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  1. and the garden grows

    May 20, 2012 by justgathering

    The month of May has been more than good to our garden.

    At the end of April, it looked like this:

    Strong seedlings. The mesclun was the runaway success from the start, but all of the greens have been surprisingly hearty. We planted the onions a week after the greens, but they sprouted quickly. See those tiny guys?

    And the tomatoes have been loving the sunny days.

    By May 6, the kale had taken off.

    The other greens have been a little slower to grow. I think it’s because this tupperware has glass bottles in the bottom, while the other has rocks. I think all the nooks and crannies in the rocks are probably better for drainage. Lesson learned.

    The onions take patience as well, but they’re chugging along.

    I’m loving how easy tomatoes are. We’re planning on planting a second variety because, well, why not?

    Our habaneros are the only really sad story so far. We had a few days of cold rain, and I think they’re just too desert-loving to survive a cool spell. The leaves are yellowing, and I’m not sure if we can revive them. Can’t win them all.

    By this weekend, some of the greens had officially exploded and we finally got to pick them.

    Our first harvest yielded a whole ton of mesclun (which we’re sowing every 3 weeks so we have greens all summer long) and a good amount of kale. And delicious greens they were. (Yes, we ate them all already.)

    Since our first foray into gardening has been mostly successful, we decided yesterday to do some more planting, starting with herbs. Mint, flat parsley, curly parsley, basil, oregano, thyme, and sage. Daniel has been building planters from scrap wood when he has an extra minute. Cute, right?

    The garden needed some color, so we picked up an angelonia from the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket. I love purple flowers of any variety.

    We also planted some forget-me-nots from seed, along with cucumbers, zucchini, and string beans. Pictures of seedlings to come in the near future, probably by next week if this sunshine keeps up.

    I can’t wait to harvest more veggies. And if they’re eager growers like the greens, we might just venture into berries as well. The roof is going to be a jungle. Nice.

    Category grow., nest. | Tags: , , , , | 2 Comments

  2. growing: week 1

    April 15, 2012 by justgathering

    Our 2012 roof garden is officially underway. My thumbs are nowhere near green, and Daniel’s horticulture experience is limited to a single bamboo reed that he managed to keep alive for a few years, so we’re diving in with the expectation that we’ll probably screw a few things up and know better next year.

    We started last Sunday, April 8 with two humble Rubbermaid planters.

    These bins are devotedly entirely to greens. Here’s the breakdown:

    I’ve been watering 1 to 2 times a day since last weekend and was ecstatic when I discovered on Friday that our first little seedlings had sprouted.

    Arugula! I wanted to throw a party for these little guys. They made it! By midway through the day today, there was a little bit of green showing in every row.

    Today, we headed back to the neighborhood garden supply store for more soil and ended up getting a few more plants. We planted onions from seed and transplanted some little habanero seedlings.

    And, last but not least, tomatoes!

    I’ve still got plenty more veggies to plant from seeds once we’re well in the clear of any late season frosts. I don’t want to forget the steps I take (in case they either prove wildly successful or disastrously unfortunate), so I’ll be blogging the garden as she grows.

    Our one goal: grow all the ingredients we’ll need for a delicious salad. Tips and tricks from master gardeners are most definitely appreciated.

    Here’s to the sunshine this week!

    Category grow. | Tags: , , , , , , | 2 Comments

  3. just made: two bowls

    April 1, 2012 by justgathering

    As part of my endeavor to make more, I decided to take a pottery class at Brooklyn People’s Pottery. And look! I made some bowls!

    Sweetly titled A Date with Clay, the class was for couples and included two hours of throwing clay and a glass of champagne to sip on. Alice, who runs the studio, and Stella, who was helping out, were super nice and incredibly knowledgable. And the tactile experience of really getting messy and molding pieces with my hands was awesome after a week of sitting in front of a computer. Highly recommended.

    Plus, you get to choose your best pieces and pick a glaze, and they’ll fire and finish them for you. Charmingly lopsided handmade snack bowls, what what.

    Category make. | Tags: , , , , , | 1 Comment

  4. just made: bloody mary grilled cheese

    March 15, 2012 by justgathering

    You heard me.

    A few weeks ago, I met my friend Leslie at the Bearded Lady on Washington. Leslie is a writer (of fiction, grant proposals, no-longer-public blog posts, and the occasional poem), and I love to meet up with her to discuss what we’re working on. And have $4 happy hour beers. By the time Daniel joined us, we were ready to order food, and we were all intrigued by the sound of a grilled cheese sandwich with horseradish.

    The sandwich was good, but it prompted the question: what if you put all the ingredients to a bloody mary on a sandwich?

    A quick Google told us that no one [who's internet-savvy] has gone there. Daniel and I set about to change that.

    Our friends Emily and Eliott were in town from Illinois, and they were down to make the Bloody Mary Grilled Cheese happen.

    Emily making a face

    The components:

    The steps: 1. Slice some bread (we used whole wheat sourdough from Bread Alone) and grate some cheese (we chose Consider Bardwell’s Rupert).

    bread and cheese!

    2. Make a (warning: potent) mixture of horseradish and Worcestershire sauce.

    3. Add to that some finely chopped sun-dried tomatoes, spread the whole mixture on bread, and top it with pickles.

    4. Add your cheese, as much or as little as you like. A mixture of different cheeses would also be nice.

    [Side note: when Emily, Eliott, and I were buying this cheese at the Union Square Greenmarket, we informed our handsome cheesemonger that we needed enough to make four grilled cheese sandwiches. He proceeded to try to sell us a hunk of cheese about the size of the heel of my hand. Of course, we were quick to correct his mistake. "No, no. We're Midwesterners. Quadruple that, please."]

    5. Pile high with greens. We used arugula for a peppery kick.

    6. Grill. We coated our bread in olive oil rather than butter, reasoning that (a) butter might be too rich to evoke the pure, clean taste of a blood mary and (b) we didn’t have any butter.

    A darling is born. Go. Make. Eat. Accompany with a good light beer. Or, you know, a bloody mary.

    Category write. | Tags: , , , , | 2 Comments

  5. long-standing preoccupations

    March 9, 2012 by justgathering

    I mentioned a few of my creative obsessions, but I woke up this morning and thought, why not share the whole list?

    I like it when one of these things sneaks into my writing, because it’s usually a sign that I’m getting at something very real to me. I like it even more when they crash into each other.

    I wrote this poem in the summer of 2006:

    Unkind of Winter

    Snowshine in moonlight is a reflection of a reflection:
    the fields in February are dim by morning.
    This is day at its clingiest, holding onto night.

    Stiff fingers on steering wheels protest,
    complaining of the cold,
    breaking the back road quiet.

    In a ditch, a truck has gone halfway through a fence
    and, abandoned, waits for release.
    The driver’s door hangs open at an exposing slant.

    The fields in February speak of death often:
    this is where deer collapse,
    in the darkness, masses of quivering muscle.

    Category make., write. | Tags: , , , | No Comments

  6. motto for March:

    March 1, 2012 by justgathering

    “Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.” — Ray Bradbury

    Read the full and fantastic Paris Review interview here.

    Category explore., learn., make., write. | Tags: | No Comments

  7. one thing that helps me write

    February 20, 2012 by justgathering

    Perseverate: to repeat a thought or action after the stimulus that prompted it has ceased. 

    I spent the summer of 2005 working at a center for gifted children (as in, 6-year-olds with SAT scores high enough to get into decent colleges), and one of the habits we were trained to watch out for was perseveration: there was an ultra-fine line between nurturing a kid’s obsession with existence theorems and allowing it to spiral out into compulsion.

    Perseveration—to be completely consumed by an idea to the point that one is unable to let it go—is a marker of both giftedness and autism. It’s also a habit of very good writers.

    Good writers take the simplest ideas and simultaneously unwind and expand them through perseveration. They give their narrators the freedom to pause at the tiniest details of life, things most people would pass over, and to ruminate, exploring every tangentially related line of thought, exhausting all possible meanings. These narrators will harp on a mispronounced word, a pleasantly burnt smell, a certain light at a particular time of day, picking at it until it is exposed entirely.

    My favorite narrators are the ones who know they do it. Leo Gursky from Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love: “There are things I find hard to describe. And yet I persist like a stubborn mule in my efforts…. Over and over, I read the pages of the book I’d written as a young man…. But. I didn’t get any closer to solving the mystery.”

    The characters we love are all big-time perserverators. It is their obsession that leads us along as we read.

    A while ago, I made a list of my own preoccupations as a writer, things that pop up again and again in my writing, the fixations of my subconscious. Harsh seasons. Milk. Misrememberings. Prairie grasses. Some mornings when I sit down to write, I begin by choosing a topic from my list. Then, I unleash a narrator to do a little perseverating. What I’ve found: allowing my characters to get a little hung up is usually the only way to really get anywhere.

    Category write. | Tags: , , , , , | No Comments

  8. hatching egg

    February 3, 2012 by justgathering

    If you and I have bumped into one another sometime over the last six months, or grabbed coffee, or made pancakes together, you probably know a little bit about egg. Well, here’s a little bit more.

    Last August, I was craving more poetry in my life. New poems, surprising poems. Poems that felt real to me. More than that, I wanted poems to interrupt my days. I wanted living and poetry to become the same thing (still do).

    I remember walking around the city on a very hot day that month, telling Daniel all of this (over chocolate ice cream cones, I think),

    and it hit me that if I want these things, a lot of other people must want these things too. So egg was born.

    Inspired in part by the Dial-a-Poem poets of the 60s (yes—call a number to get a poem!), I decided to take advantage of this amazing technology we’ve got called email. I would send out a poem via email to anyone who wanted to sign up. For free, of course. Because why not?

    John Giorno, Dial-a-Poem Poet

    (Image of John Giorno, from Katie Beha’s Become Your Own Yawn in which she describes Dial-a-Poem as “a way of experiencing art through the very facts of our daily life.”)

    But I wouldn’t send out poems from the books on my shelves, partially because I don’t like to make a habit of infringing copyright but mostly because I wanted to see what was out there. I wanted to see what would come in if I opened up egg for submissions.

    Daniel and I got to building egg right away. I sketched out the simple design in my head.

    egg first sketch

    Daniel programmed it and put a lovely speckle on it.

    egg home page

    Then egg spent a few months incubating. The subscribe page displayed a message that the project was in beta, and I watched the subscribers start to slowly trickle in. I used two forms of advertising to bring in subscribers: (1) word of mouth and (2) one mass email to the all poets I know that both explained egg and called for submissions.

    To my language-loving friends:

    I’ve been working on a little side project, and it’s about to get real. I’m letting you know because I think you’d like it.
    It’s called egg, and it’s an online poetry magazine, delivered one poem per week via email. Sign up, get a poem every week. Simple and awesome, right?
    Even better: submissions are reader-generated. It’s incredibly easy [and free!] to submit a poem and get your writing out there.
    If you think that sounds pretty sweet, sign up. Better yet, submit a poem. Better still, forward this little announcement to anyone you know who might be into it.
    Here’s to making awesome things in 2012!
    Shayne

     

    I had a tiny but persistent fear at the beginning that no one would submit. That I would tell everyone about this great new poetry email and then be forced to write poems under pen names to send out every week—or worse yet, never deliver at all.

    Turns out, though, plenty of folks were into it. Not only did the subscribers keep rolling in, but lots of people were submitting, people I’d never met before, people who lived in Ohio and California and Arizona. I was right; there were more people out there who wanted a mid-week poetry interruption.

    In December, Daniel and I created a MailChimp template that looked just like the website. By this point, I knew enough html and css to make it look almost like I wanted it to, but he taught me some pretty cool tricks along the way. Ah, the benefits of living with a handsome computer genius.

    When I felt like I had enough submissions to sustain the email for a while if all the poets were to suddenly stop writing, egg launched.

    The first email went out the first week of 2012. Since then, egg‘s been tweeting lots of lines from poems.

    And people continue to subscribe, one by one, and people keep submitting their poems, which takes a whole lot of guts and awesomeness.

    So, what next? I’m happy to let egg grow organically and see where it goes. I’m also dreaming of a one-off print version, perhaps a collection of the best of egg at the end of the year. We’ll see.

    If you’re intrigued by the idea of a poem a week in your inbox, try it out. And if you’ve got a poem that the world should see, send it my way.

    And finally, if you want to make something, make it.

    Category learn., make., write. | Tags: , , , , , | No Comments

  9. just made: kombucha

    January 16, 2012 by justgathering

    Well, not just.

    Kombucha actually takes a little while to make. But it’s so worth the wait.

    Remember this, way back in December?

     

    Yes, I got a make-your-own-kombucha kit from my bosses for Christmas. (I know. They know me so well. But wait: it gets better. I also got them a make-your-own-kombucha kit. Crazytown.)

    I gladly assumed responsibility for both SCOBYs and got brewing on Wednesday, December 21.

    The process is actually incredibly simple. (1) Brew tea. (2) Add sugar. (3) Let cool.

    Then comes the important part: add SCOBY (Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast).

    Checking temps. (SCOBY + very hot tea = a no.)

    Once it’s cool, you’re good to plop that sucker in.

    It looks like a slimy floating pancake.

    And then comes the waiting. Lots of waiting. Like 4 weeks if you like really vinegary kombucha like I do.

    Okay, so I got a little impatient. Around two weeks ago I bottled some ‘buch to make a kombucha gin cocktail. I mean, to see if it was ready. (Answer: not quite, but sugary kombucha and gin do make a nice combo.)

    This morning, though, I was determined to bottle. The kombucha was giving off a strong vinegar smell, and this nice healthy-looking culture was thriving. Mmmm, probiotics. It was definitely time.

    The verdict: this first batch tastes JUST like a bottle of KBBK Original, i.e. delicious. I’m ecstatic. Bottling the second jar to bring to work and then getting started on my next batch, which I’m thinking will be flavored. Lavender? Hibiscus? Raisins? Ginger?

    I’m feeling energized. It must be all the probiotics.

    p.s. It’s obvious from this shameless plug that I was very pleased with my experience with Kombucha Brooklyn. They’re one of the many local companies that’s doing something really cool, and everything from the tea blend to the Twitter encouragement has been stellar, so if you’re feeling inspired to brew, go get your own kit.

    Category make. | Tags: , , , , , , , | No Comments

  10. putting it out there

    January 14, 2012 by justgathering

    Have you yet had the pleasure of stumbling upon this project out in the wild?

    Before I Die is a Candy Chang brainchild. That would be the same urban planner/public interaction artist who brought us I Wish This Was. [I know, you totally love her.]

    Daniel and I encountered this installation near Borough Hall sometime in the fall, and we each made a declaration. Mine:

    No, not world peace. Just a book. One book. The book that’s been forming in me since I decided to become a writer at age 4, when being a writer meant being an illustrator. 

    I fully believe in the power of just putting something out there. So here it is: I’m writing a book. A long work of fiction. I am getting up early to spend an hour finessing a hundred words. I am allowing a handful of people I’ve made up to consume my thoughts and refusing to curtail my mind wanderings. I am jotting notes and collecting photos and starting and stopping scenarios. I am going on writing dates with friends who like to sit in silence and make things side by side.

    If you see me, ask me how it’s going. That’s how this whole thing works.

    Category write. | Tags: , , , , , | No Comments

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