crazysalad

A Speech to the Garden Club of America

In this week's New Yorker, a poem by my favorite poet-farmer-philosoper:

A Speech to the Garden Club of America

by Wendell Berry

 

   (With thanks to Wes Jackson and in memory of Sir Albert Howard and Stan Rowe.)

 

Thank you. I’m glad to know we’re friends, of course;

There are so many outcomes that are worse.

But I must add I’m sorry for getting here

By a sustained explosion through the air,

Burning the world in fact to rise much higher

Than we should go. The world may end in fire

As prophesied—our world! We speak of it

As “fuel” while we burn it in our fit

Of temporary progress, digging up

An antique dark-held luster to corrupt

The present light with smokes and smudges, poison

To outlast time and shatter comprehension.

Burning the world to live in it is wrong,

As wrong as to make war to get along

And be at peace, to falsify the land

By sciences of greed, or by demand

For food that’s fast or cheap to falsify

The body’s health and pleasure—don’t ask why.

But why not play it cool? Why not survive

By Nature’s laws that still keep us alive?

Let us enlighten, then, our earthly burdens

By going back to school, this time in gardens

That burn no hotter than the summer day.

By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,

By goods that bind us to all living things,

Life of our life, the garden lives and sings.

The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,

Contemporary light, work, sweat, and hunger

Bring food to table, food to cellar shelves.

A creature of the surface, like ourselves,

The garden lives by the immortal Wheel

That turns in place, year after year, to heal

It whole. Unlike our economic pyre

That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,

An anti-life of radiance and fume

That burns as power and remains as doom,

The garden delves no deeper than its roots

And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.

 

Sunflowers

“Did you see the sunrise this morning?”
the old woman on Dale Street
who gardens with the parrot on her shoulder
asked me as I was walking home from Grant’s Deli
with a baguette under one arm and a cup of boiling Italian roast
burning my palm.

“And did you see the sunset last night?” I asked her.
Under a summer peach and apricot sky
my daughters and I had gone out to our front-yard garden to gather tomatoes—
bagfuls of yellow, roma, green zebra, cherry, heirloom—
and more to share with the neighbors
and handfuls of fragrant basil for our pasta dinner with fresh, no-cook sauce.

The parrot woman smiled.  “We are blessed.”

Recipe for (Almost) No-Cook Tomato Sauce

3-4 tomatoes
A handful of basil
2 cloves of garlic
Olive oil
Pasta

Boil water for pasta.  Cook pasta.  (I like farfalle ("butterfly") pasta with this sauce because the wings in the pasta hold the sauce nicely. 

While pasta is cooking, chop tomatoes.  Tear or chop basil into small pieces.  Slice garlic.  Heat olive oil in a saucepan and add garlic.  Cook until soft, but not brown.  Add chopped tomatoes.  Cook for a few minutes, just long enough to reduce the water (juice) from the tomatoes a little.  Turn off heat. 

Drain pasta and add to saucepan with tomatoes.  Add chopped basil.  Stir and serve.

The Sun
by Mary Oliver

Have you ever seen

anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone--
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance--
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love--
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed--
or have you too
turned from this world--

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

Radishing Beauties

Radishes, Raphanus sativus (from Latin, radix, meaning root)
Member of the Mustard Family (Brassicaceae)

These are my first crop--the very first thing I harvested from my new garden.  I made a simple radish salad: sliced the radishes, tore up the greens, tossed them with a little salt, lemon, and olive oil.  Delicious!