Tamar Haspel - To Boldly Grow: Finding Joy, Adventure, and Dinner in Your Own Backyard

with Barbara Haspel

The Dreaded Broccoli Cookbook: A Good-Natured Guide to Healthful Eating with 100 Recipes

As a child, I learned exactly one thing about gardening: if you dont much like to garden, mint is the plant for you.

I grew up in a food-focused household, but that focus didnt extend to growing it. Mostly my parents let someone else get the food to the point where you could eat it or cook with it, and they took it from there. For a few years, though, we did have a small garden on the south side of the house, and I have hazy memories of peppers and tomatoes. But I definitely remember the mint, which was positively magic. All you have to do is put a little in the ground once, and it comes up year after year, bigger, brighter, and mintier. The import of this came home to me fully when I was old enough for juleps.

Having a particular affinity for plants that require no care at all didnt exactly set me up for a future getting my dinner with my own two hands. In fact, I spent the first four decades of my life giving almost no thought to where my food came from, let alone the options for rolling up my sleeves and procuring it myself. I had limited and inauspicious experience with gardening, but the other kinds of first-hand food activitiesfishing, foraging, huntingwerent even in shouting distance of anything I was familiar with. My job for most of my adult life was to find interesting things other people were doing and write about them for magazines, which I could do from the comfort and safety of my armchair.

Ive never been much of a doer. A reader, all my life. A writer, since about the age of thirty. Ive always been curious, engaged, interestedI wanted to know something about everything, so long as no actual effort was involved. Give me a book about, say, octopus intelligence, and I will feel no need to learn to scuba dive. Im interested in all the things my fellow humans are up to around the world, but I like to find out without worrying about exchange rates or lost luggage. As long as you can modify it with armchair, I could be anything.

This isnt a bad worldview for a writer. I couldnt have cut it as a war correspondent, but if youre writing about nutrition and diet and science, an armchair is a fine place to do it from. For many years, I made a perfectly respectable living doing just that for magazines like Self, Glamour, and Womens Health. I learned enough about all those things to be good at my job and also to make peoples eyes glaze over at parties, so if you have questions about omega-3 fats or carbohydrate metabolism, Im here for you.

Id established a comfortable career by the time I met Kevin. I was thirty-eight and he was forty, and within weeks we knew that we were in for the duration. Within months, we were living together in my Upper West Side Manhattan apartment. We got married on the third anniversary of our first date because that way wed have to remember only one date (we usually forget anyway). To be fair, by that time I had already figured out that Kevin, unlike me, was a doer, so I knew what I was getting into.

But you marry a doer at your peril, because you never know exactly what hes going to want to do.

Kevin, it turned out, wanted to do a garden. And he wanted to do it on the roof of our building.

Could we have mint? I asked, first thing. Juleps for everybody!

No mint, said Kevin. It takes over everything.

Isnt that why its good?

And thats when I came face-to-face with Kevins idea of gardening and discovered it was much more robust, much more realistic, much more active, than mine. There were no armchairs involved. The things it did involveheavy lifting, special equipment, regular maintenancewerent exactly in my wheelhouse. And although I was familiar with dirt, Id never had to actively acquire it; it seemed to gravitate to me of its own accord.

But as Kevin talked about it, I found that I was curious. I was engaged. I was interested.

And I was in.

A big part of our buildings roof was tiled and landscaped and furnished; it was a much-used amenity for the residents. But there was a part accessible only by ladder, home to some mysterious parts of the buildings infrastructure, and thats where we wanted to put the garden. To my surprise, when I asked the building manager whether we could keep a few pots up there, she immediately said yes. Even so, I was a little worried.

What if people see this and then everyone wants to do it? I asked Kevin. There obviously wasnt room for everyone, so that would put the kibosh on the whole undertaking.

Kevin laughed out loud. People here dont even cook their own food, he told me. I guarantee they have no interest in growing it.

Let the doing begin.

Oh wait, not quite yet! I got to ease into this gently because the very first step wasnt doing at all. It was research.

Now, I actually know something about research. And as with all highly technical subjects made more complex by the conflicting opinions of both so-called experts and crank amateurs, theres only one place to go to ferret out the truth. So Kevin and I sat up late into the night, cruising the internet, trying to figure out what would and would not grow in a pot.