The Tao of Martha (16 page)

As soon as these words fly out of my mouth, I realize exactly how stupid they sound when spoken aloud.

“No, no! You’re making them weaker! They can’t stand up to that kind of water pressure! They simply cower because they have such skinny little necks. Is that how you sprayed your wildflower garden, too?”

Mutely, I nod.

“Well, now you know. Stop it. Stop watering this way. Never do it again, okay? Also, I’m going to call Mike now and let him know we figured out what was going wrong.”

While Laurie places her call, I sit down next to Maisy. All I can do is laugh at myself—I honestly, truly thought I was doing what was best for my roses, and in so many complicated ways, I was. Yet the basics? Well, perhaps I could have used a refresher course first.

Still, it took Martha almost twenty years to build up her rose garden in East Hampton, so I’m not going to let this setback discourage me. In fact, I want to expand the cutting garden next year and incorporate bushes from David Austin Roses, which were featured on Martha’s television show in 2011. But this time, I’ll seek more of Laurie’s advice
before
I proceed, instead of after. I guess that’s why Martha’s always so willing to bring experts on to explain the complicated bits. She’s already
mastered the piece of the Tao that I’m just now realizing: There’s value in doing it yourself; there’s more value in learning to do it yourself from someone who’s been there before you.

So I’m going to take everything I learned from this experience and channel it into what’s next—planting an organic vegetable garden.

Look out, earthworms. I’m a-coming for you.

Z
UCCHINI
R
ICH

N
ow that I have a handle on the roses, my thoughts turn to vegetables.

Specifically, one vegetable.

All I want is some zucchini.

Everyone says to me, “You don’t want to plant zucchini—you’ll have too much.”

Okay, A) there’s no such thing as too much zucchini, and B) mind your damn business.

Besides, the idea of an overabundance of zucchini is like saying, “Stop working so hard or you’ll have way too much money!” Or, “If you keep dieting and exercising like that, you’ll wind up with the ass you had at sixteen!”

Trust me: These are the problems I want.

If my desire is to be lousy with zucchini, that’s my choice. I want it to cover my countertops and fill my crisper drawers. I want to stick excess zucchini
in the fruit bowl because that’s the only place left to put it. I want it to
rain
zucchini up in here; do you understand me?

I love zucchini. I love everything about zucchini. I love saying the word “zucchini.” Zucchini, zucchini, zucchini! Even the individual syllables are charming! You can’t not be happy around such a big, green, comical-sounding foodstuff. Zucchini’s hilarious
and
delicious!

Plus, zucchini’s my absolute favorite vegetable, so tales of zucchini the size of baseball bats and in amounts enough to fill a bathtub are anything but a deterrent. Every time I pick one of my zucchini from my organic garden, I’m going to be all, “Ha! Saved two dollars! Ha! Saved two more dollars! Ha! I don’t care if the world monetary system collapses, because I will be rich with the only (tasty) green currency that counts!”

I keep hearing, “Oh, you won’t know what to do with all your zucchini,” but I beg to differ. I’m all about zucchini bread, zucchini muffins, grilled zucchini, sautéed zucchini, baked zucchini, and stuffed zucchini.

In anticipation of my bountiful harvest, I’ve already bookmarked Martha’s recipes for zucchini lasagna, zucchini frittata, zucchini salad, and sweet zucchini cupcakes, followed by zucchini fries, zucchini gratin, and zucchini risotto. I want it roasted; I want it curried; I want it tossed with corn and orzo. I want it steamed and skewered and stuffed in a sandwich. I want to open my freezer this winter and see nothing but frozen zucchini-based dishes, so when everyone else is supping sadly on their third-world zucchini, flown in on ice-cap-melting, polar-bear-killing jets, I’ll still be enjoying good ol’ patriotic zucchini made right here in ’merica.

I want to build a food pyramid entirely out of zucchini.

I want to cut myself and bleed zucchini and then patch myself up with a bandage made of zucchini.

I want to be the Bubba Gump of zucchini.

(Also, to everyone who’s warned me of the ills of zucchini and explained how you had so much you couldn’t even give it all away? I never saw a single slice of it, so please know I hate you a little right now.)

So, clearly I’m Team Zucchini, yet there are a couple of obstacles standing between me and All Zucchini, All the Time. Before I can plant my badass organic garden, we have to make room for it.

Presently, there are a few trees in our yard that are the bane of my existence, particularly this one huge ash on the side of the house by the kitchen. Every time it storms, I think, “Well, it was a nice roof while it lasted.” Although I’d love a skylight in there someday, I’d prefer
we
install one, rather than Mother Nature.

Bob the Arborist is here today to assess the ash tree in relation to my future zucchini garden.

“Well, from the angle of the sun, I’d say you can find a way to keep the tree without sacrificing light,” Bob the Arborist tells us. We’ve already decided to lose a couple of scrubby pines and one weird tree that causes the birds to shart pink goo all over my patio chairs when its berries are in bloom. The trees are all dying and I won’t miss them.

“But the ash keeps dropping massive branches every time it rains. Plus, the limbs look moldy,” I tell him. In my head, I call this tree an ash-hole.

“What you see is the early stages of an emerald ash borer infestation. It’s soon enough to catch and treat, though. We can save it.”

“That’s good news, right?” Fletch asks. I cut him some side-eye. Oh, honey, that is
not
good news. The minute an expert tells me something can be saved is the minute my wallet cries for mercy. I brace myself for his estimate. I’ve learned the rule of thumb in suburbia pricing is to come up with what I think is a fair price and then add a zero to it. We had a chimney repair guy in here who told us he could do everything for the
very reasonable cost of…fifteen
thousand
dollars. I wasn’t even mad; I just burst out laughing. Heck, it’s a year later and his bid is still funny. Do I have “SUCKER” tattooed on my face? Did he believe that the Internet doesn’t exist and I didn’t Google that shit before he got here? Listen, Chimney Dude, unless Channing Tatum himself is going to reline the flues, then no, thanks. I’ll stick to burning candles in the fireplace for now.

(Side note: Fletch mocks me for my constant Channing Tatum obsession, but the man has a pit bull named Lulu whom he taught to do the
Dirty Dancing
move where Baby flies into Patrick Swayze’s arms at the end. What do you want from me? Channing’s calling plays directly from my psyche! I’m not made of stone, you know!)

“Bottom line, how much would it cost to save the ash-hat?” I ask.

“I’m sorry?” Bob the Arborist asks.

“The ash—how much will treatment cost?”

Bob the Arborist launches into a five-minute explanation about various steps and inoculations, and every thirty seconds, I can hear a cash register
ca-ching
in my head.

“…so over five years, you’re looking at about seven,” he finishes.

“Seven what? Seven hundred?” Fletch queries.

Fletch doesn’t believe my add-a-zero theory, yet it gets him every time.

“No, seven thousand.”

Fletch looks as though he’s been punched in the gut. Aw, it’s adorable that he thinks for one second that I’m going to fork over seven freaking thousand dollars to resuscitate a tree I actively despise.

“And how much to chop it down?” I ask.

Bob the Arborist is aghast. “But it’s a great tree! Given the size and spread, it’s at least one hundred years old. Surely you’ll want to save it.”

I snort. “Um, no. For seven thousand dollars over five years, that tree
would have to drive me to work. How much to cut it down, grind the roots, and haul it away?”

Grudgingly, Bob the Arborist consults his clipboard. “Four hundred dollars.”

“Sold!”

I’m sure in Cantitoe Corners, Martha’s Bedford home, she’d do whatever she had to do in order to save her old-growth trees. In fact, the estate’s insignia is that of a bushy sycamore. But one of us is a billionaire and the other had to be violated in order to invest in a few pairs of underpants without holes, so there you go.

(Later this year, during Hurricane Sandy, Martha will lose power and outbuildings’ roofs when massive old trees begin to tumble all over the property. Although I’m sorry for her loss and I sympathize with the inconvenience, I have to reiterate my point that sometimes trees are assholes.)

As a nod to Martha, when the ash does come down the next week, I take a section and turn it into a plant stand, sort of like what she had Dane Buell (the arborist) of SavATree do when he turned her fallen sycamores into gigantic tabletops.

And now that ol’ Ashtree Wilkes is gone, I sort of miss him—like to the point of anthropomorphizing
him—but I’m definitely not feeling seven thousand dollars’ worth of melancholy.

At least, not until I’m zucchini-rich.

A
t the very beginning of the summer, Laurie brought me with her to the private gardens of this wealthy North Shore industrialist. She had to deliver one tiny pink rosebush and thought I’d get a kick out of seeing what nine acres of manicured lakefront garden might look like. If by “kick,” she meant “life-altering experience,” then yes, I got a kick out of it.

I’ve never before witnessed so much beauty in one spot. On those grounds, even the ordinary was made extraordinary. Like, I buy little pots of pretty pink and purple fuchsias every year. They’re annuals, so they die when it gets cold and the plant never grows larger than the standard-size pots I keep them in. Yet that place boasted multiple greenhouses, so the basketball-size fuchsias at my house are as big as Christmas trees there. Maybe you see that kind of thing in the tropics, but definitely not in Lake County, Illinois. Or, I have a couple of fledgling hydrangea bushes; they had a solid wall of them. I have sixty rosebushes; they possessed thousands that are well established enough to enclose an area the size of a soccer field.

Each part of the garden is considered a “room,” and every room was designed by a world-renowned horticulturalist. What amazed me so much weren’t the parts like three open acres of crosshatched bent grass, ringed with one hundred different types of exotic plants, all symmetrically placed to the point that the owner/landscape architects knew they needed one tiny pink bush, even though those sections blew my mind. (In
those rooms, every tree was sculpted—all were square, round, or rectangular, like it’s Willy Wonka’s arboretum.)

What got me was how even the smallest bits were painstakingly detailed. I spied a tiny patch outside the living room window comprised of various thyme varietals and arranged in such a way that the colors formed an argyle plaid. Spectacular!