The Inadvertent Gardener

“Do you work in music?” asked the guy behind the glass at the main Oakland post office.

I looked down at the workout gear I was wearing, looking for the clue that might have made him ask the question. “No,” I said. “I work right downtown.” Which, I might point out, comes only tangentially close to answering his question, which seemed a little odd in the first place. I was, after all, just trying to mail a package.

“You work downtown?” he asked. “If I gave you a poster, could you put it up at your workplace?”

We had, prior to this, had a conversation about the number of people who knew nothing about geography, so perhaps that built a level of artificial camaraderie? Regardless, I could feel my face arranging itself into an incredulous look.

“It’s a really nice poster,” he said. He scurried over to a low wall at the edge of his work area and reached over it. “Here it is.”

“Oh, the Fungus Fair!” My relief heightened my level of perceived excitement. I mean, mushrooms are exciting, but at the time, I was more excited that it wasn’t a poster advertising a performance by the guy’s cover band.

The Fungus Fair will take place over the weekend at the Oakland Museum of California, which is a surprisingly odd and interesting and fun museum. To enjoy all things shroomy, including exhibits, fresh wild mushrooms, lectures, cooking demonstrations and other family activities, head to 10th and Oak Streets in Oakland between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. on Saturday, December 6 or noon and 5 p.m. on Sunday, December 7.

I’m more likely to show up on Sunday, but I’m planning to go check out some of the demonstrations. And possibly the old school scifi mushroom-as-monster films they’ll be airing. (For real, people. For real. Attack of the Killer Shrooms and all that jazz.)

After all, I am, apparently, the Poster Girl.

Gardeners, plant and nature lovers can join in Green Thumb Sunday every week. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

It’s Thanksgiving here at Chez Inadvertent, and there’s much to be grateful for.

My parents arrived Tuesday night to celebrate the holidays here, and we’ve been making our way around to various eating and drinking establishments that are favorites of mine: Shan Dong for dumplings, The Trappist for Belgian-style brews, Café Madrid for tortilla Español and a bocadillo, Hog Island Oysters for, well, you know, and Zinnia for some of Jackie Patterson’s killer cocktails and a pre-opera meal. I’m grateful they’re here so I can let them peek into the life I’m making for myself here.

Yesterday brought our third day of rain since I arrived in California, and while I grumbled about it at the time because it complicated our sightseeing plan, I’m grateful for it—all those farmers whose produce I like to eat love said rain and need said rain.

I’m off to hit the kitchen, but I invite you to join me today in thanksgiving for the people we love, the people we miss, and the people who have facilitated the celebration those of us in the U.S. are undertaking today.

Thanks to the hands that raised the turkeys (And, you know what? Thanks to the turkeys, too!). Thanks to the hands that grew the potatoes and the vegetables and the greens for salads. Thanks to those who baked the bread that will end up in the stuffing, made the wine, and grew the pumpkins.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

“I’m a little worried about this whole community-gardening thing,” I told a friend one night recently over drinks. “I’ve never gardened anywhere but Iowa, and the garden there was right out my back door.”

“Then you can go out and weed for 10 minutes and come back in and do other stuff,” he said.

“Exactly,” I said. “But with a community garden plot, I’m going to have schlep over and back, and what if I don’t feel like going all the time?”

I realize this is extremely premature whining. I have no idea if I’m going to get a spot in my garden of choice. I have no idea whether I’ll end up just driving for convenience’s sake or if I can figure out a quick-and-easy public transit route there and back.

There will be benefits to the group plot: Meeting some neighbors. Getting ideas about what will and will not grow in this utterly different climate. Learning a different part of Oakland than I usually hang out in.

But it will not provide me some of the gardening benefits that I loved most in Iowa: Walking out before breakfast to cut herbs for an omelette scheduled to be served 10 minutes later. Spending five minutes pulling off tomato plant suckers before running off to work or a social event. Going out in the morning to see how the zucchini is growing, and going back out at night to cut one off because it already grew so much during the day it needs to be eaten.

I’m sure community gardening will provide its own rhythms, and I’m a good scheduler: I’m quite capable of booking in an hour every other day or two to go check on the plants and do all the work at one time. But every now and then, I worry about how much it won’t be the same, and honestly? I wonder if I’ll like it as much.

The map? Made.

There are eight community gardens in the Oakland system: three up toward Temescal and Emeryville, three smack dab in the heart of it all (right around downtown), and two down toward San Leandro.

I know I said making a Google map of the garden locations was the most nerdy thing I could possibly do, but I have to say, it clarified some things for me. I probably never would have clicked through to the description of the Marston Campbell garden if I hadn’t seen it is basically the closest to my apartment building. And I certainly wouldn’t, then, have known that this particular garden is also where the Oakland Based Urban Gardens kids do their work.

I’m ready to put my name on the list. Here goes nothin’.

I decided this Thanksgiving will not be traditional. Why serve turkey, for example, when I live just a block or so from excellent Peking duck? Why serve green bean casserole when I can serve garlicky Romano beans with rosemary, every ingredient of which will be grown or produced within 100 miles of here? Why serve pumpkin pie when I can serve pumpkin ice cream?

I sent an email to my parents, who will be introducing themselves to my new California life, warning them of the impending non-traditional meal. “Since I’m doing the Peking duck, I’m likely to do some other twists on old favorites,” I said. “If there’s something you definitely want in its traditional format, let me know and I’ll be sure to include it in the grand scheme.”

The answer back from the Eastern Time Zone? The only request is no sweet potatoes with candied marshmallows on top. Well, OK, ‘cause I wasn’t planning on that particular dish, anyway.

But this past weekend, an experiment with the ice cream maker led me down a different path than I had planned. Armed with some Straus Family Creamery Maple Yogurt and some Straus Family Creamery milk, I decided to try a batch of maple frozen yogurt. And then, at the last minute, I decided I would throw in a touch of Macallan 12-year single malt Scotch, just for the heck of it. After all, everything’s better with a little single malt, right?

The combination, as it turned out, is amazing. Tart and tangy, with just enough sweetness to qualify as dessert, and a little kick at the end to remind you that this frozen yogurt is not for the kids’ table.

As a result, pie is back on the Thanksgiving menu: either pumpkin or pecan, either of which will go nicely with my new discovery.

Single-Malt Maple Frozen Yogurt

2 c. nonfat maple yogurt
1 c. whole milk
1/4 c. sugar
1 1/2 Tbsp. single malt Scotch

1. Combine the yogurt, milk and sugar in a food processor until the sugar is dissolved (approximately 1 minute). You can also do this using a stand or hand mixer in a bowl, or, probably, in a blender.
2. Add mixture to freezer bowl of ice cream maker and freeze per manufacturer’s instructions (I froze it for approximately 25 minutes using my Cuisinart ice cream maker).
3. Add the Scotch to the mixture while the ice cream maker is running and freeze for an additional five minutes.
4. You can either serve this immediately or transfer it to a container and freeze it for an additional two hours before serving.

Gardeners, plant and nature lovers can join in Green Thumb Sunday every week. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

The next step in the find-a-garden-plot investigation was to email the guy who runs the community gardening program. I figured there was no way I’d get in at Lake Merritt, but as I said, I figured there had to be some plot, somewhere in Oakland, where I could just slide right in, no problem.

As it turns out, I am a misguided human being.

My return email from the coordinator:

I have wait lists for almost all of the gardens. Please let me know which garden you are interested in joining. I will warn you that the Lakeside garden has a list of over 45 people and is by far the longest and slowest list.

Of course it is. That’s the showcase garden, the one where they actually train people up on issues like composting. It’s also the closest to my apartment.

But, like I said, I had little hope I’d get in there, so it is what it is. My next step? I’m going to have to get a little nerdy on this project. While the Oakland City Government page offers good photos and descriptions of each plot, I have yet to really be able to look at a list of Oakland addresses and be able to locate them in my head on a mental map.

It’s time to make the first-ever Inadvertent Gardener Google Map. I mean, what is gardening if not a technological activity? Once I have the lay of the land plotted out, I’ll be able to decide which waiting list I want to join.

Before I moved to California, I gave some thought to the whole how-am-I-going-to-garden concept. I had visions of a balcony garden, complete with herbs and maybe a flower or two, and some peppers ripening in the golden sunshine. I imagined myself sitting out on the balcony, sipping a glass of wine, and marveling at a rabbit-free existence. (Although I wouldn’t put it past an urban bunny to scale an apartment building. It’s hard out there for a city rabbit.)

I did a search on community garden plots in the area, and my eyes popped out of my head a bit when I read that San Francisco’s very active community garden program has an up-to-five-year waiting list for plots in the city. And that’s in a city where the fog situation makes tomato-growing a near impossibility in some spots.

But no matter, I thought. I was moving to Oakland. Oakland, where people were more likely to have land, because fewer people want to live there, and where there was no way I’d have any trouble getting a spot in a community garden. Right? (Cut me a break, people of California…while I was thinking all these misguided thoughts, I was still living in Iowa.)

In fact, once I signed the lease on my apartment, I felt certain I could just slide right into an open plot. No problem whatsoever. The good people of Oakland’s community gardens? They’d be thrilled to have me.

Then I discovered…The Rules.

Plants in by a certain date (I’d missed it already). Garden plot cleaned up or replanted with groundcover or winter crops by no later than November 1. Disobey and lose your plot.

Also? Oakland? Reported to have a waiting list in the community plot closest to my apartment.

I stopped investigating the options at that point and gave up the idea of gardening over the summer, figuring that I would just put it aside until the seasons turned. And now they have, and now?

The investigation into Inadvertent Gardening 2009 has officially opened.

When I let Amy Sherman of Cooking With Amy talk me into the Hunger Challenge, I’m going to have to be honest…I had no idea what I was in for. I mean, I’m Catholic, and besides that, I have a pretty outsized ability to beat myself up and set arbitrary rules for myself, so for real? I just figured it would be a week of crazy eating, that I’d learn something about myself, and that would be it.

So it was unexpected, yesterday, to find myself in a room with a panel of the other bloggers who participated in the Hunger Challenge, telling San Francisco Food Bank staff about what worked for us and what didn’t work, so they could take those lessons and apply them to the amazing work they do to feed the hungry in this community.

Although we’d all been reading along with each other’s stories, there’s something powerful about sitting along with my compadres in the experiment, hearing firsthand what they all learned and experienced. Blogs are personal, but there’s a reason most emotionally healthy people get out from behind their laptops from time to time.

I loved hearing about how Amy lost pleasure in food, which she loves so much in the rest of her life, while struggling to squeeze the most nutrition possible out of her $21 budget for the week. Gayle’s story of snagging every single sample she could get her hands on at her weekly farmer’s market so she could up her fruit intake that week was incredibly powerful. I really hadn’t quite wrapped my head around how much prep work Faith put into the experience. Vanessa embraced the challenge of using ingredients most commonly available through the Food Bank. And Maria, who joined the challenge at the very last minute, unbeknownst to me, burned a pot of rice and had to go without.

And it was amazing to see that huge warehouse full of food and to know that still, every night in this region and elsewhere, people are going hungry. I have hope that’s going to change, because I’m ever-more-convinced that if you feed people appropriately, you’re going to solve a lot of other problems in the meantime.

The question of whether we’d do the challenge again came up, and I, perhaps a little recklessly, said I would. I’d probably change up how I did it—I don’t want to recreate my experience in the Berkeley Bowl, but I remain committed to raising awareness and making a difference on this issue. And I stand in solidarity with my fellow bloggers who are willing to do the same.