Get Ready! Tomatoes are getting ready to be in your gar
Black KrimSalisaw CafeArmenianBrown’s Yellow GiantJaune Couer de PigeonBrad’s Black HeartPineappleYellow Brandywine (just a few, germination not so good)Red ZebraCarol Chyko’s Big PasteBloody ButcherBig BeefAnna RussianIndian MoonMatt’s Wild Cherry (lots and lots)
Stay tuned for sales dates. Probably the first two weeks of May! Here at Second Hand Shovels Farm. Special thanks to greenhouse…
Just when you get a bunch of regular customers for your eggs the production slows. People ask if we sell eggs and we say “yeeaaah..” then we issue the caveat of unreliability. Chickens are fickle. We’d love to sell lots of eggs but the ladies are unpredictable.
The one where I had a desk job had many creative components. It had a professional theatre program (think Neil Simon plays and musicals), it also had two galleries and an arts education program. It was a place where the patrons, suburban locals, did not really want to be challenged. However, it was also on the groundbreaking side of accessibility. It was one of the first area theatres to offer assisted listening devices for those with visual challenges, and had special shows where the actors were “shadowed” by sign language interpreters. They even built the area’s first multisensory playground which incorporated sound, tactile elements and misting water. There were even “talking trash cans” which were colorfully decorated trash cans which had a flap you pushed to drop your trash in. They would thank you for your trash, say that the trash was yummy, and make animal sounds. They were very popular with the young set.
Even though the people who lived in the area and came to the center were on the conventional side, there were quite a few who worked there who were creative spirits. I tarried in the marketing department, and marketing is dull. So in many ways it was another office job. But my co-workers were, for the most part, a hoot. And we had lunch together when we could—either in the office lunch room, or out. Lunch together broke up the monotony of budgets and marketing plans. There were lots of laughs.
Eating in the lunch room was problematic. People could come and ask you questions about work, when you were clearly ON YOUR LUNCH BREAK. The nerve. There were clay-spattered pottery department staff coming through to sort through the out-of-date yogurts people had left in the fridge. There were crabby theatre tech people who never smiled. Never. And then were people like Pam, an actress and director who worked frequently at the center in a variety of capacities. She was a woman who lived way out there—said and did pretty much what came into her head. One day, as we lunched in the break room at the square dark blue laminate tables she came in and said “oh god, do you ever have days where your crotch just itches? And nothing helps, not even a hairbrush?” She then mounted the corner of the table and went to town. We all looked at her slack jawed until she was satisfied and left.
We avoided that table for months.
Occasionally we would head out to eat. There were not really a lot of options in the suburbs, interesting ones any way. The Bagel Nook did make a fine bagel, really good pie and potato salad; there was that German deli where the teutonic woman who worked behind the counter said “you vould not like it” to all questions about the wares in the deli case.
The arts center had a ballet studio, and scores of young and old would either be dancing or waiting to dance, lounging around the space between the studio and the upper art gallery. None of us liked to use the bathroom off the gallery there, because if dancers weren’t dressing or primping they were pooping. And I’m here to tell you that those dainty dames, while possibly light on their feet, really could produce human waste.
On a lovely spring day we decided sandwiches from Vito’s were a good idea. Vito was an ancient, scrawny Italian guy and all he did was sandwiches in his little shoppette store. He had the square paper hat and everything.
My first child was a little nugget in my belly at that time, and I was at a point in my pregnancy, well, most of the pregnancy was like this, where I was queasy all the time, and could spew at the blink of an eye. I once barfed when I saw a hamburger commercial on TV. I was walking a digestive tight wire. On this sunny day as we drove to Vito’s someone in the back seat said “oh man, did you see the size of that turd in the ballet bathroom?” Oh no, I thought. I looked out the window and thought about fresh air.
Concentrating on breathing in…and out.
“I know!” someone else said. “It was massive.”
I looked out the window and thought of fresh air, and flowers in a meadow, sort of like the one Maria is twirling in at the beginning of The Sound of Music…
“I mean,” chimed in Lisa, “It wasn’t the length of the thing so much as the girth. I can’t imagine it would ever go down” I started to gag. I begged them to stop between gagging
gasps.
“yeah,” said Linda. “Wonder who had to don the blue rubber gloves and break it up so it would flush…” That was it. I had to roll down the window and hang my head out.
Meadows, flowers, fresh air, breathe in and out… My eyes watered as I struggled to think of happy things, pretty things, clean things. The wave subsided and we pulled up outside of Vito’s.
It cannot be explained why I ordered a meatball sandwich. I had never ordered one previously. Was it the turd tale? Even today, 25 years later, I am stumped. Vito often had one young assistant. It was best when you got the assistant to make your sandwich because Vito was, well, very slow. VERY slow. Like completing one sandwich to every five the assistant made.
I did not win that lottery on this day. Vito took my order for a meatball sandwich. I glanced over at one point as Vito was slicing open the roll that would later cradle several meatballs I would not be able to eat. I did a double take…the man had a long, clear string of something hanging down about half of an inch off of the tip of his nose.
I had to turn around as the gag hit me like a roundhouse to the gut. I looked out the window and practiced breathing. In…and out. Oh God. In…and out. Turning to Chuck I stage whispered “Vito…nose” and felt the gag coming. He looked over at the sandwich maker and laughed.
Surely he would realize, turn around and wipe his snoot with a paper towel from the dispenser on the wall, then wash his hands, and continue to make my sandwich. But he didn’t. And that string of viscous fluid just quivered there at the end of his nose, like a clear worm getting longer, threatening to drop on my food at any minute.
At this point I was actually making occasional “ulp” sounds between breaths. My stomach doing involuntary crunches. Look out the window. Fresh air and fields of flowers. Maria and the hills. Clean things. By the time the wave subsided my sandwich was done. And you know what I did? Paid for it. Averting my eyes from his face. Desperate to leave the little shop and be out in the fresh clean air.
We went to a park to eat. As soon as we got to the picnic table I offered up my tainted sandwich. Chuck, who witnessed the quivering snot himself, snatched it up and ate it alongside the sandwich he himself had ordered. I took out my backup snack of raspberry yogurt from my bag and took small bites while trying to get past the vision of a hand with a blue rubber glove pinching apart a huge turd alternating with the Old Italian Snot Man. It was not easy.
The drive up the side road to the center had a couple of little bends in it. Nothing a normal person would even notice really. But as Chuck drove us back to work and rolled back and forth up the road I could feel the yogurt beginning to protest. I begged to be let out before he parked and hot footed it along the sidewalk, where school children on field trips sat eating their sack lunches. Our administrative offices had large windows overlooking the sidewalk and playground. We could look out at the kids playing and be filled with warm feelings about making a difference in their lives by exposing them to the Arts.
But on this day any staff member looking out the windows would see me weave around groups of lunching munchkins towards the doors that led into the center—the ones right next to the ballerina bathroom. Bluegloves girthturd nosewormsnot. They would watch me swerve over to one of the “talking trashcans” and anyone within earshot would have heard, as I swung open the flap on the trashcan “Aww, thanks for caring about the environment!”
There’s this pause in the heart of the summer. Things slowly start to produce, but not enough to get excited about. You realize the number of things you planted that never came up, or died an early death. I think I need to make some notes about the failures so I don’t make them again. But then I don’t.
That’s why sunflowers are so important. They come to the rescue with their glory, their…
If I grew nothing else I would always grow tomatoes.
Sure, I would miss the peppers, cucumbers and beets, but I would have my very favorite a plenty. I lean heavily towards heirloom varities, especially the dark purple ones like black krim and Cherokee purple. Brandywines are always delightful, and lately I’m liking stripey varieties like Berkeley tie die and striped Roman.
Every week when I submit my unemployment forms since the Coronavirus changed the world, it asks me if I worked in the past week. The truth is every single week I have worked all day digging, picking, planting, planning. But no one is paying me to do it, so it’s not really work in the sense of the unemployment office standards.
In the beforetimes, in March we send our spring magazine to the…
