Garden salad

My garden.

My little sun-starved handicapped organic natural no-fertilizer-having no-pesticide-having near-beeless urban patio garden.

I put things in the dirt that worms like. I watched a video about the best worm-casting company and copied what they did, then added their worm castings too.

I watched several videos about organic dirt.

I bought the additives that were recommended: compost, worm castings, carbon-based things, nitrogen-related things. What's funny is, on Amazon the reviewers write as if each separate thing is the panacea, a separate fertilizer, and not as if each thing is only one element of real well-rounded organic soil.

Let me tell you story about a hapless unhappy boy.

Goes like this:

On a radar site near Benton Pennsylvania a neighbor gave my mother an African violet cutting. She rooted it in a jar placed on the kitchen widow sill.

Benton Air Force radar installation was a cold war NORAD supplemental site that covered a gap in American defensive air space. It filled the gap between mountains that larger radar skipped. My dad was a radar kind of guy. It was a tiny base with only fourteen houses. Basically, an honor to have one. Other than that the whole place was run as a regular Air Force base. Tiny BX, tiny theater, tiny bowling alley, tiny library, on-site sewage system, one barber, and a gigantic radar without a dome that went round and round and round twenty-four hours a day, every day, all year without ever stopping. Inside the building with the radar on top it smelled of electronics and of supremely polished green floor. They have this thing for brilliantly waxed floors, and for dim green electronic light.

It's spooky.

The radar was the equivalent of the eyes of T. J. Eckleburg in the Great Gatsby that oversaw all the wrongdoings of the whole town. The radar was omnipresent. The radar saw everything my brother and I did, walking through the apple orchard, traipsing through the blueberry bushes, hunting for snakes, fishing in the nearby lake, exploring for bird's nests in the trees, throwing rocks, running through the deciduous forest, looking for creatures. The radar watched over us.

No it didn't.

But it seemed like it did.

Look at this place.

The radar site was on the edge of Rickets Glenn National Park. The drive up the mountain was a drive into a fairy tale.

Mum handed me a coffee can and she told me to go get her some dirt.

Get her some dirt. Now there's a task right up my alley.

It's no longer an AFB.

It's a career-development center. 

And I'll tell you, the people who get assigned to this place now for whatever reason are the luckiest people around. It is an ideal place to grow up, to spend time, at least a full summer. It has everything a boy could ask. It did, anyway. 

Still, never satisfied, I wanted more. I recall a long summer day sitting in the sun on the side of a dirt bank with a cluster of roots on my head pretending it was a wig and with dirt from the root-clump falling into the back of my shirt and thinking, "I sure wish school would start up. I'm bored as H-E-Double maple tree twigs." 

And I wondered how I could be bored. I chided myself for being uninteresting with so much nature around. Mum said if I'm bored then I am boring. I told myself that when I grew up that this would be among my fondest memories. How would I know that? In that very long moment of solitude and reflection and mind-erasing mind-opening meditation and introspection, my then-present young self opened to my matured self who spoke directly to my present self back then. I knew I was speaking to myself. I knew I had opened to reception and I was listening to my older self who had opened to direction. Through mind-channel in which time doesn't exist. So I also thought way back then, "Man, these psychic episodes sure are psychic sometimes." And I was right. That time and that specific place is among my fondest memories. 

Soon as school started Dad was transferred to Japan and we went with him this time.

I found the best dirt. But it was brown.

I dumped it out and scooped up nearby dirt that was black and loose between the roots of a tree. 

I smelled the dirt. It smelled like wet rotting wood and decay and it smelled of mushrooms and life. The black wet dirt was death and life dirt. It had insects in it and insect eggs in it  and worms in it. It had microbiologic life and macro-biologic life in it. It had the decay of organic material at various stages in it. This would be excellent dirt because living things are attracted to it. I was attracted to it.

I took it home. Mum planted her rooted leaf in it. The leaf doubled, tripled, quadrupled, multiplied exponentially very quickly into a tight dome of dark green foliage with tiny purple flowers all around it. Mum told everyone who asked it was because of the eastern exposure morning sun and the constant humidity from the sink below it. 

And I was all, "Meh. Maybe. It's because of the dirt." 

I didn't care about her stupid African violet. I didn't care about living/dying dirt. 

Later she tried to duplicate this one success that she had but failed every time. She bought black potting soil specifically for African violets combined with commercial fertilizer specifically for African violets, but nothing worked like that living/dying organic dirt. 

That's what I tired to duplicate. I want the type of dirt that worms will thrive in. If only worms could survive harsh winters in large ceramic pots. That's my new approach. 

And I must tell you, these vegetables are explosively flavorful, small and few as they are for insufficient sun. 

Everyone around here thinks I'm a fantastic knowledgable farmer but the truth is I don't know what I'm doing. I killed 10X more plants than the number of them that lived.

I am not a farmer hoax. It's that even with so little that I know, I still know more than everyone else around here. All of us are basically blank slates.