This Old Farm Feels Like a Long Lost Friend

I haven’t seen them yet, but I hear that there are sprouts in the planters out on my deck.  It was almost a week ago that we planted seeds for four different vegetables and three herbs in containers of varying size, shape and vintage.  Unlike last summer, thus far I have been quite diligent in watering, and the tiny half-bent green tendrils are starting to reward us with ever-increasing presence.  If all goes well over the next few months, there should be at least something edible that we will be able to harvest from just outside our door.  There may not be much quantity or variety, but growing real food from virtually nothing is quite the product in itself.

My wife and I live in what seems to us a quite large condominium, almost twice the size of our last apartment.  However, the fact that it is a condo, not to mention on the third floor, means that we have no soil in which to create a garden.  We both had experience gardening with our families and wanted to try it for ourselves, so a little creativity was needed.  And thus was born the container garden.  It started small, with one borrowed (and never returned) round planter and a trip to Lowe’s to buy a larger rectangular one, and has grown ever since.  Sitting on our deck as I write this are the original containers plus three more purchased in the succeeding years, as well as an experiment in using wooden boxes to grow herbs.

We aren’t exactly building on success with all this expansion, though.  It has been three years that we have attempted the container garden, and not once has it really been productive.  That first year with our two planters, we excitedly rode the bus to the local Wal-Mart garden center, minds racing with images of the bountiful gardens of our youth.  The cherry tomato and hot pepper plants we chose from the racks of young plants actually did generate some food, but a lot went to waste unpicked or sitting on the counter waiting for a use.  We were both in college at the time, and though we really liked the idea of gardening, we just didn’t have the time to put in to it.

Moving forward a year or so, after relocating to our West Des Moines condo, we decided we finally did have the time, and thus should expand our efforts.  Two more containers in hand, we planted seeds for tomatoes, sweet peppers, green beans and spinach.  Well, as I alluded to a few paragraphs ago, the fact that we had time to garden didn’t exactly mean we used it to maintain and water our plants.  Miraculously, many survived through our neglect, the limited light on our deck and the vicious winds we often see here.  Unfortunately, the spinach withered, the peppers were tiny and bitter, the beans arrived one or two at a time, and the tomatoes had a bizarre tough skin that made them very unpleasant to eat.  Not exactly Little House on the Prairie material.

My family’s garden, on the other hand, was and still is an achievement in self-sufficiency.  Our house was built in the late 80s in a fairly typical suburban subdivision.  A large plat of land with labyrinthine streets peppered with similar houses on ¼ acre lots, the development doesn’t exactly lend itself to large-scale agriculture.  But for one white house with blue trim in that subdivision, making the most of a small piece of land keeps my family in fresh fruit and vegetables all season long.

Where many of our neighbors’ yards are consumed with keeping-up-with-the-Joneses swimming pools or kept empty so the kids can run around, almost our entire backyard is put to good use.  There are at least a half-dozen dwarf apple trees, a trellis with grape vines, and a berry patch with currants, blueberries and raspberries.  And then there is the garden itself.  Two rows of wooden boxes partially sunk into the ground run the width of the yard.  The boxes are used to separate different crops, so one has tomato cages while another has bean towers while still others are open for leafier plants.  Each box is carefully planned to maximize output in the limited space.

This past weekend I was at home, converting the boxes from chaotic messes overgrown with weeds to a garden ready to produce.  My siblings and I weeded, tilled, sowed, planted, and in the course of three days saw an amazing transformation.  But the real incredible change will come in the next few months.  By the time I left there were several small plants started indoors and transplanted, but many more areas that looked empty waiting for seeds to sprout.  By August the backyard will be a menagerie of spreading tomato plants, sturdy peppers, sprawling cucumbers, climbing bean vines and dense forests of greens.  It will be enough to feed my whole family those vegetables (and the many more I haven’t mentioned) until the weather starts to turn.

That’s what’s really neat to me.  Sure, we spent a few dollars on some seeds, but in essence the entire garden was built up with a weekend of hard work, some knowledge about plants and the determination to essentially make something out of nothing.  And in the meantime, I got to get my hands dirty and spend quality time with my whole family.  I was absolutely happy to be done by the end of the weekend, as it was fairly exhausting work, but it was satisfying to help create a magnificent garden out of a few seeds and some dirt.

Now I recognize that the container garden on my deck isn’t going to reach the standards set by our garden back home.  But the concept and the idea drawing me in to it is still the same.  Buying some containers, a bag of soil and a few seed packets, and I might be able to replicate that feeling of creation on a smaller scale.  I know our problem has been in not keeping up with the work for our containers, but maybe looking back at my family’s garden that I worked so hard to set up and knowing what it has produced in years past I can find the motivation to really make something of it.

Journey to the Past

It’s been almost two weeks since we got back from Washington, DC, and I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of all the incredible things we saw there.  I already talked a little about the monuments, but in all honesty that only took up a day and a half of the weeklong trip.  There was so much more – museums, the zoo, Mount Vernon, the local food, the neighborhoods – that if I wrote about everything at about one post per week, I could have material for the rest of the year.  But among the other things I want from this blog, I do want it to be somewhat timely.  So I have limited myself to one more article from the DC trip and then I will move on to other topics.

With that framework in mind, what should I choose to explore in more detail?  The monuments really capture the essence of DC, but they epitomize the city for everyone, not just me.  They are a requisite tourist stop, and although they have the potential to affect each individual visitor in a unique way, just about anyone who visits Washington could write about them.  My second topic for the DC trip needs to be something as epic as the monuments, but something that profoundly impacted me as a person.  And clearly, the only subject that meets these criteria is dinosaurs.

That may have caught you, dear reader, a little off guard.  Dinosaurs are hardly the first image one has when thinking of Washington, DC, and I’m fairly sure there aren’t even any pictures of them in the visitor guides I ordered when I was planning this vacation.  But between my experiences at the National Zoo and the National Museum of Natural History, prehistoric creatures did significantly add to the awe and wonder of this trip.

Although the museum has quite the dinosaur collection, the much more significant dinosaur encounter in Washington happened at the National Zoo.  The zoo only seems to garner average reviews in online trip planning websites, but my wife and I are big zoo fans, so we thought we should give it a try.  I grew up being an on-again off-again member of the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago and loved every trip we made out there.  And although Des Moines has a rather small zoo, we are members glad to support it and its mission.  Besides all that, the National Zoo has Giant Pandas, one of the rarest land animals in the world.  For the pandas alone we decided to ignore the online advice, and blocked out an entire day for it.

It’s a good thing we did, because the National Zoo is really big and has a lot of animals.  Unfortunately it is also the worst laid-out zoo I can imagine, but the great creatures we saw overshadowed that.  We got there early to avoid the crowds, and headed over to the pandas.  The one we saw was as adorable as they are in pictures, but she seemed content to spend her morning sitting in a shady spot munching on bamboo.  Once we had watched her for a while, we quickly headed toward Beaver Valley where we intended to watch the otter feeding time.  As we rounded a corner past the lemurs, I found myself face-to-face with a life-size Triceratops statue.

My first thought was to hurry past, because strangely enough, Brookfield Zoo has an unexplained Hadrosaur statue and for some reason I thought this was the same type of display.  But I saw that there was a small placard in front of the statue, a few gears clicked in my head, and I suddenly froze.  My wife had walked on a little ways, not knowing I had stopped, and now came back to see why I was gawking at the dinosaur statue when there were real animals just a little further on.  With goosebumps breaking out on my arms, I slowly stepped forward until I could read the sign, and confirmed that I was staring at Uncle Beazley.

The reason for my reaction, as I hurriedly explained to my bemused wife, is that Uncle Beazley is the dinosaur protagonist from The Enormous Egg, one of my favorite books growing up.  It is a heartwarming story about a Connecticut farm boy whose hen lays a, well, enormous egg, which ends up hatching into a dinosaur.  I’d rather that anyone reading this blog actually reads the book, so I won’t elaborate any more on the story, but suffice it to say that it makes perfect sense to see Uncle Beazley at the National Zoo.

I don’t know how many times I read The Enormous Egg when I was younger, but I do know that I absolutely loved it.  I can still picture the copy we owned, and more importantly, I can see in vivid detail the scenes that occurred within its pages, just as I imagined them all those years ago.  This was the first book that I remember painting images into my head with such clarity that I could actually see them.  And although the 1979 encyclopedia set we owned gets a lot of the credit in conversation, I think The Enormous Egg really began my love affair with the written word, as a consumer and now starting to become a producer.

Just think of what an experience this was.  A defining moment during my formative years, a fond memory I have from my youth, staring me in the face some 20 years later.  And he looked exactly like he should have, both from the beautiful illustrations in the book, and from my own imagination.  Can you conceive what it would be like to bump into the Lorax, one of the Wild Things, Falcor the Luck Dragon, whoever it might be for you?  That was what I experienced, right in the middle of the National Zoo.  And though I said before that it made sense for him to be there, I never would have guessed that I would ever actually see Uncle Beazley in person.  I respectfully took a few pictures and headed off a few minutes later to see the rest of the animals.

The rest of the zoo was really great, definitely warranting a trip for those heading to DC, despite the average online reviews.  The animals were fantastic and there are a lot of neat exhibits.  Similarly, the hall of dinosaurs at the National Museum of Natural History is impressive to look at, inspiring awe and wonder at the magnitude of the bones on display.  But I have to say that of all that I saw at the zoo, and of all the dinosaurs I saw at the museum, the greatest one had to be the unmoving concrete one at the National Zoo.  So if you take a trip to Washington DC, definitely check out the museums and be sure to visit the zoo.  And while you’re there, say hi to Uncle Beazley for me.

Let's Go to the Mall!

They call Washington, DC the city of statues.  Actually that’s probably not true, but they certainly could if they wanted to.  Aside from the well-known monuments that adorn the pages of every Social Studies textbook in the US, there are countless others all around the city.  In fact, it can be hard to turn a corner in DC without seeing a statue, a monument, or a plaque for some historic figure.  The size and style varies, some are grander than others, but it seems that Washington, DC is a city that remembers its history.

My first glimpse of DC came from the air, as we were approaching Reagan National Airport.  We had been “on approach” for what had seemed like forever, and I was glued to the tiny window, gazing down as the green hills gradually turned to suburban housing developments and office parks.  Finally we banked to the south, and across the river was what I assumed to be Washington.  A surge of excitement ran through me as I located the Washington Monument, a tiny spire standing tall in the center of the miniature city.  We quickly made another turn to head in to land, but I had seen it.  We were in DC.

As regular readers (ha!) know, this trip had been planned out well in advance, and from the instant the door to our CRJ-200 had opened, I knew what was on tap for the day and days ahead.  The first afternoon would necessarily be spent walking the National Mall.  The Mall defines DC, and to not set a day aside to simply appreciate its magnificence would be a disservice to the city.  And what an experience it is.  Arriving at the Smithsonian Metro station, you ascend an escalator from the dark of the tunnel into sunlight above.  As your eyes adjust to the light, you look around in all directions, straining to see the familiar yet somehow new sights.  Reaching the top, the Mall is clearly to your left, but trees and buildings hide anything else from view.

But take a few steps onto the mall itself, clear of the buildings and foliage that hems in the station, and suddenly you are there.  The first thing you see is the Washington Monument, a simple obelisk rising hundreds of feet above you, stark and austere.  Turning around 180 degrees you find the ornately complex dome of the Capitol building, perched atop the columned rectangle below.  At the other end, not visible from this location, is the Lincoln Memorial, a marvel of white stone from which the giant President sternly gazes out.  The Mall is deceptively enormous, it is grand, and it is amazing.

But each memorial on the mall is so much more than just a wonder to behold.  It is a reminder, even a guardian of the story it symbolizes.  The Washington Monument, at the center of the Mall, just as George Washington was central in the founding of our nation.  It is the simplest monument there, a four-sided spike of white stone.  And perhaps that is most appropriate.  Although President Washington had a complex and multifaceted life, to us as a people, he is a symbol of our nation, the foremost founding father.  Consider this, told to us later in the week when we toured Mount Vernon (unfortunately poorly paraphrased).

“Washington could have remained President for as long as he wanted.  But he served two terms and then left the office so the democracy could go on.  That was Washington’s legacy.    He gave us our system of government.  Remember that and you don’t need stories about cherry trees or wooden teeth!”

Or consider the Lincoln Memorial.  Abraham Lincoln, probably our most beloved President, is in many ways considered larger-than-life.  He, more than any other American figure, is the one we look to as a source of wisdom, temperance and honesty.  Fittingly, his monument is also larger-than-life, literally, yet also humbling and inspiring respect.  From outside, the monument is simply a brick surrounded by pillars, with an indistinct form within.  Stepping inside, you find yourself awestruck by the immense seated figure, to whom you can only look up.  A solemn look covers his face as he looks out upon the city, a constant reminder to think of the ideals he stood for.

A little further off the National Mall, there are two figures on horseback we saw during our stay in the city.  One, the Casmir Pulaski monument, was of personal interest to me, and we made a point to visit it.  As a proud Polish-American, I have always been happy to be able to identify a Pole who was instrumental in our country’s history.  In the American Revolution, Pulaski brought his cavalry to American soldiers unfamiliar with such a force.  Thanks in part to Pulaski and his men, the Americans prevailed, and the USA is what it is today.  A statue of Pulaski sitting astride his horse stands on 15^th St and Pennsylvania Ave to salute this achievement.

The other man on horseback is a statue we walked past many times on Pennsylvania Avenue, whose name we read once and never remembered.  Clearly he was important at some time in history, and there are certainly those who knew him well enough for a statue to be cast, but for the life of me, I couldn’t tell you who he was.  How many more statues are there, in DC or elsewhere, of a person who did something very important, yet is unknown today?  And aside from me, how many people who walked past the statue of Casmir Pulaski every day, even know who he was or what he contributed to the world?

I think the true importance of these monuments lies somewhere in the middle, between Washington and Lincoln (as well as Jefferson and Roosevelt, who I didn’t have room to mention here, but had equally inspiring monuments) and Pulaski and the unnamed rider.  Seeing the grandeur of the “name” monuments inspires us, makes us all want to lead better more meaningful lives, so that one day our names might be considered in the same sense as Washington’s and Lincoln’s.  At the same time, the riders tell us that many of those who do perform great deeds can eventually be all but lost to time.

So we can seek inspiration from these figures, but I won’t spend my time hoping for a statue to be made of me.  For if I think about it, I doubt even Washington or Lincoln ever sought statues and monuments.  So let us use that inspiration to lead good lives, whether we change the world like those names in the textbooks, or by simply being a good parent, or sibling or spouse.  If one day there is a statue to me or you, to inspire the next generation, that’s just an added bonus, and maybe a photo-op on someone’s vacation.