You have to be tough to make it in my yard.
For one thing, we live in the inner city, in a row home, with a tiny backyard. Lots of squirrels, feral cats, spotted lantern flies, and various other hardy and unidentified critters.
But we do our best to make it individual and beautiful. And completely low maintenance. It’s all river rock, so no grass and no mowing. There are many perennial herbs, annual flowers responsible for reseeding themselves, a big rhubarb plant, black raspberry vines, a huge Russian sage plant that attracts floods of bees (My sage! Brings all the bees to the yard!) There’s a rudimentary drip irrigation system that we hook up to a garden hose.
And a four-by-four raised bed garden. We always get a head start with volunteer tomato plants from last year, and Swiss chard that’s at least two years old and never seems to die. To that we add indeterminate heirloom tomato plants from Countryside Nursery, with attempts at a couple of other things that never seem to work.
And a few types of complementary basil.
It gets used frequently in summertime cooking. Quite often it’s layered between sliced tomatoes, olive oil, balsamic, and mozzarella for a light dinner. And in early to mid September, when the weeds are starting to take over, we cut back most of it, sit around the patio table, pick and wash the leaves.
Then it comes inside and I make fresh pesto for the year. It gets whirred in an ancient food processor in batches, put into ice cube trays, frozen, and bagged in gallon Ziplocs.
The recipe? Don’t have one. I have a list of ingredients though. Basil, olive oil, Parmesan, garlic, walnuts. I can’t afford pine nuts in that quantity, so it’s nearly always walnuts. Some years it was deluxe unsalted mixed nuts (no peanuts – that would be total heresy and I know I’m skirting the nut line anyway). This year our new Lidl grocery store (Do you have one? Best store ever) had huge bags of whole walnuts for $4 and change. Score.
So today was pesto day. It’s so relaxing. The leaf picking and washing is meditative. The entire process is relaxing and mindful. I feel linked to hundreds (thousands?) of years of people doing the same thing.
And, soon, I’ll probably break out the hand-crank pasta machine.
No Italian heritage, yet I feel a connection.
