Quarantine Radish Watch

I planted radishes on March 17. Radishes like cold weather. They only take 24 days to grow. Maybe, I thought naively, they’d be ready by the time this whole quarantine thing was over.

Urban farming came to me reluctantly. I grew up across the street from a cornfield. There were 40 people in my high school graduating class and we could all differentiate types of manure by smell. For the uninitiated, chicken is the worst. When we’d take field trips to bustling metropolises like Columbus, Ohio, I’d fantasize about the anonymity of being in a crowd of busy-looking people, of working in a skyscraper. I liked the idea of a fast-paced life, far away from corn.

When I hit college, my fun, creative friends—the types who should have been fantasizing about moving to cities with me—found mid-00s sustainability. Everyone was reading Wendell Berry and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and talking about going in on plots of land and getting chickens together like a Portlandia sketch.

It took ten years of cramped apartment living and terrible grocery store produce to see the appeal of getting my hands dirty again. I began with failed attempts at fire escape container gardening. Tomato plants that grew precariously tall, then got flies before they produced anything edible. Windowsill rosemary my cat knocked over. Over-watered basil, under-watered basil. Finally, last year, I moved into a house with a tiny backyard. A garden bed of one’s own.

I planted some apple trees last year, which should be yielding fruit by 2024. But I’m quarantined now, and spending more time in the backyard this spring than I did all of last year. Watching the apple trees slowly reawaken for spring wouldn’t be enough entertainment. I needed a quicker return on investment: radishes. I don’t even love the taste of radishes that much. Gently patting two lines of seeds into the soil, I knew they’d nourish a different part of me: my need for near-instant gratification. Radishes are as close to bustling as garden beds get.

My old roommate has a radish tattoo. She liked that radish and radical both came from the same Latin word for “root.” Root word: root. We lived together on top of an Ethiopian karaoke bar eight years ago. This apartment had zero bathroom storage, so we’d buy toilet paper rolls one at a time at the bodega around the corner. 

I used to complain about how gross the basement in my current house is. The house is old, and the basement has a dirt floor in sections. Now I’m just happy that I have a bulk box of toilet paper from January down there. Gratitude for a room with a dirt floor and the tiny, patchy backyard with my apple trees and radish sprouts.

That same roommate was the one who tried to convince me that I could cure a yeast infection by putting a clove of garlic in my vagina. I demurred and made the uncomfortable twelve block walk to the drugstore, but maybe it would have worked.

I now have garlic growing in my tiny backyard, across from the radishes. The plan was to eat it, but who even knows anymore.

We were living on top of the karaoke bar the night Whitney Houston died. Everyone was trying their homages.

The Greaaa Test Love of all IS Happening to Meee-eeee

Eye-ee-eye-ee-eye will always love You-hoo-hoo.

The back soundtrack didn’t carry up the three stories, but those drunken, sincere, off-key vocals did. A community funeral.

I’m seeing early reports of which famous musicians are sick or have died. And all the collective mourning is Youtube Videos and Spotify playlists. I wonder which losses will be front of mind when we gather at karaoke bars again. I wonder if I’ll be able to cook the radishes for friends. They should last for a while in the fridge.

I’ve been posting a Radish Watch on my Instagram Stories, sharing fuzzy, unartful close-ups of what I think are radish sprouts. I might be Instagramming weeds, but I don’t think any of my friends know enough about plants to tell the difference. If they do, I hope they don’t tell me.