I've got the itch...

Poison ivy, that is.

Even as we enjoy our weekly community support agriculture share this summer, we are attempting to develop our own extremely locally grown agriculture in our backyard garden. I guess than in a certain way, what I really want is for "The Story of the Mosbacher Pizza" to be really really short-- as short as "we picked everthing in our backyard and mixed it in the right measure and voila, pizza!" That's an ideal worth working towards.

Since the days when I watched my father, of blessed memory, make his garden larger and larger each year until it seemed to take over half the yard, I always imagined that I'd have a vegetable garden of my own some day. For some years, first in Atlanta and now here, I've learned through trial and error about the pleasures and pain of growing your own food. My first real experience in gardening sans advice from my dad involved planting bulbs. I planted them too early, so they came up in the middle of the winter. And, not knowing or really contemplating that bulbs had tops and bottoms, I planted about half of them upside down altogether. My gardening knowledge has been more empirical than textbook learning.

Now that we've got young kids of our own, having a garden is even more fun. Each year, the kids help me pick out what we should grow. We've started more and more things from seed in the late winter/early spring. So that as the Jewish calendar matures from Tu B'Shevat (the Jewish festival for trees which falls in January usually) towards Passover, we are more accutely aware of the argicultural cycle in our home. So, too, we are more and more aware of the frailty of farming. This spring, we planted about six different plants in small pots and put them in this great windowbox we have in our kitchen. Everything came up and has taken root beautifully in the garden, except the lupine, which, for reasons which remain a mystery, simply never so much as peeked their heads above the soil in the pot. Who knows why? And it's amazing. It's now months later, and our three year old still mourns for the lupine that never were. Each time we talk about the garden, we "oo" and "ah", and then inevitably the little one gets a little sad and says, "but the lupine never grewed up." It's a huge disappointment to him, and yet an amazing lesson for us all.

In any case, for each year for the past three summers since we've lived in this house, I've tinkered with a small plot, perhaps 3X6 feet. We've grown tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, squash, and a few other things over the years. But it's been crowded in there.

This spring, though, I got ambitious. I decided that we were going to clear the whole entire other side of the yard, which was covered in vines of suspicious variety. My wife warned me that there was poison ivy, but me, being me (just ask her!), determined that I was going to clear it all, sans chemicals, of course.

I spent several days in there-- probably eight hours in total. Each time, I emerged scott-free of itches or allergies. I had rigged up a veritable haz-mat suit for myself--longs and longs, rubber dishwashing gloves with gardening gloves. No problem.

On what I estimated to be my last day of work on the project, I guess I must have gotten cocky. I didn't suit up with quite the care as I had-- heck-- I hadn't gotten poison ivy yet. I got to thinking that I had mastered this thing-- I was teflon man.

Well, I was wrong. Not a major case of the itches-- just on my forearms. But I'm off to the doctor tomorrow for prednisone or whatever will make it go away.

What can I say? My learning curve-- about life, the universe, and gardening-- is a steep one.