Public Nuisance?

A few months ago I took out the swath of grass between the street and the curb and put in a raised garden bed.  It had been wasted space that just ended up looking shabby and I was tired of picking up other people's dogs' poop.  I thought some peas, beans, and zinnias might brighten up the space and provide us with some fresh vegetables. 

(This is how it looked back in June when we got the ticket)

The City of New Haven saw it differently and demanded that I remove the garden.  The penalty for failure to comply is a $100.00 fine for each citation.  So far I have only gotten the one citation and I have mostly just ignored it.  When I read the statute under which I was warned, the official charge said "Public Nuisance."  

Here is how the garden now looks, in all its glory.  In a city that is objectively not all that beautiful, is this really a public nuisance?

Parli inglese?

If you have read David Sedaris’s latest collection of stories—When You Are Engulfed In Flames—then you probably remember the story of his trip to the doctor and the chain of misunderstandings that led him to be sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, mostly naked, while fully-clothed patients stared at him.

The path that led him to this embarrassing position was paved with the French word “d’accord.” Rather than admit his ignorance of French after having lived in France for years, he would always just answer “d’accord” whenever anyone said something he could not understand. “D’accord” is equivalent to “Okay, sure, I agree with whatever it is you just said.” This quick and ready agreement with just about anything anyone said sometimes led Sedaris into some uncomfortable positions.

I am not mostly naked in front of a lot of strangers, but through a similar instinct away from clarity and toward agreeability there is now a nice woman in my neighborhood who thinks I am from Italy. I was out in the garden last summer and she came strolling down the road, arms pumping her little hand weights as she walked. I looked up just as she was looking at me and we made eye contact. She saw whatever it is people see when they decide to talk to a stranger rather than ignore them and she came over and said something I couldn’t quite get.


When I asked her to repeat the question it turned out to be something about the basil I was growing. I wasn’t exactly sure what she had said, but I told her that I use the basil to make pesto. She said something else and I told her my recipe and that I mostly use my pesto on cheese tortellini. Then she asked me yet another question that I could not quite understand.

Not wanting to ask her AGAIN to repeat what she had said, I simply said “yes.” It was dumb, (I now know), but in the moment it somehow struck me as the right thing to do. Some inner voice quickly sized up the situation and said to me—“yeah—go ahead—agree with her. Whatever she just said can’t have been very meaningful, right? Probably something like ‘Nice weather we’re having.’”

That inner voice was wrong. I know now she was asking if I was from Italy. Turns out, she is from Italy. And now every time I see her coming I have to hide, fast, because I know she is going to want to talk about the Old Country. Yesterday she saw that Erica and I had put in a new raised garden bed and today I found some seedling tomato plants out in the garden. I just KNOW who they are from.

How do I now go back and tell her I am not really from Italy? Can I even do that? Or am I doomed to a lifetime of skulking around in my own front yard, watching, watching, always watching for the woman with the hand weights and the thick Italian accent?

Garden Update

Back in the spring I tore out the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb in front of our house. I built up a raised garden bed with compost from our bin and some bagged dirt from the store and then framed it in with some wooden posts that I staked down to hold it all in place. I also put some tomato plants into pots on the porch and filled some window boxes with flowers to add color.

Turned out to be a great thing. The garden has been a source of real pleasure for me all spring and summer. I took some pictures this morning and wanted to post them.

Black-eyed Susans, marigolds, and chrysanthemums.















A basil plant that has decided to take over a fair-sized chunk of the garden. I have made a LOT of pesto this summer. Excellent recipe:

3 Tbsp toasted pine nuts
3 cloves garlic
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1/4 cup olive oil
1 cup basil leaves

Grind pine nuts and garlic in a food processor. Add salt and basil leaves. Grind some more. Add olive oil and process into the consistency you like.

Goldfinches have loved eating the seeds out of the sunflowers. They are small, beautiful birds and I can tell when they are eating because they chitter noisily to each other as they eat.





We have gotten dozens of juicy, sweet tomatoes that don't quite look as perfect as the tomatoes for sale at Stop and Shop, but they taste far better. Must be all the flavonoids.











I put in just one pepper plant, since we don't use a lot of heat in most of our cooking. Well, that one pepper plant has put out dozens of VERY hot habaneros--far more than we can use. I am just throwing them in the freezer so far.