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The Summer of My Porch Pots-A Guest Post
I met Lisa Bertagnoli early in my career. She was a rising young writer in Chicago working for a national restaurant magazine. I was just starting out in PR, pretending like I knew what I was doing. We became fast friends, and over the years have had some fun adventures and developed a friendship I treasure. This April, she’s coming for a visit. We’re going to see Arielle in Athens and then we’re off to the farm to kick back for the weekend. Lisa lives in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood with her husband, Bill, and their three rescue dogs: Henry, Rosie and Sammy. A journalist and author, her first book, Scarlett Rules (http://www.scarlettrules.com/), came out in 2006, the 70th anniversary of Gone With The Wind, and was featured on NPR’s “Weekend Edition” (to listen, click here: http://bit.ly/9EUQ4A).
She’s now working on her first novel. Her articles have been featured in Newsweek, Forbes, Readers Digest, Washingtonian, Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, to name a few. But for the purpose of this blog, it’s important to note that Lisa is also a real foodie and last year tried to grow a little vegetable garden on her back deck in the Windy City. That experiment, well, wasn’t much of a success, at least not by her standards. Here’s her account.
The Summer of My Porch Pots
Lisa Bertagnoli
I’m a vegetarian. I love vegetables. I like to recycle and live low on the food chain and all that stuff. So I should be itching to own a farm, right? I should be one of those people who can’t wait to get her hands dirty planting, hoeing, weeding and whatever else farmers do, right?
But I’m not. As much as I love my vegetables, I do not want to grow them. That I will leave to the family farmers in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin who truck their home-grown goods to the Wicker Park farmers’ market every weekend.
I tried to be a city farmer. Last summer, I grew arugula, basil, chives and parsley on our 100-percent wooden, 15’x9’ deck, which is perched above our one-and-a-half-car garage. Tomatoes and other edibles were out of the question, unless I wanted to offer a free buffet to our neighborhood’s rodent population, and I did not. (Before you go “eew”: We live in a good neighborhood, but it’s urban, with restaurants and bars and houses set closely together. Where that trio exists, rats also exist.)
It started with good intentions – supporting the organic farm at my friend’s daughters’ school. The day my plants arrived, it was a typical Chicago spring day: cold, with driving rain. But I couldn’t wait to move them from their tiny pots to more spacious quarters. I knelt on the wooden deck and carefully lifted the plants from small pots to big pots, using organic soil that, according to the label, was especially designed for container gardening. Visions of home-made pesto and parsley-spiked tabbouleh danced in my head as dirt lodged under my fingernails. It stayed there for a few days, testament to my nascent farmerhood.
The sun shone full and bright for the next week, perfect for my babies to stretch and grow. Within two weeks I had enough peppery, flavorful arugula for a small salad, enough basil to make an uncooked tomato-and-basil pasta sauce, and enough parsley to snack on (I love parsley, even when it’s wilted on a dinner plate).
That was mid-June, and it was the height of my porch pots’ life. As summer wore on, the arugula leaves turned anorexic, growing slimmer and slimmer until they were as tiny as the Olsen twins. The arugula also flowered, sprouting delicate little cream-colored blossoms, which I snipped and put into vases.
The basil flowered, too, though I knew enough to de-flower it to prevent the leaves from turning bitter. The parsley spread out obstinately, with broad, flat yellow leaves on the bottom and spindly ones up top. The chives thrived – to reward their good behavior, I left them the hell alone.
Though I watered them faithfully and turned them this way and that as the sun patterns on the porch shifted, the plants never recovered. By early July I was buying salad greens at the farmers’ market again, and by August the plants really weren’t food. They were just decorations.
I told my friend Monica (http://www.lostrecipesfound.com/), an accomplished gardener and cook, about the plants. “It’s the soil,” she said. “You should try composting.”
Composting. In downtown Chicago. Rats, step right up to the free buffet.
“No, no,” she said patiently. “Vermiculture. You can do it under your kitchen sink.”
Worms. Under my kitchen sink. I don’t think so.
It’s mid March. The weather is turning windy and warm. Time to think about the porch pots. This year, I think I’ll stick to geraniums. And leave the arugula to real farmers.
Iron Man
You might say Barkley Wike is an iron man. We first met over 10 years ago when I was getting back into horses. He was our farrier. Donna, my first trainer, used to say that Barkley was not only a great farrier but also an artist. After a long career shoeing horses, Barkley finally gave up getting banged up and kicked around by these large animals and started creating original ironworks for friends. Then he turned it into a business and launched B.W. Iron Design. Custom gates, stall doors, chandeliers, furniture, fire screens, pot racks, wine racks, shelves–you name it, he can probably design and build it with iron. If you like, trot on over to www.bwirondesigns.com see what all the fuss is about.
(Hey Barkley, for this nice plug, will you make us some halter hooks for the barn? Need about seven. 😉
Friend & Inspirationalist
Just got back from a few days in New York where the magic of Christmas is spreading fast. Even saw the tree lighting at Rockefeller Center for the first time in my life. Also got to visit with old and new friends, including my former boss from Fleishman-Hillard, Randy Siegel. We spent a fun hour in a Chelsea coffee shop, catching up and talking about our life-and work-philosophies. Randy’s staying in NYC for a few weeks, but he makes his home in Asheville, NC, where he moved several years ago after a successful PR career in Atlanta. Today’s he’s a professional coach and what I call an “inspirationalist,” and a trainer and speaker. He’s also a painter. I’m just glad he’s my still my friend. Here’s an excerpt from Randy’s blog, http://www.buildyourleaders.com/blog/, about the beauty of diversity. ‘Til next time. -C
The Beauty of Diversity. (by Randy Siegel)
Remembering how far we have come. “Some would find this scandalous,” my Southern mother whispered. “What’s that?” I asked innocently.
“A black woman kissing a white man.” Mother, Dad, and I were at the Broadway play “No Strings”; it was the Sixties. Diahann Carroll was the star, and her romantic lead was a white man. While I don’t remember his name, I sure remember Diahann Carroll’s. “She’s so light skinned, you’d never know,” my mother said.
That was my earliest memory of racial prejudice. Years later I would see my prep school be one of Atlanta’s first to integrate, watch my father take down the “Colored” signs on the restrooms at the R.A. Siegel Company, and witness the assassinations of Martin Luther King and John and Robert Kennedy on television.
Today, I am back in New York, an easy subway ride from the Broadway stage where Diahann Carroll performed in “No Strings.” Everywhere I look, I see racial diversity and nowhere have I seen such beautiful children.
I love what I see; it reminds me that we are all one. It also reminds me how far we have come.
Out of the Fast Lane
There are days when I’m so thankful for Facebook. Like the other day when a familiar name popped up on my page–Ellen Alexander, one of my very favorite clients from the big PR agency days. Ellen was a senior executive with MasterCard International and we worked together for a number of years when I was at Fleishman-Hillard. Not only did this mean lots of fun trips to New York City to visit her, but also many adventures across the U.S., a boondoggle to Hawaii, and a 9-day jaunt to Bangkok with Ellen and Robert Kennedy, Jr. (another story for another day). Anyway, thanks to Facebook, we’re now “friends” again and I couldn’t be happier! I always admired her style and her spunk and had such fun when we were together. Just guessing here, but I imagine Ellen’s life today is a far cry from her NYC days. She now lives in upstate New York and is married. She and hubby David, a retired advertising exec who designs one-of-a-kind silver jewelry, have 21 acres, a pond, deer, bears, coyotes and a very cute dog named Sparky. Here are pictures she shared of their place. I hope we’ll have lots of farm and life stories to swap in the future, and I can’t wait to see her again.
