Sweetpea Bicycles

On the final day of the “Eat Local Challenge,” after an entire week of working hard to find fruits and vegetables that I’d never tried before, I found the Seckel Pear. This came as a joy and a relief. As silly as it sounds, I had been sort of planning my days in part around the acquisition of produce novelty. And this was the day I had slated for the mysterious kohlrabi.

The Seckel Pear has many fine qualities, the most notable being its grown-in-Oregon-ness and its diminutive stature. The size of a plum and the price of a piece of bubble gum, it was just the low-commitment compliment to my lunch that I was looking for. And I enjoyed both bites immensely.

The other aspects of our edible day were more remarkable though. We headed down to the Portland Car Free Day after work to join a crowd of bike-loving folks for some mocktails and a Voodoo Donut Eating Contest. I chatted with a friend of mine who has recently begun moonshining. (His brother, a chemist at UW, has proven his moonshine to be the non-lethal kind.) He’s been making beer and wine – he grows his own hops, picks fruit for wine from friends’ trees. It has been a long time ambition of mine to make blackberry wine so I was interested to learn about the process and what it takes to get started. In a word: blackberries.

After watching the beginning of the donut eating, we headed off to the Newlands’ for dinner. They both are both really crafty in the kitchen and sharing a meal with them was the perfect way to mark the end of our Eat Local Challenge.

Kelly has an urban garden (recently featured in Portland Monthly Magazine) which is no more than the strip on the sidewalks where most folks put stones or shrubs or other intrepid landscaping. Her garden, on the other hand, is a beautiful mix of flowers, trellised vines, and all kinds of herbs and vegetables. We ate a salad full of ingredients that all came from her small, intensively cultivated garden.

Andy told me a story about the delight of one elderly lady, who walked by the sidewalk garden and noticed a big Italian parsely plant. She may have circled the block, but within no time, she was clipping away at her newfound herb plant. She felt awful when Andy pointed out that this was a growing garden, but it is easy to understand her mistake. It was such a splendid fertile upwelling of a median strip that it couldn’t possibly have been put there on purpose. The wonders and miracles of nature are to be enjoyed (and cultivated) by everyone, right?

It makes me look at the strip of dirt outside our apartment building a little bit differently.