Back to mother nature

I know you're dying to know what will become of my garden! I haven't even had a chance to post about its progress and it's been seven weeks since I planted it. I started out with a lasagna garden but ended up hacking back the bamboo and making the garden bigger. I dug into the earth and pulled out pounds of debris - broken glass, rusted nails, old saw blades! I amended the soil with compost and manure and planted even more plants. I love digging out there, it's so relaxing.


San Francisco is chilly so my plants don't get enough consistent warmth and sun to really produce the way the seed packages promised. My mom's garden in So Cal, by comparison, runs wild and they can barely keep up. I will enjoy giving it some love and eating the fruits of my labor but will also miss my little city garden.


I returned a derelict patch of dirt filled with debris back to mother earth and there's an enormous amount of satisfaction in watching the cycle of life happening in the garden. I found this photo of what a dreary scene it was when I moved in.


I just hope that someone who loves vegetables moves in here and takes over. I won't have been here long enough to reap the full harvest of this garden:


I've been eating lettuce, arugula, fresh herbs, cilantro and radishes from it for weeks and there just might be summer squash before I hit the road.


A butterfly has been visiting me for the last week, flying around me as I water and pull weeds. It's the first time I've ever seen a beautiful creature back there and I believe it's because the garden is a happy place now. I did that.

Concerned citizen

This weekend I found a note on my car. It was a slip of paper printed on a laser printer. It read as follows:

Thank you for taking up two parking spaces.

Had you been more thoughtful, you could have moved forward/backward to allow another vehicle to park.

So rather than helping to solve the problem, you have helped to make it more difficult. Please make an effort to do otherwise in the future.

At first I was shocked. I couldn't have taken up two spaces because I am actually very thoughtful and would never do that. Even though I was in a hurry to get somewhere, I got out and looked. Sure enough, there was two or three feet of curb behind my car but it seemed as though the car in front of me had found plenty of room in the "other parking spot". Besides, I have a tiny car. My RAV4 is shorter than pretty much every car on the road except a mini so another car would have taken up those extra feet. Would they leave a note on a SUV saying that their car is too large for the city and how dare they take up so much space?

I drove away kind of incensed. This person has made it their job to monitor their street (neighborhood? city?!) for rude parkers, printing out sheets of these notes and cutting them into "tickets" to issue. It's hard to imagine that this note would cause anyone to change their behavior. Dripping with condescension and judgment, it fails to even indicate "the problem" the note is trying to address, so a truly clueless person would only be baffled.

For a moment, I was tempted to write a response and leave it on my car. This is what I would have written:

Thank you for being such a diligent citizen.

Without you, surely our city would fall into chaos and ruin, overrun by the rude and stupid.

At the time that I parked, another car was parked in front of the neighboring driveway and taking up a few feet of curb so I squeezed my tiny car into the only space available.