West Oakland Food Post: Urban Garden and Grub Box

As I both love my domesticity and strive to be well-rounded (i.e. my life is not all po-biz all the time), here are some updates on the little West Oakland urban patio’s container garden: we’ve planted three tomato plants (husky cherry, yellow heirloom, and something else), two bell pepper plants (yellow and orange), a sweet basil (which got a little too much water during the recent rains), and this week I’ll be planting the Japanese eggplant. We are southwest facing, so we got nothing but sunlight, in which the tomatoes grow like crazy. After we cleared out all the old growth, the lemon balm, spearmint, and jalapeño pepper plants are making a come back, and the dwarf lime tree has been just fine. The lemon thyme has continued growing like crazy. As for non food plants, the pink jasmines have started to bloom. Señor Alfred’s wildflowers are still here, alive and kicking, as is the butterfly bush. The monkey flower plant has only gotten sturdier and bushier, like a thick head of hair; its orange pinkish flowers are forthcoming, as it is currently sprouting many little pods. In the patio’s one tiny shady area, there is new growth on the fuschia. Inside the sexy loft, new orchids! Ah, West Oakland.

West Oakland: Things Grow Here

Morning Sun Side, originally uploaded by geminipoet.

Poetics, Horticulture, and Being Environmentalists in West Oakland

Here’s a cliché for you: Think global, act local.

I am wondering who concretely does this, or at least makes effort to do this.

I have been thinking about the cliché, in light of the recent discussions on the civilizing missions elsewhere in the world not our backyards attitudes in American poetry, and its love and fetishizing of the exotic, quaint customs of the primitive third world brown people elsewhere never here. I believe this love for the exotic, quaint customs of the primitive third world brown people elsewhere never here stems from the dominant culture’s boredom and discontentment of its own cultural capital, and from a refusal to look at what happens in American cities, which isn’t all affluence, comfort, progress, and enlightenment, as much as it is corporate dependence, environmental non-sustainability, wastefulness, poverty, acts of directed violence, and terrifying homicide rates.

You know what else? I am tired of other people. I am tired of other people’s baggage. I am tired of talking about other people, and writing criticism about other people’s problematic work. Lord knows they don’t give a shit about me and what I think.