SPINACH GOES ALL THE WAY

Despite what whoever else thinks about spinach may think, spinach has its own life purpose, if only an evolutionary one, and it deserves to fulfill that purpose whenever possible, is my humble opinion, especially since I planted so much of the stuff and nobody here is eating much spinach this year, other than me doing my best, which explains this greenish tint. 

Our weird Spring weather is too chilly for daily family salads and anyway there's only two of us living here now, so it must've been in a spell of zombie gardening that I planted a lot of greens, out of habit acquired from years of more mouths to feed, as I'm sure happens to empty-nester gardeners all over the world, we are united  in this are we not, though no one at the forums ever talks about this type of overabundance; there should be an international distribution system for surplus vegetables. 

In any case it's not easy to rationalize all that succulent, flavorful and nourishing vegetation growing so high and leafing out with abandon, gaining fiber in the natural process of going to seed (a noble idiom, wasted on humans), which is what spinach originally evolved to do and has never forgotten how to do; and now, for the first time in who knows how long - no one I know keeps track of these things - some righteous spinach is getting a chance to go all the way, so who am I to put my foot down? 

Yes, who am I to tell a nourishing vegetable friend what to do-- or even more hubristically, cut a beautiful and licentious plant into compost simply because it's useless to me and is interfering with the artificial comfort parameters of my life, such as what will my gardening neighbors think of me for letting this happen (an interesting variation on Veblen's concept of conspicuous non-consumption, btw), for letting spinach walk all over me as it were, and for not tastefully maintaining my spinach bed. There seems to be a moral aspect trying to assert itself in here somewhere...

Speaking frankly, though, I have never seen spinach have so much fun, or look so wanton and passionate with life, so-- fulfilled in its true mission, spelling itself out in max green leaves on rising ruby stems and the beginnings of seeds; it's almost erotic, except it's a plant, so nothing goes on actionwise other than slow intense growth and general vegetative lasciviousness, which I suppose could be arousing to a more passionate gardener. Nothing salacious, though; it's not like Caligula or anything. Still, what are the neighbors thinking of all this verdant intimacy? No one has said a thing yet... 

Not to be all that be humble, but I here and now assert my wish to not have, an eon or more hence, a plaque of thanks in the Leafy Hall of Fame, when Spinach descendants gratefully and capably rule the world... 

It was nothing, really.

RAISING VEGETABLES

Vegetables have been around longer than we have, you'd think by now they'd have figured out how to grow pretty much on their own. In the wild, they are indeed boss; too much so in some cases - kuzu finds an in and soon takes over. After generations of kitchy-koo domestication, though, the plants we call our vegetables can be a lot like children.

Gardeners must therefore now and then provide temporal guidance to our selectively bred green friends, who in their growth and development are prone to undesired tendencies that can accompany human preferences and require staking, training, shading, netting, fencing, heading, stringing up and so forth. Such guidance, however, should be administered with balanced judgment and tender interspecies diplomacy. You don't want a garden full of offended tomatoes or even worse, peppers. Lettuce, forget about it. 

The other day I spotted my newly emerged Climbing Bean tendrils just hanging around lowdown, looking for green action in an arm-over-the-shoulder kind of way with the Spinach, a family that can be bad company for vegetables that have been bred for higher aspirations.

I know from personal human experience, mutatis mutandis, that lowlifery in the early phase sets a bad precedent, and can tend to restrain upward ambition. If Climbing Beans remain too long in an earth-hugging relationship, they may never regain their full powers, never reach the heights to which their birthright entitles them. So without sounding too elitist about it, I had to take the gangly neophytes aside and, in the gentle language suitable to sprouts, give them good advice without bruising their spirits. 

There's an art to vegetal diplomacy. To the young but unstriving reachers, I said: "Listen here, greenies-- there are a few things you've got to learn about life. First of all, you've got to choose your companions wisely. Don't hang around with the groundhuggers-- no offense to you, Spinach, don't get all bolty. This isn't personal, it's gardening. You do your job well. We love you. You're tasty, you're nourishing, you're beautiful. Keep up the good work..."  (Gardeners often sound like Hollywood agents.) 

"But you, all you young beans, reaching with your tendrils: choose high-reaching companions! At your age, take all the help you can get! See those nets up there? Look for the net overhead and use it. Climb as high as you can and don't look back; grab a stake and keep on reaching! Believe me, the sky's the limit for you youngsters, so go for it with all you've got! You'll be blooming way up there in no time! That's your destiny!" 

And so I went on, a bit over the top, the green young tendrils hopefully hanging on my every word, though now that they've known the ease of Spinach life, I thought it wiser to lash them to the masts of ambition with plastic twists.

LOCAL LUNCH

Yesterday morning when I went out to empty the wood ash onto the fallowing part of the garden, on my way back I grabbed a good couple handfuls of big-leaf spinach and snagged a few large shiitake from the logs, then went inside and for lunch started sauteing some garlic in olive oil while I sliced the shiitake to translucent thinness, then I threw the slices in with the garlic, stirring now and then to softness and even greater translucency while I tore the spinach leaves into mouth-sized pieces, poured some broth into the pan with the garlic and mushrooms, turned the flame high and threw in the spinach, tossed with a spatula till the broth reduced then put it all in a nice local mingei bowl and ate it together with some local rice in another nice local mingei bowl. Boy was that locally delicious.

BARELY NICE THINGS

Hunkered out in the morning winter rain up here, thinning some spinach for lunch, after I pinch off the soil-caked roots and leave them there to nourish the future I am privileged to note the nevertheless kindness of the snowcold rain in washing the dirt off my freezing fingers so I can carry the handfuls of baby spinach back to the kitchen without getting dirt on the leaves... such barely nice things as this, easy to miss, going on even in the cold heart of a gray chill-drizzly day...

SIX-GREEN SALAD

Just had a six-green vinaigrette salad (two kinds of lettuce, spinach, arugula, mitsuba and dandelion) with red radishes and onions, all from my own garden except the onions, and we all know why that is. It was every bit as delicious as the picking of each leaf to fill my bamboo basket in the last gold of the day.

FOND MEMORIES OF VENISON

No, I'm not going back to consuming the flesh of other creatures in rare chunks and gobbets, I just instantly happened to recollect the hearty flavor of the venison my uncle used to bring us every deer season when I went out into the garden yesterday morning to get some spinach for lunch and found the entire bed looking like the rich green exclusive carpet in the lobby of that classic hotel in Hollywood, whose name understandably eluded me.

I shook my head to clear my eyes, but no matter how long I shook it, the large and only yesterday vigorously growing spinach bed remained as flat and smooth as if a herd of sheep had just come through. There was only one set of tracks, though: the hoofprints of a deer bouncing around with the sheer joy to be found in a pre-dawn feast of green lusciousness. (Imagine the savor and mouthfeel of several square meters of fresh baby spinach, after an entire winter of dried bamboo leaves.) No doubt it was the buck who's been at the biwa tree: I went over to check that and sure enough, he'd had the biwa tree for dessert and used no napkin, just left the bedraggled branches hanging where he'd broken them off to get at the best parts.

So in a sort of deeply reflexive, not to say Pavlovian way, I began to recall the increasingly appealing taste of venison. Nothing really omnivorous mind you, just a brief hallucination brought on by a sudden deficiency of spinach, aggravated by biwa trouble. I love deer; they go great with mashed potatoes and gravy, nice spinach salad on the side.