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The p-patch sits on the corner of 20th and Republican. On the West side is a three-story apartment and to the North is an old house. The East and South sides are open to the street. There are thirteen different patches there, including two very high raised bed which are designed to be handicapped accessible. It's not a very fancy patch, not like the one down the hill by Broadway, but it's sunny and only three blocks from the house. My part of the garden is 100 square feet.
I haven't had a garden since I moved to Seattle. Back in California, I had three raised beds in the backyard. A rather successful crop of lettuces provided for a nice salad almost every night. The carrots didn't work so well, they came out short and stumpy and in funny shapes, but they were still very tasty. Just down the street, Steve and Mary grew a jungle of tomatoes that they couldn't get rid of, so I didn't bother planting my own. For the Seattle garden, I'm tomato obsessed. I want tomatoes, and plenty of them. I'd plant the whole patch with tomatoes if I thought I it made any sense. Maybe a little basil to eat with them. I can imagine myself sitting on the edge of the bed, alternating bites of tomato with a leaf of basil.
I'm sharing my little patch of dirt with Nia, my friend and neighbor here on Cap Hill. I think she knows more about gardening than I do. Plus, with my constant need to wander off for parts unknown I need a backup gardener who'll eat those tomatoes when they're ripe and I'm off camping.
News has it that it's a tricky thing to grow tomatoes here in the Pacific Northwest. It's the talk of all the gardeners I know. The seed catalog on the coffee table has something called an Oregon Spring, a plant bred to withstand the conditions of the Pacific Northwest. I'll be giving those a try. Erin grew a rather robust cherry tomato plant on her back porch last summer. I remember snacking off it on sunny afternoons but I don't remember if she had a big crop. Knox's tomatoes reached their prime while Julius and I were out seeing the national parks of the West, so we missed those even though I helped pick out the plants. I was full of enthusiasm to garden with Knox, but lost interest quickly as it never really felt like it was my garden, being located as it was in Margot's yard next to the cottage that Knox rents.
Margot has a mess of seedlings started in her office. She's got a big west-facing window, so it seems as good a place as any to start them. They're under a grow light and I reckon that the zig-zaggy leaves and the blue glow make it look like she's got entirely another crop going. I'm hoping to score some of her starts for my patch. I really need to get those Oregon Spring seeds ordered, because my kitchen window faces south and could be a good place to start seedlings of my own.
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| Scrubby patch of dirt or elegy to spring? |
Doug (the downstairs neighbor) and I spent the last two years being all talk about transforming our parking strip in to a vegetable garden. There's no reason that it wouldn't work outside of our extreme lethargy. We need to get the grass out of there, build a bed, fill it with topsoil, and start planting. The parking strip gets just a ton of summer sun, running in an East-West line throughout the day. However, neither one of us seems motivated to take the first steps. The p-patch is all ready to go, thankfully, though I felt a little confused about what, exactly should be done first when I looked it over. Dig out the leftover onions? Turn the open bed? Build a frame for a raised bed where the open bed now sits? Plant sweet peas along the fence because they are so pretty? I snapped some photos and went home to read the documents from the p-patch office. They were no help with the decision making, though there was a flyer for a three-part workshop, the first part of which is called "Getting Started."
When I first moved to in to my house, Knox told me to sign up for the p-patch program. "It will seem like you're waiting forever, but then one day, you'll get something in the mail that informs you that you now have garden space." He was right and it was worth waiting for the one I wanted. Some time back I got a postcard asking me to consider gardening down south at a patch in Rainier Valley. I'd never have gone down there to plant vegetables, as at the time, I didn't have a car. I stuck to my guns and got the patch here in the neighborhood. Not only is my little patch of dirt just a five-minute walk out the front door, but, if my p-patch neighbors used the same logic, they'll be my household neighbors too and it will give me the opportunity to meet them. I can hardly wait to run in to them down at the patch. "So, whaddaya got going there? And have you eaten at that new place on 15th yet?" I am crazy about my neighborhood and this will give me one more reason to be so. Or so I hope. They could be crazy all-about-only-gardening types who lecture the novice amongst them on how the Oregon Spring isn't a real gardener's tomato.
There's one thing I'd like to avoid in the garden this spring and it's not slugs, though I hate slugs. I'd like to try not to spend all my time writing nonsense about gardening. I'm getting that out of the way early, see? "As the days become longer, I feel as though I am becoming taller, like the seedlings stretching their new tender leaves towards the warming sunshine." Yawn. "The sweet taste of the first peas is nature's own candy." Blech. I don't mind the idea of taking some pictures and maybe doing some pretty little watercolors of the beds. But what is it about gardening that makes for spewing clichés? I pledge now to try with all my might to avoid that. And I apologize in advance for saying how "the rich aroma of the freshly turned earth revitalizes my body and spirit it a way that the coffee I drank before heading out to the garden never could." Yeesh. There is one exception, of course: the homegrown tomato. Be it the Oregon Spring or otherwise, a homegrown tomato is poetry and nothing less. Expect to have to read about it.
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