Cyclical nature

Spring continues its joyful unfurling. The first sprouts from my hot pepper plants appeared yesterday in their little pots by the window. It was a thrill to see these tiny shoots, the beginning of life. Seeds are amazing.

I planted some of my urban garden last week. I built a little walled bed for my mess-o-mesclun and nasturtium, and put in a few rows of scallion, peas and okra, and a few hills of summer squash and butternut. Later in the season I'll put in tomato seedlings (sungolds, I hope) and kale. Laura has her eye on an unoccupied section of one of the beds for some more flowers and maybe carrots. It was fun to make little furrows with my fingers and lay the seeds in their new homes. I loved seeing all the crazy different shapes and sizes of the seeds. Some were obvious: squash seeds look like the seeds you take out of squash (my lord!), but others were foreign to me. The nasturtium seeds were huge, craggy hailstones, while the scallion seeds were tiny half moons, inky-black. They got stuck in the spaces between my fingers. Soon, hopefully, I'll start to see more little shoots popping up in my garden beds.

We began composting last week. I took an unused municipal trash barrel, hosed it out, and drilled holes all over it. We started it with a few scoops of soil, and a bucket of horse compost, and then started collecting and adding kitchen scraps. I put the barrel in the driveway, on a little patch of gravelly dirt (about as good as we can do at our apartment). We were adding scraps to it on Friday when our neighbor poked his head out the window and asked what we were doing. When we said we were composting, he disappeared, and returned with a bowlful of kitchen scraps. Now all of the neighbors in our and the next building are participating. We're going to need another barrel. It's incredible how much waste we've saved from the landfill after just one week of composting.

Now that I have some little seedlings to care for, I've started a batch of fertilizer tea. My working recipe is this: Take half-full bucket of compost, fill it to the top with water. Let sit for a few days, stirring occasionally. Voila: fertilizer tea. This is my first time using it, but I keep reading and talking to people who swear by the stuff. I'm going to put some in a spray bottle and use it to water my seedlings. It's amazing to think that my kitchen scraps can feed my vegetable garden. Instead of going into a landfill, those onion peels, coffee grounds and eggshells are going to become okra and kale and tomatoes. Life is cool.