spring is sprung & yard work has begun

All of a sudden, this past week, flowers are popping up all over the place: from the ground, on trees, and all over previously skeletal shrubs. We didn’t see our neighborhood at this time last year; the major tree flowering fell in between our first visit to the house and when we moved in the following month. My parents also missed this by a couple of weeks on their recent visit; because the winter was a regular (i.e. cold) one, the early blooming of the past few years didn’t happen. Our dogwood hasn’t bloomed yet, either, and I’m looking forward to that.

It’s really quite pretty, and it’s easy to see why the Bradford pear trees were such a popular choice for the town now that they’re in full bloom. Because of the cold winter the azaleas haven’t bloomed yet, but the forsythia and cherry trees are also in bloom this week. Before moving out here, I didn’t have any allergies: now I have them for these three weeks each spring, when the pollen count goes through the roof. I maintain that they’re not technically allergies, but just a completely predictable and healthy reaction to having my internal head membranes become coated in plant dust.

All these flowers serve as a reminder that spring is really and truly here, and the time to take advantage of weak root structures and soft earth is now. ‘Ivy, begone!’ is the theme of this season’s yard improvement project plans. In practical terms, we’re trying to fill our two trash cans with yard debris (old wood, pulled up weeds, pulled down ivy) every pickup (twice per week) from now until all we’re left with is the lovely mundanity of side beds that are weed-free, soil-treated, and mulch-covered.

With a little luck, that will be sometime before next winter. If that’s all we accomplish this summer and don’t plant a single new thing in our yard, I will still be ecstatic.

spring is sprung & yard work has begun

The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

I finished reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan, and promptly followed it with a viewing of Delicatessen. Conclusion: I will never eat meat again (and most certainly not in a dystopian Parisian wasteland, thankyouverymuch).

Ok, so, no, it wasn’t that simple. To start, I have made that vow before: I stopped eating meat 16 years ago, planning to never touch it again. Being lactose intolerant didn’t interfere with my grand plan too much: I lived happily on nuts, beans, eggs, and tofu, plus the varied goodness of the rest of the vegetable world. Then, five years ago, I was diagnosed with thyroid disease and stopped eating soy (only one of many life adjustments). I decided then to start eating wild-caught fish and free-range chicken; these two categories of meat balanced my concern for the quality of the animals’ lives, the economics of the meat industry, and my commitment to my own health relatively satisfactorily. Around the same time I discovered I have a shellfish allergy, so the insects of the ocean aren’t an option for me (it likely went undetected all of these years because of my childhood dislike of their appearance and my subsequent vegetarianism).

As I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I was acutely aware of the lines I’ve walked in balancing my own competing interests when making food choices. I have never been repulsed by meat itself, although I have been — and continue to be — repulsed by the most common practices of raising and slaughtering animals in the U.S. These practices are what drove me to stop eating cows, pigs, and chickens in 1991, and they have remained substantially the same. Pollan touches only briefly on the industrial practices of raising and slaughtering animals, drawing heavily on the assumption — accurate in my case — that the reader is familiar with them through works such as Fast Food Nation and The Jungle. Pollan also avoids issues related to workers — on farms, driving trucks, in supermarkets, at slaughterhouses, in restaurants — throughout the book, an omission that his somewhat contrived framing — tracing the source of four meals — makes easy. Throughout, his focus is on the individual eater, and the choices the eater as individual has to make, rather than on communal ethics or the collective responsibilities of civil society. I found this emphasis, along with his frequently glib and often smug rhetorical style, rendered the narrative less engaging and, at times, off-putting.

In terms of new information, I found the description of the small farm’s system of combining managed intensive grazing and poultry pasturing to be the most fascinating part of the book. No doubt my heightened interest stems from my family’s connections — historical and contemporary — to food farming, but it was also the only section of the book that wasn’t telling me something I was already familiar with (as was the case with the discussions of industrial agriculture, ‘big organic’ companies, and hunting or gathering). The main value of those sections was to confirm the choices I already make: to eat low on the food chain; to buy local, seasonal, and organic fruits and vegetables; to do without eggs or chickens unless they’ve been allowed to range freely and fed organic seed; to buy milk from a cooperative where the cows are pastured and not treated with antibiotics or growth hormones; and to avoid corn syrup and soy additives whenever possible. Of course, I’m not perfect, and my access to all of these foods isn’t either; I buy organic breakfast cereal imported from Canada, because I like it and because it’s the one with the largest amount of fiber and the smallest amount of sugar that I can find.

The book did highlight one dilemma for which I still haven’t arrived at a solution, that of what to do about the chickens: to eat, or not to eat? Non-industrially farmed meat is still both hard to find and hard to afford in many instances, and I don’t have the standard Midwesterner’s freezer in which to store large amounts of meat (which would lower the cost). Also, truthfully, I don’t think I could ever get used to handling and cooking pork or beef in my own house, and that probably means — in the ethics of looking your dinner in the face that Pollan describes — that I probably shouldn’t be eating it. Really, I have issues preparing any meat at home — we said an inordinate number of graces for the chickens we received through our farm share this winter — and I can’t imagine increasing my current consumption for that reason.

Thus, our introspective household has arrived at an uneasy balance exactly of the type that Pollan explores: every single meal is necessarily a compromise between our ethics regarding farming, labor, local economic, and environmental practices, and our ongoing commitment to our own health.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

Jasper Johns exhibition

The current exhibition at the East Gallery is a selection of Jasper Johns paintings, among them some of the most well-known of his works (e.g. the paintings with the names of colors painted in colors other than those which they signify). I went a few weeks ago with a friend, and will return at least once more in order to see the accompanying exhibition of prints. I had always liked his work just fine, but the exhibition—organized by theme rather than in a strictly chronological manner—immersed me in his vision in a whole new way.

In this exhibition, and the Joseph Cornell retrospective earlier this year, I was fascinated by the reproduction of certain images and concepts throughout the works. With both Johns and Cornell, I find myself loving the themes, both in terms of content and in the fact of their existence. I suppose it makes them more human to me, linking them to the way that each of us circles around themes and repeats motifs and patterns in our own lives. It’s endearing to find such a clear expression of this aspect of modern life in such compelling works of art.

At least, it was for me: while at the two exhibitions I was surprised to hear other viewers describe the works—and the habit of returning to favorite themes over time—as disturbing or jarring. With Johns, several friends commented that the disconnection of the signifier—e.g. ‘red’—from the color it signifies was jarring and difficult to enjoy. It’s not only the simple disconnection, I suppose, since we’re used to seeing all color words printed in a neutral black; it’s the replacement of the signified color with one that doesn’t match (e.g. ‘red’ painted in blue) that is disconcerting. Or, it was to others: I found it wonderfully energizing. Granted, I’ve spent a bit more time considering postmodern linguistic theory than just about everyone I socialize with out here, so it was a treat for me to see those ideas made real in such a vibrant way.

Until I saw a photo of Johns at work on these paintings, I would have imagined their creation to be nonstop fun (he doesn’t crack a smile, and his stance and self-presentation in early photos are so Germanic he appears Austrian). I, for one, smiled enough for both of us throughout my visit.

Jasper Johns exhibition

celebratory dinner

Tonight I made a delicious dinner in my our new skillet, to celebrate…my our new skillet arriving! Also spring arriving, but mostly the new pan.

The saga of the demise of my nonstick pots has been somewhat protracted, with one of them going a couple of years ago and the others starting to get a little worn but remaining functional (i.e. no bits of nonstick coating coming off in the food). Since the new year, though, I’ve lost two (the wok-style frying pan and the inky dinky frying pan), which meant that we definitely needed to get something new (because the one that went first was the regular-sized frying pan), not to mention my backup enamel soup pot that used to belong to my grandparents (it got its last utility scorched out of it during an inattentive reheating just last week). Now that we’re getting the farm share each week, we’re cooking nearly every meal at home. This has meant that in addition to the pots and pans getting more wear, we’re branching out and cooking more seriously. We’d gotten in the habit of just boiling water and having pasta, or making sandwiches, but with the fresh produce something else is called for.

What all this has meant is that we’ve spent the past month or so talking about what kinds of pots we’d like to get, what kinds of cooking we do, what kinds of pans are both of good quality and easy to maintain, et cetera. The collective answer to these questions is: a hodge podge. We replaced the littlest frying pan with another small nonstick pan, just to have one around. Our plan is not to replace the nonstick pots generally, though, but instead to swap in higher end pieces that will require more attention from us but will also allow us to cook things more the way they were meant to be cooked.

To that end, our first replacement purchase was a 10″ skillet. After going back and forth and around, we picked the All-Clad MC2 line for our stainless steel pans (ultimately, over the next, say, ten years or so, to be this skillet, a sauté pan, and a tall stockpot). I have heard only good things about the evenness of cooking with them, and I personally liked the more matte-finished exterior than the shiny version. When our nonstick soup pot finally succumbs, I’ll replace it with a round French oven of the same size, in the cheery orange color.

So that’s the skillet that came today, and I took it as an opportunity to use up some kale and farm eggs in a frittata using a recipe from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (thus maxing out the possible things I could do with the pan on its first day, since it ended up under the broiler for the last 4 minutes). Accompanied by some farm salad greens and a bottle of California merlot, a housewarming gift from one of our neighbors, it was quite a tasty little meal.

And, the pan was nice and easy to clean. Welcome, spring!

celebratory dinner

repotting house plants

A couple of weeks ago, my largest jade plant took a tumble off the windowsill. It had been getting imbalanced, I just hadn’t realized quite how much. I’d rotated the pot to help it even out, but the weight on one side was great enough to bring the whole thing down. With the fall, the plant lost branches along one side, making it too uneven to survive as is. I decided to cut it back, to pretty much dismantle it and plant each of the small branches as cuttings.

After gathering up the little limbs that were scattered on the floor (I just threw out the leaves; there were too many to accommodate), I had 9 new pots worth of plantings. It didn’t take me long to get them into the pots, but I’m still working with the light in the house and finding enough places to help them grow. The east- and west-facing sides of the house have deep sills, and those sills have been where I’ve kept plants up until now. With this profusion of pots, I moved a small shelf in front of a south-facing window upstairs, and I have a couple of rows of plants hanging out there. I imagine that I’ll be checking and shuffling them around for some time until I’m satisfied.

The mass repotting of the jades provided an opportunity to repot a couple of other plants that had been needing attention. I divided my aloe plant, which had grown from a tiny sprout ($2 at the Ikea checkout counter) to two huge plants crowding each other in the pot. Now they each have their own pot, and they just crowd each other on the windowsill. I also repotted a pot of variegated pothos cuttings that I had plunked into a pot full of dirt from my yard nearly 10 years ago, when I didn’t have any potting soil. The intervening years hadn’t been good to them: they still had only their individual roots and nothing like what you might call a root system. Now they’re luxuriating in potting soil, and I have high hopes that they’ll grow long and prosper. Somewhere down the line, I’ll hang hooks in front of the south-facing windows and hang the spider plants in those. For now, though, everything is doing fine, and that’s good enough for me.

Best of all, there’s still plenty of room in the house to introduce more air-filtering plants and become as sophisticated as future space shuttles.

repotting house plants