Everything Must Be Remade

Sometime, in the garden or washing dishes, I hold onto certain phrases and, for the life of me, I cannot get them out of my mind.

"Everything must be remade" is the one that's been on me for months now. When I look at it, what my mind is really thinking that is, I can see it's really about the world being remade.

None of this comes as a surprise since some of my immediate family and friends have remade their lives, homeschooling, devoting themselves more to religious lives, etc. Somehow I've always skirted the issue of radical change, perhaps due to my Air Force Brat upbringing and always carrying a longing to "just get along", regardless of my personal feelings. (Perhaps I'm really Asian and was adopted into my family...)

As I look at the world around me and see in so many ways, what it's become, I do in fact realize what it could be, at least from a ecologist's standpoint.

Pulitzer prize winning author Jared Diamond wrote a book called Collapse, which studies how great societies fall into ruins. That book and that title have stuck with me. Especially in these times of incredible change. Will one of the world's richest and powerful countries overextend itself and end up in ruins? Is the world, in its global economy and global pollution, heading the wrong direction?

Well, some people say that you shouldn't wish for things you don't really want, and I guess the same could be said for thinking about things you don't really want. Over the last 6 months my office has undergone massive changes and, once again, I don't know if I'm in a good leadership role for it. I got a new manager in January, which was okay, as I know her really well and she knew what I did on a day-to-day basis. But then, 3 months ago, 50% of our HQ and 30% of the offices worldwide were cut. Friends I've know for years (10 years, some of them), were given severance packages and told to clean out their desks. It was heartbreakingly awful I mean, I realize business is just a reflection of what's going on in the world, but to have it all fall down after so many years of working together was in so many ways, more than my heart could bear.

Three months later, the whole company is being reorganized and my manager now is someone across the country and I'm not quite sure what my role is in this first week of the reorganization. Sadly, lots of people are confused over the details and the unknown is making everyone frustrated and nervous.

But here it is exactly: the old way wasn't working and everything has to be remade. People who did one thing will now do another. Certain ways of doing things will have to be rethought. There will be retraining.

My old boss, who is exceptionally smart, told me that with change like this, you can either just ride the wave under the radar, or use the opportunity to do something you really love. The problem I see with this is if what I start doing what I love, if it doesn't jibe with what the company loves, I'm going to be out of a job at a terrible, terrible time. But if change was easy, or if everyone could do it, the world would look a lot different than it does now, I suppose.

We know how evolution works, correct? The environment changes and whoever is adapted best to that change flourishes. This is really no different, except that this change can be exasperating, especially for people like me, who aren't incredibly comfortable with it. But then again, it's time to say goodbye to what was and move onto the next thing. I've done it before. When we moved into this house 14 years ago, I knew little to nothing about gardening. Now I take care of hundreds of plants on a small 1/8 an acre using less water than people with 4x that acreage using no pesticides or fertilizer. It's all possible. We've learned to live with less water, use less electricity and gas, create a compost pile, go organic, invite animals into our yard to live, and grow native plants in our yard.

It's not bad.

But even though this change at work isn't like working in a garden (the aloe doesn't complain when I cut in back by a third and the squirrels don't bitch when I move their feeder), I think I can do this.

If I really want the change, I'm going to have to.

Atwater Drift

Garden log: Matillijas up, but more sparse than last year. Tomatoes already setting fruit, if you can believe it. Ryan's dream Big Max pumpkin plant (reputed to produce 75 lb pumpkins) in the ground. Love-in-a-mist blooming.


I'm sure everyone has this, you go out somewhere, the garden, shopping, bike riding, whatever, and you come up with this really terrific idea. You think about it and you're just in love with it.

Then you come home, get a drink of water, check the mail, feed the kids, whatever, and suddenly that idea is gone.

It's sad but true, even if you remember the idea, a lot of the fire behind it has disappeared.

"What the heck did I think that was so great for?"

Though there may be the case that the idea might not be so great anyway and it's probably best forgotten about.

Especially when you should be paying attention to the task at hand instead of drifting.

I'm a big drifter out in the garden. It's actually an observation I've had about writers, even garden writers, when you see the projects they're describing it's usually accompanied by a, "that's it?" feeling.

"That's the garden you've been going on and on about?"

Garden writers have a tendency to try a lot of different things, but they're essentially different people than great garden designers.

The garden writer for the Los Angeles Times, Robert Smaus, was always going over his new finds, creations, and critiques of flowers, vegetables, and the like. When I finally found his garden online I had that feeling described above. It was a very small garden with things pulled out, this set by the other, this needing weeding.

Martha Stewart Magazine it was not.

I still love Robert Smaus, and his work, but I wouldn't recommend him coming over to your house and redoing your garden. For the same reason (and more), I would tell you I'm fine bringing over bottles of wine, but probably not a trowel.

There was an amazing designer over at a nursery called Hortus years ago in Pasadena. My neighbor Dan just came over and was talking about it today and we recalled how stunning it was. I should have taken pictures, but there was a huge clock tower with the entire face made out of old farm equipment, a beautiful 1900's era steel hothouse, a working vegetable garden (I'm not kidding, the guy had a grounds crew whose job it was to tend to the plants including this veggie garden), four koi ponds... The place was magic.

It had two drawbacks. One really only pertaining to me, which was that you could pick up a beautiful little something only to turn it over and discover that it's $1,300. The other was apparently he wasn't such a great businessman. I heard one of his gardeners tell me that he owed so much money by the end that someone was yelling at him while he was at the cash register who proceeded to grab him by the collar and pull him across the counter. The owner broke free and took off down the street. And that was the last the gardener ever saw of him.

Good designer. Bad money guy.

I guess the point is you can't be good at everything. Or maybe very few people are good at everything. Or that that the old adage is true, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym."

Back in the Mix

The tomatoes are in and the world is in bloom.

The gardening month has been made "interesting" due to my dealing with a walking cast and a strict order from my podiatrist not to work in the garden. So it's been a bit of teaching for both Ryan and Abby (the latter, being 6 and having a very short attention span, picking a weed or two then wandering off). I've taught Ryan how to mow the lawn without running over the power cord, which is pretty good, considering how likely an event that actually is.

Looking over the tomatoes at the heirloom-specific Tomatomania this year, I was convinced that I needed these cool pulp pots, essentially large pots made out of old pulp that can be used for a couple years, then break down in the compost. Okay, maybe I was dreaming that last part, but that was my original intention before I discovered they had none of them by the time I got there. 12 o'clock on the second day of the sale. They're pretty hot, these pots.

We bought our normal boatload of tomatoes, for us - 6 plants, and I went home wondering where the hell I was going to put all these things. Like all plants and puppies, when you get them they're so small and cute you wonder why you didn't get 20 or 30, never realizing that they will take over your home rather quickly. I've learned to limit myself (and Ryan) over the years. Which is ironic, since Ryan loves to buy plants but refuses to eat most vegetables.

I had been reading online a lot about these EarthBoxes, which are essentially containers within containers that allow you to water at the bottom and grow more in a small space than you ever dreamed possible. Well, that's what the ads say. The ads also say that they run about $55 apiece not including shipping. Which would put me in the $200 range for planting all the tomatoes I just bought (3 per box).

Why not plant in the ground, you ask? Very smart question. We've been planting in the ground and in planters for a few years now (trying interesting techniques like an inground terra cotta pot full of water to help keep the ground around the plants moist), but the problem is that you're supposed to rotate your "tomato" crop in three year cycles. Which means if I plant a tomato outside my back door this year, I'll be waiting three years until I can put another tomato plant there. I don't know about you, but I live in the middle of a rather large city. And my whole front yard is a jungle. I don't have a heck of a lot of space to plant my leggy, thirsty tomato plants.

The clever thing about container gardening is that you can put the same tomato in the same place year after year.

That's the plan anyway. Finish the season in October, dump the soil, wash out the pots, put some lettuce in, then use the same pot in the same place next year for tomatoes.

But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself, since I have absolutely no fruit as of yet.

After reading forums about creating your own "EarthBox" and deciding, yes, they work, but I'll be damned if I'm putting one more ugly thing in my yard (ask me about my radial tires!), I went with a company called The Garden Patch.

I know, they had to search long and hard to come up with a worse name than EarthBox, but by gum I believe they nailed it.

So I sat on my chair and directed my 9-year-old son to haul around the 30+ pound bags of soil and my dear Abigail to stop listening to High School Musical 3 long enough to put at least one scoopful of dirt into the container. She actually was good enough to help me haul them, one by one, back to the back of the house and try not to squirt the hose at me. (Which went something like this: "Hmm, the directions say DO NOT GET THE FERTILIZER PACK WET BEFORE PLANTING.... Ack!!! Abby!!! Put down the hose, PUT DOWN THE HOSE!!! AHHHHH!!!!" Something like that.)

We got all the tomatoes in and the fertilizer packets stayed relatively dry.

I did not.

And I tried not to look fazed later in the day, upon going back to the garden store, when Ryan picked out a seedling for a pumpkin called Big Max.

Would you laugh when I told you that it supposedly grows pumpkins up to 75 pounds?

Yeah, I wonder where that's going to go...