The view

My bedroom looks out onto a roof. You can get to the roof from a door or a window. Most of the roof is flat, though there is a pointy bit sticking up. This space simply begs for a rooftop garden, with maybe a very small table and two chairs. I took one look at it and my memory dredged up a vision of Square Foot Gardening (who here is old enough to remember Square Foot Gardening?).

I should really introduce Square Foot Gardening to Holland, or somebody should. It was practically created for this land of maniac orderliness and limited space.

Anyway, my roof gets sun all the livelong day. And yet, my vista was until recently limited to those flowerpot looking thingies on a roof and tar paper shingles. Well, it looks like tar paper. This is partly because I have been clinging to the transitory nature of our stay here. However, what with the major adjustment issues we have been dealing with, there has been universal agreement on one thing: we have to work out some way to not disrupt things again at least until the new school year starts. Which means a comittment of at least one growing season to staying here.

So of course I loaded up my kids in the wagon (no, it isn't litle, and it isn't red, either) and went off in search of growing things. This dredged up a long standing argument in my home, which is what to grow. I believe in things I can eat; when I say "garden" you might just as well tack the word "kitchen" on the front of it. I want a 12 month kitchen garden. I want basil and I want thyme and I want mint and the occasional tomato. I want beans and if I had an arbor I would grow watermelons and squash on it. * My own personal specialty used to be edible wild plants -- drop me in the woods anywhere in Georgia and I can come up with a meal.

Hey, what can I tell you, my mother collected a basement full of canned goods against the depradations of life, I collected information on what to do when the can opener gave out.

Dearly Beloved wants flowers. Specifically, he wants cutting flowers. Dearly Beloved has a tremendous affinity for cut flowers. He can walk over to the flowers I put in a vase, touch them twice, and voila, a perfect arrangement worthy of the pages of House Beautiful appears from nowhere. He also knows what container to get for which flowers, and does not limit his options to vases. Cut flowers even live longer when he puts them in water, with or without 7-Up. It is very irritating, I must say.

Now, Dearly Beloved has no plans to mess about with dirt. It is my job is to make flowers appear in a garden, should we have one. He has been known to operate a tiller on my behalf, though this required my looking extremely small (no trick) and helpless at the appropriate time. Beyond that, forget it.

And I know nothing about flowers, except that they come in annual and perennial varieties and seem to require a great deal of sun. Well, okay that its't true either. I know a lot about angelica, carnations, dianthus, chamomile, nasturtiums, pansies, marigold, violets. **

So there I am looking at plants and seeds. I get a bunch of bulbs to toss about -- even I cannot screw up bulbs, and I have in my house two pairs of hands which very much like to get muddy, so bulbs are a natural. No, actually, I did not get tulips (even though they are edible, too) . I did get freesia, because I like the way it smells.

And I got a very few things to eat. Tomatoes and peppers and strawberries and basil and thyme and...erahem.

So I took them all home and we went to plant them. The strawberries went in two homemade strawberry jars which began life as containers for race cars. The seeds I put in plastic boxes to sprout and set them out with the rest.

The it started to rain. And rain. And rain. And I did not put drainange holes on my sprouting boxes. So I am now trying to spout seeds in a box which alternates between two states: dry and in full sun; or a puddle.

Oh, you mean like the rest of Holland?

I think I shall have to try again, with drainage holes. I think I drowned the little buggers.

But the strawberries are very happy, so I may just wind up with a view of strawberry fields on the roof. That would be okay, too. And I can eat them.

*Here's an oddity, by the way: Dutch does not apparently contain a word for "squash", that is, the members of the genus cucurbita known in English as squash. It has individual words for yellow squash and butternut squash and acorn squash and zucchini and so on. But of the three Dutch folks I have had occasion to discuss this matter with (hey, squash does not come up in daily conversation, does it?) not one of them ever related a zucchini to, say, a butternut or a pumpkin. The only reason it came up in the first place is that I was trying to explain why the best pumpkin pies either use canned or use a combination of pumpkin and butternut squash. +

+Because fresh pumpkin is watery and and has very little taste unless you have a massive volume to start with and then cook it down for ever, that's why.

**note to Carol: yes, I know these are all edible flowers, that's why I know something about them. Don't tell anyone else.