Opportunity Gardens: Have Another Independence Day
An update from Opportunity Gardener and AmeriCorps VISTA Erin King
“Some people just like having a garden... I can definitely fall into that category. I love checking up on it every time I go outside of my apartment. But I only can enjoy having a garden because I actually have things growing and things to care for. My roadblock is knowing what to do with it beyond a salad, where to store it, how to preserve it - more or less, eating it before it goes bad.”
Apparently, I've been wanting to write about this topic for a while. This was a Facebook Status update that I wrote on June 24th. It stemmed from my strange need to go Paparazzi-mode on my garden almost on a daily basis. Documenting how much can change in a plant’s life cycle from day to day is an amazing learning experience in itself.
But how does one move beyond being that person that just likes having a garden to someone who actually uses these things they've grown to feed themselves, and not just in the immediate future? That’s a larger learning curve.
Being a product from fast-food culture since I can remember - this is perhaps my greatest challenge as a gardener. I've always had my life packed with extra-curricular activities, planning committees, church commitments, etc., and was able to do everything I wanted because of fast food restaurants, campus dining, and processed foods.
Not that I don’t know how to cook; I know how to follow instructions, and really enjoy cooking. The problem is the recipes that I grew up with in the home were meat-reliant, chunkless, watered-down dishes to satisfy finicky eaters. This kind of cooking doesn't translate well with fresh produce…
So, my Independence Day weekend was spent as a symbolic personal independence day of sorts. I stayed home most of theweekend, did some garden work that needed to be done. The majority of my weekend, though, was spent trying to extend my produce’s use over multiple days. I made refrigerator pickled green beans and zucchini bread. I later rearranged my freezer so I’d have space to freeze my blanched green beans.
But I took this need to use everything produced from my garden to another extreme. My snap pea plants were the first plants to officially die and convince me there was no reason to keep them in the ground. I uprooted those, and experimented with making paper pulp out of the plant fibers – one more freezer bag added to my tiny freezer. (I’m tempted to do this with a little bit of every plant from my garden – not all of it, because my compost needs them too.)
This weekend, I plan on making more zucchini bread, and converting my cabbage into coleslaw and perhaps sauerkraut. But with the development of my new love for gardening and preserving, a new problem rises; how do I balance this slow food life with the fast pace of the rest of the world?