The Fink Farm Dirt

When you have three people working the same garden, you're bound to have a clash of styles. I like having a plan.  I have a yet-to-be-realized fantasy that I will one day have a visually pleasing garden with plants arranged to allow variations in scale and color. A delight with every step and change of perspective. Kate was more of a "I want to plant this, here now" type of gardener. A bunch of green onions at Ralphs could send her to Sego's for a flat of onion bulbs to plant. Turn your back on the garden for a weekend, and you'd come back to a salsa garden Kate planted in an organic patch of garden that I had imagined having a different destiny. One year I dusted off my copy of Square Foot Gardening . Kate was enthusiastic about the concept, but suggested that we could "just eyeball it" instead of laying out lines for each foot mark. And eyeball it, she did. None of the rest of us saw it quite the way she did -- and perhaps she didn't see it ...

Two years have gone by and we've scarcely stuck a trowel into dirt. I blame these fallow periods on California's lack of seasons. It's even worse with a four-year-old drought on. Planting time seems to begin earlier and earlier and there's always something else to grab our attention. The oregano, thyme and mint that we moved away from the main vegetable plot are still going. There are brown paper bags hanging from my balcony with drying herbs. They should be ready to put into jars tomorrow. The biggest challenge is harvesting before they go to flower. The mint died off and has now come back.  It's indestructible, it seems. It makes wonderful tea when added fresh to black tea.  We need to work harder on summer recipes that use mint with yogurt, quinoa or cucumbers.  Perhaps with the Fourth of July holiday coming up we can spotlight some dishes featuring mint. All that's left in the main vegetable patch is a tenacious yellow chard. We cleared away the k...