The Inadvertent Gardener

I know my readers come from far and come from wide. There are those of you who live in Eastern Iowa (particularly in the Cedar Rapids or Iowa City area), though, and I just know some of you were jealous of me when you read about my coolest-ever CSA farmer last year.

There’s no need to be jealous anymore, ’cause I have an opportunity for you.

A week from today, Local Foods Connection will be rocking the Robert E. Lee Community Recreation Center, at the corner of Gilbert and Burlington Streets in Iowa City, for their annual Community Supported Agricultural Fair. From noon to 4 p.m. on March 22, you can come meet local farmers and sign up for a CSA share.

What does that get you? Well, weekly fresh and local produce. Seasonal stuff. Those goodies that just aren’t the same when you buy them at your local, faceless grocery store. Plus, by purchasing a share, you’re guaranteeing income for farmers, which means they’re more likely to continue providing healthy, local produce, and continue being good stewards of the land.

If that’s not enough for you, you’ll be able to meet me! I helped organize the fair this year, and I’ll be there with some Inadvertent Gardener swag that you can take home with you.

Hope to see you out there!

Somewhere along the way, I picked up a Very Good Idea: Always keep a bottle of sparkling wine chilling in the fridge. Do this at all times. No exceptions.

After all, one never knows when a celebration will break out, and one must be prepared. Often, good news arrives in an instant, leaving no time for chilling.

A couple months ago, I made a trek out to Wallace Winery, a small winery with surprisingly good wine – some of which I mentioned drinking at a long-ago birthday dinner – just west of Iowa City. They grow some grapes, but buy most of what they press from vineyards around the Midwest, and produce, hands down, the best Iowa wine I’ve tasted. They had added a Blanc de Blancs sparkling number to their starting line-up, and I wanted to check it out.

The bottle they had open in the tasting room was a day old and a dollar flat, but even without the bubbles, it had decent flavor. I took a properly corked bottle home with me that day and stashed it in the refrigerator for the appropriate occasion-to-be-named-later.

Then, last weekend, my car exploded. I’m driving a 1994 Toyota Camry with almost 215,000 miles on it, a hand-me-down from my parents. Although my mother has maintained since I moved to Iowa that I desperately need a new car, I keep trying to run this vehicle into the ground, no matter how long it takes.

Here’s my deep, dark secret: I am an only child, and every one of my cars has been a hand-me-down. I harbor a delicious fantasy of getting to 40 before having to actually purchase (new or used) my very own vehicle.

“I kind of admire your ability to stay off the grid in these matters,” my father said when I announced this to him last year.

But on that fateful Saturday, I started the car up and heard a loud noise, followed by a horrible grinding noise. I turned off the engine and sat there for a few minutes, contemplating the vision stretching before me. Car ads. Car web sites. Car. Dealerships.

I mourned as the tow truck hauled my car away. I ate a Reuben to make myself feel better. When that didn’t work, I went out for tapas. I developed theories of what was wrong with my car that included the phrases, “threw a rod,” “cracked the engine block” and “stripped the transmission.” I solicited a co-worker who recently bought a new car to go with me when I had to actually negotiate a deal.

Then I got the call last Monday night from my car repair place: A spark plug exploded. All the rest were about to go, and the spark plug wires also needed to be replaced. The total damage? Just less than $200, which is not chump change, but ain’t no downpayment on a new or used car.

I popped that bottle of Wallace Winery Blanc de Blancs that night. I had skated through. I had permission to continue running the car into the ground. It was cause for celebration.

There is still a crazy load of snow and ice slicking up Iowa City, but at least for today, the sun shone down and did some helpful melting-like work.

Last night, some of my friends and I headed out for the evening, and we decided we were all sick of snow boots: although no one braved sky-high heels, there were some definite signs of fashion on our collective feet. Of course, the flip side of that was we all nearly killed ourselves walking from my house, where we gathered for a pre-festivities festivity, to the vehicle that carried us on our way.

So, this afternoon, I spent a little time smacking at the ice out front with my shovel, busting up big chunks and reclaiming about two feet of my sidewalk that has not been seen in a couple of weeks.

There’s still a heck of an opportunity to land on one’s bazoom out there, and there’s snow and freezing rain in this week’s forecast, but for whatever reason, the sight of ice coming off the sidewalk gave me a little hope. The sooner it’s off the sidewalk, the sooner it’s off the garden.

Gardeners, plant and nature lovers can join in Green Thumb Sunday every week. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

At BlogHer ’07, I attended a fabulous dinner with a group of other food bloggers, some of whom attended the conference and some of whom live in the area. At the table that night, we got to talking about my particular obsession with Lost. I told my table neighbors about my friend Betsy, who lives just up the street from me and whose basement (aka The Cave) sports a 9-foot projection TV system, and that she and her husband share my Lost obsession, so I planned to join them for as many minutes of Season 4 as I possibly could.

“I made the fish biscuits,” said Kat of KungFoodie, who was sitting to my right. “Well, they were sugar cookies, but I have the recipe on my blog. I even made a template.”

I don’t remember what I sputtered in response, but I’m sure it included the words “awesome,” “omigod,” and “that’s hi-LAR-ious.” If I’d had a laptop on me, I would have looked up the template right then and there.

It was all I could do to keep my secret for the next six months. I told Betsy back in August that I had a surprise awaiting the season premiere of Lost. And so, last Thursday night, I took my carefully made Fish Biscuits (which, I might report, are citrusy and delicious), and trudged through the snow up the street to Betsy’s for the first night back from a long, Lost-less era.

It was just the ticket for a snowy night during a winter so bitter even everyone I know who is from Iowa has been marveling. We ate our fish biscuits and stared at the nine-foot projection of an island that, even with weird creatures and enemies all around and a serious lack of a good bar and a shower, looked a heck of a lot better than the world outside The Cave.

And I’m just going to go ahead and admit it. When I showed Betsy the fish biscuits? I literally jumped up and down like I was four years old or something. I adore surprising people, and I had kept this under wraps for so long, I am probably lucky I didn’t cause myself some sort of bodily harm in the process of hopping around the kitchen.

I missed tonight’s episode, because I was off to see B.B. King with The Mint Killer. In the snow. We got eleven inches yesterday, and just as I was getting ready to leave for the show, I looked outside to find snow falling again. The forecast for the next four days? Snow flurries, snow showers, occasional snow and snowy snow.

Luckily, I have just enough dough in the freezer to make another fish biscuit or two. Because with this much snow, there’s something to be said for pretending I’m eating one on an island somewhere.

Photo credit for photo of me: Royce Chestnut