(Everbody's Store sandwich board)
I got to work at the Everybody’s Store and made a Black Forest and Herb Gouda sandwich on dark Pumpernickel. Next, I weighed and sorted Australian black licorice into quarter pound packages. Naturally, I waited on customers and pumped gas, but I was surprised when Jeff called me outside to weed the strawberries.
“You can eat as many strawberries as you like, your reward for working among them. Consider it your Zen” he boomed again in his baritone voice as he walked the few steps farther to his house
(taken from the parking lot a view of the garden with the Margolis house just beyond)
(the Everybody's Store Organic garden)
I bent in half and began pulling. Pulling weeds can be one of my favorite activities, so I set to work happily. I like to do a couple of passes. It’s hard to get all of them the first time through. It’s best in my humble weed-pulling opinion to go for a certain type or size first and then go back over a couple more times. There are always the sneaky weeds hiding amongst the legitimate plant’s leaves. I stood up and un-kinked my back, looking around, really looking around and appreciating the amazing garden.
The bounty was inspiring. The corn was strong and healthy, the rhubarb vibrant. As I went back to work thinking back to the day I moved in to my house in Woodland Hills, my yard had been a hot baked barren wasteland.
(rhubarb)
(Some lettuce - Amy said to come snip some when I wanted a salad)
(More yummy lettuce)
(me cleaning the pool in the middle of my dirt wasteland of a yard)
I planted hundreds of cabbage roses, shrub roses, and even climbing roses. Herbs like basil and rosemary were abundant. I grew perennials of every color including fragrant Lilac and Butterfly Bush, deep purple Mexican Sage, and velvety Lambs Ear lined the walkways. Queen Palms and hibiscus transformed the pool area. Lush Cape Honeysuckle hid my fences while tangerine, orange, grapefruit, plum, apricot, peach, nectarine, lemon and lime trees fed barefoot children in the summer. I put Redwoods in the back by my father’s guesthouse. Flowering lavender Jacarandas, fluffy yellow Tipuana Tipu and Chinese Elm provided shade and dotted the perimeter.
Although there were the occasional plants that didn’t like the blazing hot sun, of my yard most varieties I selected were well suited. Tomatoes, artichokes and peppers thrived. However, climbing fig despite the gardener’s old adage “first they sleep then they creep finally they leap” never took hold.
(fountain on left surrounded by pink and white iceberg roses- cape honeysuckle on the pool fence- on the other side of path)
(fruit trees on the side - most flowers not in bloom yet)
So when I moved to Washington, I was excited to plant all the things I’d wanted to plant, but never could because of the extreme heat. Fancy frilly things like Fuchsias, Peonies, Shark ferns and Rhododendrons. I thought I would grow a magnificent garden full of sweet, succulent vegetables. Not so
(my weed-eater, Miracle- with a mouthful of greens - in my flower not vegetable garden)
I thought as I collected my mound of damp weeds in a plastic crate and carried them to the compost. I don't get this place. I longed for my old garden where I knew what was what. I'm seriously ready to just give up. I don't know things like: do you plant when there's still a chance of snow? Or not? How do people get their gardens going just after the cold? Is it different up where I live than it is down in the valley? I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, but my garden is nothing like this. It’s a disaster. I have non-existent spindly carrots. My peas are stringy, my cantaloupe is ok, my tomatoes whiney. Perhaps I thought as I looked around at this Eden, maybe it wasn’t just a job I was going to get from working at the Everybody’s Store.
