garden : ground is prepped and azaleas are coming in

We seem to have the latest-blooming azalea varieties on our block, which leads us to wonder each year whether we’ve done something wrong and the bushes just aren’t going to bloom at all. However, except for immediately following the drought, they’ve always come through; this week the color of the buds is finally visible, casting a faint sheen on the entire shrub.

After a long day of digging out roots and mixing in hummus last weekend, the foundation bed is reasonably prepared for the plants that are due to arrive in the first week of May. I made a date with a friend with a child to plant the bed on the morning of Mother’s Day, and I’m hoping to have the plants well in hand by then. In the meantime the rain is doing a wonderful job of integrating the soil, and the robins are busily attempting to eat all my worms as they come up for air in the exposed earth.

Once that bed is planted, I’ll integrate into it some of the bearded irises I inherited last year. I’ve been marking the stems as they bloom to identify the colors, but haven’t yet decided if I’ll move the white or purple ones. I’ll likely wait another month or so to see how the bed looks when the flowers start coming in; there’s a limit to how well even I can visualize a future space filled with flowers I’ve never grown before!

garden : ground is prepped and azaleas are coming in

University Park needs a race-class-gender analysis, pronto!

It’s probably true that every small town has its dramas, but the ones in University Park seem to always fall out along lines of race and class. This shouldn’t surprise me, given that I live in a town that was incorporated with racial covenants in a county that was and is predominantly black. Language is an important window into thinking; here, whenever the town needs to make a choice about access and distribution of resources, the desire for exclusion of outsiders and fear of a loss of privilege predominates. This was true when the town invested in a playing field in the public park — who would be allowed to use it, would they pay, how would it be policed — and years ago when a major road was closed off to through-traffic and the metro line extended to our area.

Currently, this dynamic is playing out over the issue of enrolling the 24 town employees in a defined-benefit pension plan run by the State of Maryland. The pension plan would replace the 401(k) plan that’s been in place for over 20 years and is now essentially worthless, would provide defined contribution and payout amounts, and would provide disability insurance for the police and maintenance workers without the risk that a claim would send the Town’s rates through the roof. There are debates about the specifics of the numbers, but the proponents of the plan perceive it to be essentially affordable and a more secure way of meeting our obligations as an employer and the opponents would rather not spend the money at all.

This last is where language, rhetoric, and a whole bunch of unseemly underlying assumptions come into play, and where an intersectionality approach is useful. There has been rhetoric about how federal social security benefits are adequate for the (majority black) working class employees, rhetoric that would be appalling were it to be offered to any of the resident doctors, lawyers, professors and bankers as a rationale from their own employers. The underlying belief is that the folks working for us in town are fundamentally different from us, and there is no reason to provide to them the quality or extent of benefits that we expect to be provided to us as a matter of course at our own jobs. There’s also the underlying assumption by the opposition that in matters of finances, we would all rather have more money in our pockets than pay more for better services; this assumption is revealed by talk of doing away with town employees altogether and outsourcing their jobs. Of course, race and class play into this argument as well, because if there’s a working population more vulnerable to exploitation than the men who work jobs in city maintenance, it’s the usually-recent-immigrants who work for large companies that supply the outsourced labor to clean office buildings and haul trash. But if folks have no qualms about suggesting workers retiring after 30 years of service live on social security alone, they certainly have no qualms about suggesting the town benefit financially from further exploitation of vulnerable workers.

None of this is anything new, and is entirely typical of an entitled cultural attitude wherein people who do our dirty work are nothing more than a cost on a balance sheet to be whittled down whenever possible. Certainly this type of race and class privilege cloaked in the language of economics and cost-benefit analysis is something with which we’re all too familiar. What’s different in this particular debate is the fall back on a deep-rooted and classic sexism in categorizing the proponents as ’emotional’ and the opponents as ‘rational,’ conflating all ethics with emotion and assuming that the most rational action of all is one that moves to block expenditures whenever possible. Perhaps it should be heartening that the opposition perceives itself to be backed into a corner and is grasping at straws, but it plays like a case study for a feminist analysis straight out of the 1970s. Patronizing language and attitude? Check. Insistence that your side alone has the true facts and the other is guided by the whims of emotion, which of course has no place in decision-making? Check. Insistence on speaking first, last, and repeatedly at all meetings related to this subject? Check. And last but certainly not least, loud and derisive interruption of women speaking on the other side? Check, check, check. (There are men speaking on both sides, but it’s only the opponents who do the interrupting and only to the women on the other side.)

I know I should be finding it amusing that the people nearly apoplectic and sputtering at the Town Council meetings are those who are accusing the other side of being guided by irrelevant emotion, but it’s such an old and galling argument that I find myself frequently unable to see the lighter side. The behavior and rhetoric is insulting to everyone, and I don’t think the opposition realizes just how much they are alienating people with their continued pursuit of this approach: the Mayor who’s crafted this proposal with knowledge from a long career in financial data analysis; the employees who are constantly being publicly characterized as not worth equal treatment; and the town residents ourselves whose collective choice to be responsible and ethical employers is being ridiculed as irrational and weak-minded. The opposition spends a lot of energy claiming to have the facts on their side, but I have to think that if they actually did they wouldn’t perceive a need to be behaving in this manner. Unless of course, a rational and strategic assessment of the tactics most likely to succeed isn’t what’s guiding their actions after all.

University Park needs a race-class-gender analysis, pronto!

bad milk from J-Wen Farms

After my excitement last week to have a dairy vendor at the Riverdale Park Farmers’ Market, I’m ticked off that the milk I purchased from J-Wen Farms was bad when we opened it, five full days before the sell-by date. It wasn’t totally rotten, but it was putting off an odd smell that my partner thought was maybe just the grass aspect. Of course, he now has a headcold and I wasn’t here with my non-chemistry-lab-damaged nose to tell him the smell was definitely the milk going bad, so he had some. And now he’s feeling it. Probably I shouldn’t have bought milk that was not labeled pasteurized and was being sold out of a plastic tub filled with ice cubes; so much for assuming that the online comments I found about the milk’s inadequate shelf life had probably been addressed. However, I understood the vendor’s explanation of heating to 145F to be pasteurization, and the jug was labeled with a date of April 25th. At any rate, I emailed the Farmers’ Market coordinator and have saved the milk in case they need it to test for salmonella or whatever makes milk bad other than improper heating and/or storage.

Thus ends my foray into local milk sold from something other than refrigerated cases and labeled something other that PASTEURIZED.

bad milk from J-Wen Farms

garden : what a difference a year makes


The lavender, when I first planted it last year.


The lavender, today.

When I created a spot for the lavender at the side of the porch steps last year, I was so proud of myself for keeping it alive in a pot inside all winter. Yes, it was a little wilted, and yes, it needed more sun and hadn’t grown as much as I’d envisioned. Still, it was larger than it has been when I bought it and it seemed fundamentally healthy. Looking at the plant today, I am embarrassed to even admit that it’s the same one I planted last year. How pathetic last year’s plant looks, and how enormous this one is! I had imagined it filling the spot and becoming large and vigorous like some of the others I’ve seen around town; I had no idea that might happen in a single year. Every time I see the small herb that’s quickly becoming a shrub I’m glad I put it in the ground when I did.

Having it in a spot we pass every day is also a useful reminder to stop trying to grow perennial herbs in pots; while the sage survived the winter the (second) rosemary did not and the thyme is beyond pathetic. One of this year’s tasks is to determine a spot where the herbs will have enough sun and room to grow long-term and plant them out into the ground.

garden : what a difference a year makes

good finds at the farmers’ market


Two plants waiting for their spot in the ground.

This week was the second of my local farmers’ market, and I found much to tempt me. You might think that having 70 plants on order would have satisfied the desire for flowers; you would be wrong. I managed to escape with only two Bee Balm plants; if I’d had more cash and an actually-developed plan regarding where the culinary herbs are going to go it would have been a lot worse. However, I was glad to find the Bee Balm, as it’s a plant I wanted to include in the garden and hadn’t found in the catalogue from which I ordered. And, I have that little spot around the corner that needs filling in; I think the Bee Balm will nicely bridge the gap between the (soon to be two varieties of) irises and the wee white azaleas.

In addition to the flowers, I bought dairy products from the new dairy vendor, J-Wen Farms. The cheese looked too good to pass up, and my choice was (what’s turned out to be) a nice sharp cheddar. I’ll definitely be trying their various goat milk selections in the future. I also bought milk for my partner, and we’ll see if he likes it. I’m happy to support a local option for pastured hormone-free not-ultra-pasteurized milk if the quality is there. All those things plus organic would be ideal, but cows that rotate into a fresh paddock every day all summer are close enough to the mark for me to give it a try.

I didn’t buy any produce as we’re still working our way through the last of our winter CSA greens, and I won’t be buying much next week since we’re going out of town for a week just two days after the market. No doubt there will be many more options when I return in the first week of May; asparagus is nice, but I’m more looking forward to the appearance of sugar snap peas.

good finds at the farmers’ market