Weird Things You Learn About Food When You Garden

By: | August 11, 2025

One of the great joys of gardening is learning how stuff grows. Did you know that green beans are just baby bean-beans? You harvest them when the pods have developed but before the beans inside get plump and then hard. Green peppers are just unripe red (or orange or yellow) peppers. Green olives are just young black olives. Cherry tomatoes are just … no, they’re just bite-size tomatoes. The green tomatoes in fried green tomatoes are just unripe tomatoes, but some tomato varieties are green (or black or yellow or orange) when they’re ripe. White button mushrooms grow into cremini (baby bella) mushrooms, which grow into portobello mushrooms.

Artichokes are the flower pods of a gigantic thistle plant. Seriously. 

Do you know how to grow ginger? Plant ginger. It’s a root, so if you stick it in the dirt, it’ll send up grassy shoots and spread, and at the end of the season you’ll have more ginger. Same goes for potatoes and garlic. Coriander is just cilantro that has gone to seed. Hops grow on vines and smell like beer. Bay leaves come from bay trees. Asparagus shoots up out of long, ropey, horizontal roots, and if you let the stalks keep developing, they’ll grow wispy fronds out of their tips and get as tall as you are.

I was showing a (very smart) visitor my garden the other day and she was delighted to learn that blueberries grow on bushes. There’s so much about food we don’t know! Or didn’t always know. The first time I grew corn, I ordered a packet from a seed company and laughed and laughed when I tore it open and found … corn. Obviously corn grows from corn, but I hadn’t really thought about it before. You grow beans from beans, peas from peas. 

I love to see people share their garden porn photos on social media this time of year. People are so proud of the produce they’re harvesting, as they should be.

I garden out of interest in how stuff grows and for flavor. Fresh-picked herbs and vegetables make it a lot easier and more delicious to get your five servings a day. (Even if you’ll get so sick of kale after a couple of weeks of kale.) It’s fun to eat produce varieties that you can’t easily find in groceries because they’re too delicate (like tart cherries, which grow on trees) or weird (like tie-dye tomatoes). But you can’t sustain yourself on a backyard plot, no matter how many potatoes you plant. 

Gardening is itchy, achy, tedious, hot, endless work. The people who grow, harvest, process, and prepare food for a living are heroes and deserve safe working conditions, honest wages, and protection from being abducted, imprisoned, and separated from their children. 

Anyway, this is a fuck ICE post. Fuck ICE. May the thugs in the U.S. Gestapo never be welcomed into a restaurant again or know the pleasure of a fresh vegetable. 

Photo by Laura Helmuth, who planted way too many radishes this year.

Crazy for Capybaras

By: | August 8, 2025

My daughter’s obsession with capybaras began about six months ago. One day she was drawing mushrooms with cat ears, the next she was drawing capybaras and only capybaras. She watches videos of capybaras. She sings the capybara song. She purchased a capybara stuffie that is also, improbably, a burger. She taped a piece of notebook paper to her wall that reads:

How to be happy:

Step 1. Move to New York

Step 2. Get a capybara

Step 3. Enjoy.

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The Road Not Taken

By: | August 6, 2025

A couple of weeks ago I spent a long weekend with my dad in Astoria, the town in Oregon where I grew up. Our visits tend to go like so: On the first day I arrive in the late afternoon and we go for a walk, either at a beach or around the neighborhood. The second day we do some project around the house and then we go for a walk, almost always at a beach. Finally, on the last day, we get brunch at a coffee shop before I hit the road.

It was the evening of the second day, and we had decided to go to Clatsop Spit at Fort Stevens State Park, a few miles from Astoria. We parked and made our way through dunes and beachgrass to the beach. There we turned west, walking along soft wet sand.

Our progress was slow. It often is. My dad snaps pictures with his phone of whatever catches his fancy, which is almost everything. (“Doesn’t that beached sea nettle look like a nebula if you crop the image?”) I watch birds. Clatsop Spit marks the mouth of the Columbia River, and the river was roiled, this being where it and the Pacific meet. In that roil were scads of pelicans, gulls of various species, Caspian terns, cormorants, all of them pursuing small fish swimming out to sea. I watched the pelicans tip over and dive from the air, watched the terns do the same, both of them plunging into the water. I watched the gulls swim over and try to snatch meals from the pelicans and terns, or, to give them their due, catch fish on their own. As different sets of pelicans or terns or gulls ate to their hearts’ content, I watched them fly over to the beach to roost together in the warm brilliance of the setting sun.

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Rejoice, for Mars Retrograde Is Finally Almost Over

By: | August 4, 2025

This first ran August 21, 2018 — another, earlier, fraught August — but this re-run is earlier in the month. So Mars retrograde isn’t already over. August, will you pleeeease just get it over with please?

Taurus


The other day at brunch, as two of my friends and I were commiserating about things varied and universal, we agreed about the sluggish pace of our brains. What an injustice, I ventured, that our sluggishness is so out of sync with the blistering pace of this summer and of 2018.

“Someone was telling me that it’s because Mars is in retrograde. What? When is that over?” one of my friends said.

“August 27,” I replied instantly. “Mercury is retrograde right now, too, and actually so are Saturn and Uranus. I know Mercury’s ends on the 18th but I’m not sure about the giant planets.”

My friends blinked, and asked what this meant, for them and for the cosmos.

“Uh, nothing,” I said. “That’s astrology. Astrology is not based on any real science.” They nodded. They know this. They were still curious.

“Astronomically, it means Mars seems to move backward in the sky from night to night, as viewed from Earth.” I orbited my fists around a coffee cup to demonstrate the apparent motion of the planets. I have patient friends who humor me. “Astrologically, it means … nothing real. But people say it means things are slow, and kind of backward.”

They nodded. This sounded right. It even felt right to say out loud. It’s the dog days of summer; we can blame our sluggishness on the stars. 

Did you know it’s called “the dog days of summer” because of the stars? It is not named for lazy dogs who nap a lot when it’s hot outside. The dog days refer to the heliacal rising of Sirius, the dog star, one of the brightest stars in our sky. “Heliacal rise” marks the morning when a star or cluster returns in the predawn sky, showing up with the sun (Helios).

If you are still reading, and you have read anything else I’ve ever written, you might be wondering why the hell I know any of this, or would write a post about astrology. The truth is that I keep tabs on pretty much everything happening in the sky. I know where Jupiter and Mars are, and when they are retrograde or “direct.” I know where the moon is in its cycle and can tell you where to find it at a given time of night, even if it’s cloudy. I know when to expect the heliacal rise of Venus, when it becomes the morning star instead of the evening star. I even know whether our star has any sunspots, because I bought nice solar binoculars for the eclipse last year and I use them occasionally, because why wouldn’t I look directly at Helios if I could? I know my sun sign and the signs of everyone in my family.

I know none of this holds any actual significance, and that I cannot use the motions of the planets or the constellations to divine any insight about my circumstances. I know astrology is a lark, as my mom might say.

And yet for some reason, I want to know all this detail. When it comes to the moon, I feel like I need to know. I’ve decided that this desire is meaningful on its own. My urge to watch the heavens, absent any oracular significance, is a form of cosmic communion that works for me. I think it’s fine to seek meaning among the stars. Actually, I’ll just come out and say it: I think it’s totally appropriate.

It’s so natural to imbue the skies with meaning. Doing so has been a primary focus of human civilization since time immemorial, since long before we imagined supernatural beings living up there. I happen to believe human civilization owes itself to the night sky. We owe timekeeping and writing and a lot more to the machinations of the moon and other objects. Did you know that the zodiac dates to Babylon? The 12 signs, which each correspond to a month of the solar year (though they don’t line up with the calendar) were invented six millenniums ago. Along with writing.

I finally decided to write about this when I saw an email in my inbox Monday: “Use code RETROGONE for 20% off sitewide!” I laughed and checked the date. Oh, I realized, it’s the 20th, so Mercury retrograde just ended! Mercury retrograde is over, let’s celebrate by buying yoga pants! I was tempted to shoot back an email asking if the sale would last through next Monday, when Mars goes direct, too. Then I laughed at myself. And then I stopped laughing, because dammit, I like knowing where the planets are, and I like that others want to know, too. I don’t care what their motivations are if it means they look up, and notice, and maybe think about something bigger. Even if it’s just over brunch.

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Photo credit: By Carol M. Highsmith – Library of Congress, Public Domain/via Wikimedia Commons

Slow Touch

By: | August 1, 2025

Our one-year-old strokes his hair when he’s tired, twirling his curls between his fingers. That’s how he puts himself to sleep — eyelids drooping, drooping, down.

Neuroscientists call this lazy, rhythmic caressing “slow touch” or “affective touch.” It moves across the skin at one to 10 centimeters per second — faster than a snail, slower than handwriting — and works best when it’s warm and focused on hairy skin, like the scalp or forearm. That’s where we and other mammals have the highest density of C-fibers: nerves specially tuned to respond to gentle, affectionate contact.

What fascinates me about C-fibers is their dual nature. In addition to a soft caress, these evolutionarily ancient, slow-conducting nerves are also responsible for carrying the sensation of a hot chili pepper, the itch from a poison oak rash, the hellfire of shingles.

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Discovering What’s Possible at CERN

By: | July 30, 2025

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of visiting CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) with a group of STEM-curious high school kids. Our guide on the visit was Shirajum Monira, a tiny, dark-haired woman, who spoke gently as she walked us through numerous exhibits, experimental facilities and scientific devices. She spoke patiently and answered our questions in a way that showed a deep understanding of the science. 

One of the places Monira took us was the Control Center for ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider). The ALICE project is studying strongly interacting nuclear matter that was prevalent in the universe’s earliest moments. Monira clearly knew a lot about ALICE and when I asked her how she ended up as a tour guide, she explained that she’s a researcher on the project. (I would later learn, via an internet search, that she was part of a team that won the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their work with the LHC.)

When I expressed my surprise that someone of her professional stature would be spending their time giving student tours, she told me that she volunteered to speak to students in hopes that she might inspire them to see possibilities for themselves. When she was 15, the age of the students in my group, she didn’t know any physicists, and hadn’t seen anyone from her background working as a scientist.

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Snapshot: Approaching fig season

By: | July 28, 2025

In 2021, I discovered figs, and I wrote about it here. Where have figs been all my life? I asked. A generous neighbor had a productive fig tree and over the next few Augusts, I made fig tarts (pictured above), fig cake (gift link to the recipe in the New York Times – you’re welcome), and fig-lemon preserves (recipe from my mom’s head. And I ate figs. My goodness. Figs are great.

But then this year I moved. There are fig trees here, too, just six miles south of my old place. As the end of July approaches, the fruit is bulging, still green, on fig trees in my neighbors’ front yards…but I’ve barely met any neighbors yet, and none that have offered me fruit. I’ve figured out where I can harvest some other things – a sidewalk herb garden with a sign telling passersby to pick what we need, for example. Several neighbors have rosemary bushes, and once I saw an older gentleman slow down, look around furtively, grab some basil from a front-yard bush, shove it in a plastic bag, and scoot.

I’ve tracked down one fig tree that isn’t on private property and I plan to walk by and check on it in the coming weeks.

In my old neighborhood, I knew where to find garlic mustard and persimmons, and who would give me mint from their garden (everyone! mint grows like a weed!). And I knew the buildings and the trees and the people, too.

I’m sure my old neighbor will let me stop by and harvest her figs, if it’s a good year. And some day I hope my new neighborhood can provide everything my old neighborhood could.

Photo: Helen Fields, obviously

My Corvid Friends-to-Be

By: | July 25, 2025

I’ve always wanted a crow friend, and this summer I’ve been making an effort. Each morning I put a handful of dog kibble on a paper plate and set it out on our back-patio table. I also ball up a piece of aluminum foil to add to the plate for decoration, although whether crows and other corvids (birds of the family Corvidae) actually like shiny objects, a common belief, remains to be proven. Then, I do my best rendition of a crow call (something between a caw and a honk, to my ear) to alert them to breakfast service, watching the skies for takers.

Our neighborhood has a resident flock of them—“murder” seems a little dramatic, though I suppose that’s the official, if antiquated, term—and they make themselves known daily. They start out calling from a distance mid-morning, moving closer via a long line of tulip poplars, before swooping down to see what’s what on the ground, chattering amicably (I think) all the while.

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