Tending Your Garden of Life with Imagination

Nadja Maril
4 min readAug 13, 2024

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Leave town in summer and gardens tend to go a little WILD. I was gone less than three days and although my husband did plenty of weeding in the flower garden, he neglected to pick all of the tomatoes. He told me he picked tomatoes and ate some, but I found plenty rotting on the vine hidden behind the tangles of leaves and stems curling around the metal cone shaped baskets that are supposed to keep the plants organized. He pleads guilty to not pruning and cutting back surplus branches as do I. We love the smell of the tomato plants and see the budding flowers and leave them be. The results: we get plenty of fruit, but in late summer the garden needs constant harvesting.

Analogous to life in general, a garden requires constant maintenance. The more you put into the garden, the more beautiful and interesting it becomes. However, if you neglect it, the weeds take over and your plants no longer thrive. And when you plant herbs and vegetables, they should be harvested and used.

{So my writer friends, keeping tending to your manuscripts and by all means, as painful as it is to receive rejections, keep sending work to publishers.}

Some crops fail and you try again. Others, like our Kohlrabi produce more than we know what to do with and as I refuse to let anything go to waste, I’ve been devising new recipes. A few weeks back I wrote about our Kohlrabi and provided a recipe for the cut-up bulbs and leaves to be sauteed. A nice addition to any stir fry, one may not want to eat stir fry for every dinner. When the weather gets hot and humid in Maryland, I like to eat a salad or two with something cooked on the grill. So here is a recipe for Asian style Kohlrabi and carrot slaw which makes use of the bulbs. The leaves of the plant I sauteed with garlic and onions for approximately seven minutes and used them as a topping for flatbread pizza.

ASIAN STYLE KOHLRABI & CARROT SLAW

Ingredients

Six Kohlrabi bulbs (peeled)

Three carrots peeled

1 cup of fresh chopped cilantro

Juice of one lime

2 Tbsp toasted sesame oil

1 tsp Harissa (a North African spice blend with chili)

1 tsp grated ginger

Grate the kohlrabi and the carrots, add the cilantro and blend in the other ingredients. You may want to add salt and you may want to increase or decrease the Harissa. It is all a matter of taste. This slaw works well as an addition to a taco or a sandwich. And it can to added as a variation to enhance a tossed spinach or lettuce salad.

SUMMER PARTY WRITING PROMPT

I was visiting with two classmates from my MFA program (Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine) and I ‘d just read about surrealistic poetry prompts, so we made one of those prompts , courtesy of The Forever Workshop by Chill Subs and Karan Kapoor, into an after dinner game and could not stop laughing. Each person: Sandy, her husband Steve, Leah, and myself each wrote down four disconnected questions and four disconnected sentences in the general form of an adjective/noun/verb/adjective/noun. We went around in a circle randomly asking each other a question and the next person responded with one of their sentences. I cannot reproduce our results, but I can share my own surrealist poem created from what I wrote down.

Surry Courage Surrealism

How long does it take to write a beautiful novel?

Wild blueberries into roll high voices.

Why does the moon look as if it has a face?

Red apples stroke shiny tables.

How will our world end?

Busy crickets sing white moonshine.

When will humans stop fighting.

Maybe when green beans pop inside wet frogs.

Silly or profound? Writing doesn’t always have to be logical. Sometimes it is informative to experiment.

Thank you for reading, and if you haven’t already signed up to follow me on WordPress, Medium or Substack for FREE and read my piece “My Inheritance” recently published by Five South here. Learn more about me at Nadjamaril.com.

Originally published at http://nadjamaril.com on August 13, 2024.

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