Abbreviated view of my balcony garden. Just as water is life, so is sticking my hands in soil. This summer, I am growing 6 chili plants, New Zealand spinach, tomatoes, borage (pictured) and red orach (a voluteer). I’ve also started seedlings for my fall garden (brassicas). Not pictured is the ginger I thought would decompose but instead took root. I am very proud of my garden as this year shows my patience has increased. Never before have my chili plants got to the point of producing peppers! For the past few years, I have been buying dried chilis to make my own chili powder. The reality that I’ll soon be able to make that powder from my own homegrown peppers is incredibly freeing…and a sustainable practive that drives me crazy with delight! The plan is to dry the chilis and grind into powder as needed. I hope to have enough to last through to next spring when I will start the process all over again but this time with allium (onions and garlic) powder.
I’ve been wondering, the past few days, about how to integrate my love of gardening into this blog. The other day I went to get some cabbage out the fridge to shred for tacos and found this:
I was amazed that it grew in the refrigerator so much and was actually taken aback to the degree that I did no barbering of the plant/vegetable and just popped into the soil nilly-willy, as you can see. The next day, I was calmer and tore off all the old leaves and composted them. This is what it looked like after that:
I am amazed and totally obsessed with this plant: the fact that it grew, unnoticed, in my fridge; it’s full-throttled desire to go to seed, etc. Deep as that aspect of my love of this plant is, there is an even deeper aspect and that is the color purple. Whenever, I say that phrase “the color purple”, my mind immediately goes to Alice Walker’s book, of course. I still remember the first time I laid my eyes on the words that make up that beautiful story. I was sitting at a round table in a high school classroom. One of my tablemates was discussing it and had a copy in her hands. I don’t remember what she said but I remember it was enough for me to ask to see the book and once it was in my hands, I started reading. Celie resonated with me from the start! I wanted to steal the book from my tablemate but instead, I went to a bookstore and acquired it the only way a teenager with no money could in the pre-metal detectors 80s. I read it all the way home. Then I read it again and again and again. That book changed the trajectory of my life. First of all, I had never before read a story written by a black woman centering black women. Never. It wasn’t even a part of my consciousness as a young black teenaged girl. Little Women, yes. Jane Eyre, yes. Toni Cade, no. Toni Morrison, no. The Color Purple changed all of that and I am forever grateful!
Here are a couple of Alice Walker quotes related to purple-related quotes :
“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
“Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.”
In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983)
Tichaona Chinyelu 
You must be logged in to post a comment.