Before any of the planned plants go into the garden, I like to check what volunteers come up. In my window box, which has never sat in a window despite being set up at 3 different addresses, I see these little guys that I can’t identify.

They’re too small to get a real idea, so I’m mostly just trying to see if I can accurately guess whether the soil it’s growing in ruins any edible plants that grow in it. I may have left it too close to the roof of the first house, and too close to the roof of the shed at the apartment in Philly. And I know that, rationally, foraging in the city is actually fairly safe, at least when it’s fruits. (Shoots and roots, not so much, as I understand it.) But we were only one building away from the road, and like, I still have OCD despite working very hard on managing my symptoms.

Anyway, could be beets. Could be lambsquarters. How beets would volunteer in this box is a bit beyond me, so I suspect not.

Plant ID is still kinda new to me, and I’m really only good with edible invasive plants–which is most invasives where I am, and that’s for the very simple reason that they were primarily introduced as food, seasoning or medicine. The time you spend hating garlic mustard or dandelions for existing is time that you could spend eating them and enjoying them.

I mean, yeah, rip out the roots, because they propagate extremely easily, and they’re still invasive plants without natural eaters to balance it out without intervention. But wash and prepare and eat them, too. Be the eater. Be ~the balance~.

Admittedly I’ve never totally understood the intensity with which people (and especially other white settlers!) hate weeds, or how arbitrary the designation of a weed really is. Even the “plant where you don’t want it” criteria is ridiculous. Why are you the judge of that? Why should your whims dictate the landscape?

Anyway, there are seeds in the garden, and they are sprouting, but I’m impatient and as soon as it made sense to start buying crunchy greens from the store again, I once again started eating lettuce by itself because I got sick of all the meat I was eating over the winter. My brother usually cooks dinner. He is a very meat and potatoes kind of person. I am not. I would rather have rabbit food. But I don’t want to wait for the carrots to finish growing.

But, in the spirit of being Punk As Fuck in terms of the whole “prefiguring the abolition of grocery stores through gardening” thing, obviously, you have to be DIY. Them’s the rules.

You will find, by the way, that acting on your anarchic values does have rules, kinda. Or principles, at least. Because you have to self-govern. The magic is in the fact that these are not rules made by some centralized authority that doesn’t know or care about you, so if you make up the rules, you can follow rules that are organic (astonishingly not an intentional pun) and that actually make sense.

Usually. There are exceptions, what with the whole OCD thing.

I might have violated my principles a little (a lot) by buying the 4-pound bag of mung beans off of ~the Zon~ but unfortunately ~the Zon~ has created a feedback of loop of being able to offer the best variety and sometimes lowest prices, and then doing so, furthering its monopoly.

And anyway, I think you can utterly despise a corporation or institution and still be stuck using it. That’s usually why you come to despise it.

So. Beans.

At first I had these little dudes in a jar. It was very aesthetic, and all of the moms on Pinterest would have loved it with a little burlap ribbon added to it, or something. Petit Trianon who? I don’t know him.

But I didn’t like the drainage situation–there was no drainage, basically–and I had a ton of plastic cookie tubs from Giant which I had been saving for sprouts, or microgreens, or maybe baby plants that couldn’t go out in the main garden yet. At first I was dumb and used a votive candle and a paring knife to try and melt holes in the bottom for drainage. The primary thing this achieved was just wrapping the tip of the knife in a very thin, form-fitting layer of burnt plastic that had to be scraped off with another knife and then scrubbed away with steel wool.

The upside is that I guess this inoculated me against the fear of stabbing my fingers. My next attempt involved two tubs, one for beans and one to catch drained water, and repeatedly jabbing holes in the bottom of the inside tub with a corn cob skewer. This scared my mom’s dog and I added an optional step of repeatedly tapping the plastic while petting her, to help demonstrate that the plastic cookie tub was not, in fact, going to murder her.

Someone might see those stray crumbs and assume that I eat in my kitchen. I’ll never recover.

It worked. Or the poking holes part, did. My mom’s dog was not really into the ERP session, though she did make a decent amount of progress. I ended up adding air holes for better humidity control to the lid, too, which does not show in that picture…because I had not done it when I snapped that photo. I’m way more comfortable with the humidity situation now that there’s outside air circulating through holes too small for most bugs to try and sneak in. Apparently sneaky bugs is a tradeoff you get with purpose-built sprouting lids. I think that’s not a good tradeoff for a household that spent about 30 years without air conditioning and just relied on making sure air was constantly moving. Bugs are just something you deal with.

I know sprouts have a reputation for getting people sick, but I’m a hardass about food safety–again, the OCD thing—and every time I check on them, they just smell like wet beans. I eat a lot of beans when I have the chance. This is a familiar and safe smell even if it’s a little weird.

Leaves are poking out now, so I think in a few days there will also be a little more air in the sprouting setup simply because all the little baby plants are going to start shoving each other out of the way.

I think I’ll make stir fry.