaps of dirt, evidence of our belabored attempts to install a sprinkler system and plant a patch of grass in the backyard. Landscaping an older home (ours is vintage 1975, which I know is not old to east coasters but in Phoenix people hardly ever buy houses more than a few yrs old) involves a lot of destruction. So far we have removed:

1 rusty pool fence
3 tree stumps
1 tree
2 clumps of decorative grass
1 4×10 patch of bamboo
4 bushes
2 planters
1 yardful of knee-high weeds

We rototilled the back yard at the end of March and since then dirt has been blowing into the pool and the house at every opportunity. Mmm! Grit! Gotta love it. With all our tilling and digging and uprooting, though, we’ve uncovered a number of suprises.

1 plastic easter egg containing a mini candybar
1 carefully folded piece of magenta cloth
1 cats-eye marble (the big kind that we used to call boulders)
1 patch of asphalt
1 patch of concrete
1 coil of disconnected TV cable, which apparently connected our house and the neighbor’s at one time.
2 pre-existing non-functional drip systems
1 underground tree stump
Several bricks and paving stones
1 cockroach nest
1 bees nest
Countless nails and bolts
Countless big rocks.

Dirt, dirt, dirt. It is hard to imagine a time a time when it will be settled down and doing its job beneath a layer of grass and gravel.