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By Root 561 0

to end all gardens. The spring warmed into summer, the seedlings burgeoned into a jungle, and we harvested enormous thin-skinned tomatoes and a few tiny white eggplants and a lot of purple amaranth that was amazing sautéed with olive oil and garlic. I got chard, more chard than I wanted, and I have never seen more tomatillos. The tomatillo plants were spidery and unstoppable. Unlike tomatoes, which collapse in a hysterical puddle if you do not stake them, these grew wild and rangy and when they reached the brink of collapse, simply collapsed and kept on going, crawling over the yard like monsters—but generous, benevolent monsters. I picked the tomatillo bushes clean and a day or two later they would be loaded with pale green fruits bursting through their papery husks. I used them in salsas and the best guacamole I’ve ever eaten.

I had every intention of planting another fabulous garden the following year, but that next spring my mother died. A few weeks after her funeral, Owen and I took some seed potatoes and planted them. I’d read that two pounds of seed potatoes will yield up to forty pounds of potatoes at harvest. We’ll just see about that, I thought sourly.

“Pretty soon everything is going to have high-fructose corn syrup in it,” Owen said, helping me dig in a few carrot seeds. “Except the trusty vegetable.”

I planted several white onions and a single yellow squash seedling. I had thought it would be peaceful and restorative to work in the garden, but contemplation amid the bees and the tender shoots of April just made me want to go lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. I didn’t lift a trowel again for the rest of the year.

And the garden went feral on me. The epazote I’d planted the year before metastasized into a forest of chest-high shrubs with serrated foliage, brutish and everywhere. Where last year had flourished tomatoes and pole beans and cilantro and eggplant, now grew epazote, and, where they could fight their way through, some purple-flowered thistles and blackberry vines. I’d grown a bramble, not a garden.

Yet a tomatillo came back, struggling through the epazote, laden with fruit. I was touched. That is the kind of vegetable you need in your platoon. And the six rhubarbs were not just holding their own, they were thriving. By summer, I had thigh-high plants with green stalks almost as wide around as my wrist, leaves the size of doormats. Given that I’d paid $2 for the seeds and rhubarb sells for about $3 a pound, planting rhubarb had turned out, in the end, to be a very sound decision: I harvested fifteen pounds.

The biggest surprise, though, were the potatoes, buried with so little expectation of success. Idly one day that summer I went out and scrabbled around with my hand in the earth and hit a small, solid orb. I reached around some more and found scores, some of them the size of jelly beans and some the size of golf balls and some as big and lumpish and dusty brown as spuds from the supermarket. I carried them in and boiled the babies for dinner and ate them with a salad. They were hands down the best potatoes that I have ever tasted—milky and sweet. I knew right then that I was never going to harvest forty pounds of potatoes in the fall because I was going to eat them all before the end of summer. Far too much has been written about the glories of the vine-ripened tomato and far too little about the pleasure of eating steamed just-dug potatoes on a balmy summer evening. I almost had the heart to garden again, but by then the days were already starting to get short.

GUACAMOLE

Everything lovely about avocado perishes when it is mashed, packed in a pouch, and shipped to a supermarket. Avocados don’t keep. I started making this fantastic guacamole, inspired by a Rick Bayless recipe, because it uses up tomatillos, but if you don’t have tomatillos, forget the tomatillos. For that matter, forget the cilantro, garlic, onion, and chiles. You can just mash avocado with lemon juice and salt and spread it on toast and it will surpass any guacamole you’ll find at the supermarket.

Make it or buy