There’s a reason my family calls my house “Li-Mart.” In recent weeks, I have supplied the following without leaving the confines of my home:

**298 Danish Krone to my mother. In August, she goes to Copenhagen to visit friends (a family that includes the woman I’m named after), and, mistaking me for Thomas Cook, dropped by today to ask my advice on changing money. I recommended ATMs, but then I also just happen to have a foreign currency stash in my WHQ office, where I have leftovers from trips along with a curious accumulation of currency for places I’ve never been, including Portugal and China.

**A handwoven Ethiopian netela, sewn by yours truly into a Tibetan-style baby carrier (this is also the way I saw many Ethiopian girls carrying their smaller siblings, and a method I imagine is too sensible not to be used in multiple cultures). The carrier was a collaborative project with the visiting DIL (Daughter-In-Love), whose current AZ locale makes the gauzy cotton weave of the netela especially apropos for toting around an increasingly active, heat-generating 12-lb wonderbaby. In the desert. In summer.

**Shallots, shallots and more shallots. Our highest-yielding crop to date (with raspberries a solid second). Other garden plantings that seem to be faring well: the rainbow chard is a gift that keeps on giving; Magda squash seems to be borer resistant; and the various tomatoes–if we can keep on top of the potato beetles–look to be coming on strong. Much curiosity about the currant tomatoes and wondering whether the 3/4-inch little guys will deliver flavor bombs as promised.

**Oilcloth and other fabrics and sewing notions to my niece, Phoebe, and her friend Fazia–so they could make banners for their eighth-grade graduation ceremony. Some kids focused on their high schools, their families, their academic interests. Our girl dealt with such matters in the circular tassels she hung down from hers — but mostly, she made a giant sneaker.

 

 

5/11/2010 UPDATE: DIVIDE & CONQUER COUNTDOWN

Four days and counting before the 7th Annual Driveway Plant Sale (Saturday, May 15th, 9:00 AM). Things get a little crazy at this point, and I have to hold back from digging up the rest of the yard and adding it to the “inventory.” Several rituals have developed over the years, and one is to give the uprooted plants a week of settling before the sale day so that if something’s going to die, it dies on me and not its new owner. Looks like the final headcount is between 700-800 plants; so far only one flat has been identified as weeds (neighbor Claudia, using her gentle voice, saying, “I bet you thought that was basil”). Price stickers: check. Coffee: check. Mom lined up to act as cashier: check.

4/21/2010: AND SO IT BEGINS

For the seventh year in a row, I’m digging up the volunteers, dividing the out-of-control perennials, and potting them all up for my Divide & Conquer driveway sale. D-Day is May 15, three weeks away, and I’m up to 201 pots (my all-time high was 900). What’s different this year? Spillover from Triangulation Farm, the organic community garden plot we maintain over at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education. So there are more veggies and herbs this time around, but still, the bulk of my “inventory” is from many early years of overpurchasing — at Russell Gardens Wholesale Nursery, Produce Junction, and Primex – as well as from the glorious dumpster dives at the now-defunct Frank’s.

Hard to imagine that the wacky weather — multiple blizzards, strange blasts of summer, rain of the Noah’s Ark variety — would have positive results, but I swear there are more hellebore seedlings than ever, ferns out the wazoo, and beefy perennials looking robust and ready to thin out. An added incentive for all this pruning and reshaping is the moment of temporary insanity during which I said yes to Syd Carpenter’s request that I join her as one of the stops on the May 23rd Garden Conservancy Open Days Tour. What was I thinking?

Approximately 47 seconds after I got the back porch painted — giving it a brand new start in life, a chance to reinvent itself from impenetrable junk repository into organized junk repository — The Beloved Husband stepped in.

“I’ll reorganize it,” TBH selflessly offered, sidestepping the long Honey-Do List I’d generously worked up for him. (We give and we give and we give. That’s what makes our marriage work.)

“Okay,” I said, “but don’t throw away any of my crap without telling me.”

Freshening up the porch is one of several recent efforts to repair and refurbish the 103-year-old behemoth we call home. These undertakings are certainly in response to the global economic crisis: If we fall off the grid and have to convert our house into an urban homestead/fortress that we can’t venture out of except to harvest root vegetables from what was once a lawn, I want it to look nice. But also, it turns out that many of my dad’s adages are true…in this case: With assets come responsibility. The porch was beat, and I’d grown sick of looking at it every time I walked through from the back door to the kitchen.

Several days after the tarps came up and the VOC’s had dissipated, I was picking adorable turkey figurines out of the trash bin and TBH had reconfigured the porch into a curing room.

Once he set up the metal hanging rods (repurposed trashpicked closetware courtesy of moi), TBH had no choice but to call in the Poet-Butcher, his partner in meat-curing crime. Off they went to Restaurant Depot, where they purchased 80 pounds of pork shoulder. Or was it butt?

Much bleaching of kitchen surfaces and soaking of intestinal casings later, here is the result. Every day, the perfume of butifarra, chorizo and garlic sausages grows stronger.

“What if they drip, the way they did in the guest room?” I asked. The porch was so shiny, so bright, so grease-free.

“I’ll put pans under them.”

I stifled a whimper.

Meanwhile, the beagle assumed a new command post, forsaking her cushy bed for a fragrant promise, a savory dream.