How Green is My Kitchen – The Organic Community Garden

It’s not easy being green, but I’ve noted a touch of chlorophyll pulsing through my veins as of late. Determined to eat locally – to the best of my abilities – I’ve shunned produce from Chile, worshipped at the compost bin of Barbara Kingsolver and become an apostle of Michael Pollan. I even purchase Martha Stewart’s “Good Things for a Healthy Home.”

Yet practical solutions are far more challenging than embracing rhetoric. The produce demographic of the typical Long Island grocery store resembles a well-traveled TripTik from The American Automobile Association and it’s often wilted or even rotten, as well.

So, as is often the case, I go online for options and quickly find myself at LocalHarvest, a bountiful web resource for everything from farmers markets to organic produce. I type in my zip code and…it is as if the Red Sea has parted.

It must be divine intervention. Who would have imagined that among the strip malls and gridlock of suburban Long Island one could find an organic community garden? It is like manna from heaven, and just to push the celestial analogies to the limit, check this out – it’s run by an order of Dominican nuns.

Welcome to Sophia Garden, a little organic patch of God’s country in Amityville, Long Island and a mission of the Sisters of St. Dominic who have lived on the land and often farmed it since 1875. I rejoice to see that memberships are still available.

The next day I dial up and secure a share. For a very small price and a commitment to work 15 hours during the season in the garden, I will get 10 to 15 pounds of vegetables every two weeks. It sounds so easy, and the community involvement will be fun. I note the first Saturday garden work day on my calendar and plan to attend.

Almost immediately, my failings as a localvore become painfully obvious. I arrive home horribly late from a business trip and sleep through the first work day. For an entire week after, I live in fear of being disciplined by the nuns for cutting class. I am wracked with guilt, which is easy when the clergy is involved.

Then, I read the fine print more carefully and discover that the Saturday work days don’t even count towards my 15 hour quota. That means I’m going to have to take a few days off to meet my work commitment. I commiserate with a working mom colleague who is intrigued by such activities but bemoans the lack of time in her schedule. “Can’t I get my housekeeper to cover my commitment?” she wonders.

As the growing season moves on, I’ve not managed to log a single hour of weeding in the garden and conclude that I am guilty of the sin of organic omission.

Finally, I receive notification that my first pickup of produce is scheduled for mid-June. I plan carefully so I can be there to commune with the farmland…and another business trip comes up. So, I must impose on my parents to make the first pickup and deposit the harvest in my crisper while I am away.

My localvore experiment is already fractured and my parents are cutting into their gasoline budget to pick up my organic vegetables. During high school, they chauffeured me, and now they’re chauffeuring my vegetables.

Several thoughts begin to germinate. First, I offer my parents a cut of the initial harvest (no sense wracking up more guilt). I decide not to go to the grocery store, since my refrigerator will be overflowing with produce. Then, I recall that – according to Barbara Kingsolver – in the cool, early spring and start of summer, it is the season of tender leaves and shoots. On the airplane to the West Coast (not helping my carbon footprint, either) I obsess over whether I’ll be eating lettuce at every meal. How will I creatively prepare, eat and store the yield? I’ve got to make sure I plan my meals carefully so ten pounds of veggies don’t go rotten on me. Where is Clarence Birdseye when you need him?

I arrive home from San Francisco at 2:00 in the morning and head straight to the crisper. As anticipated, the yield is mostly salad greens. Peter Rabbit would have a field day. Do you know what 10 pounds of lettuce looks like? Mom can’t even fit it all in the crisper. But, it is divine! It is the wee hours of the morning, I am examining glorious produce, and my fingers are covered with dirt and grit. I could almost sing the “Ode to Joy!” It's like a little revival meeting right there in my kitchen.

I still have to do my penance – 15 hours of hard labor in the Garden of Eden – and I’ve already got a conflict with the next upcoming workday. I’ll have to let my conscience sort that all out. In the meantime, I must decide how to prepared my share of the first harvest – my bags of “vegetable love.” As always, Mom is detail-oriented and leaves me a thorough written inventory:

Red romaine lettuce
Green romaine lettuce
Butter lettuce
Garlic snaps
Haiku turnips
Mixed radishes
Snap peas
Sugar peas
Mixed field greens
A handful of mesclun greens

The next night, I get to work planning my plant-focused menu for the week. Thank goodness I didn’t let my Professional Declutterer dispose of the salad spinner during Spring Cleaning. Soon, my head will be spinning from excessive use of the salad spinner.

Among the menu items I’ve created are a Chicken Caesar Salad with leafy red and green romaine lettuce and homemade croutons:

A “composed salad” atop peppery, bitter field greens with sweet, tender radishes, raw slices of Haiku turnips, organic hard-cooked eggs and organic chick peas:

A salad of sliced apples, Roquefort cheese and homemade candied walnuts drizzled with aged balsamic vinegar:

Meantime, I’ve been working on getting my terms straight. It took me too long to figure out that CSA wasn’t a public accounting accreditation. I’ve also learned that Alice Waters’ “The Art of Simple Food” is my friend. The Queen of Romaine Hearts knows her lettuce, and I now know the appropriate ratio of vinegar to oil (1:4) for preparation of the perfect vinaigrette. I also spend a lot of time rinsing produce. My kitchen sink has rings of dirt in it, but that’s a very good thing.

Okay, if you want to be a purist, I know I’m not a complete localvore. Who knows where the chicken and anchovies came from for the Caesar salad, right? And, I still have to visit Sophia Garden and get my hands dirty to make it all real in my mind. But, tonight I took my big bowl of salad outside with a glass of Chardonnay from a New York state vineyard and ate dinner at twilight to celebrate the Summer Solstice. The lettuce is piled a mile high in suburban Long Island and I am loving it!

©2008 T.W. Barritt All Rights Reserved