Requiem Vegetabilis

Though we haven’t been baking sourdough or whipping coffee, Jess and I aren’t entirely immune to COVID food trends. We’ve made The Stew, The Cookies, and countless pizzas from scratch. Plus, about two months back, driven by Instagram posts featuring the idea, Jess talked me into regrowing scallions and celery from scraps.

Doing so is remarkably easy: you take the bottom inch or two of a scallion or celery plant, submerge it about halfway deep in water, and set it by your window. Et voila, the scallion will begin to grow inch after inch of new stalk, and the celery root will quickly bloom new leaves.

We started out with a rubber-banded bunch of five scallions in a narrow glass, and a celery root in a shallow glass bowl – Jess named them Scarlet and Cecilia, respectively. And, over the course of three or four weeks, they shot up fast enough that the change was obvious day by day. Although my (public, but still rather hippie) California elementary school had a farm on the campus that the students tended, it had been years since I’d grown vegetables, and I’d forgotten how thrilling it is to watch new floral life unfold.

About a month in, however, Scarlet and Cecilia stalled out. Planted in water, they could only draw on the nutrients they already embodied, after which they were stuck, short on the raw materials for further growth. So, we picked up a bag of soil – more expensive than Scarlet and Cecilia had been in the first place – and moved the ladies to two small vases, Cecilia in one, the sisters Scarlet (now spaced out by an inch or two each to give them room for their own roots) in the other.

And, immediately, both started growing again. Somewhere along the way, we also picked up a basil plant, which Jess named Basilio. And, between them all, we had an excellent little window garden going.

In the past week or so, however, we’d seen a couple of flies in our apartment – a rarity in a New York high-rise. And then, last night, Jess realized the source: fruit flies were hatching from the vegetables’ soil, a small swarm surrounding their bases. I briefly Googled for solutions – a layer of gravel atop the soil, traps nearby. But, in the end, we realized that there’s probably a reason most people don’t grow vegetables inside their apartments.

Still, having named the plants, and having watched them sprout, we couldn’t quite bear to just toss them down the floor’s trash compactor chute. We were like the proverbial farmer’s kids, unable to slaughter the pig they’d named and treated as a pet as it grew. So, instead, we transferred the plants to Solo cups, brought them downstairs, and left them on the edge of a planter in front of our building:

Vegetables on a street-side planter.

Up and down our street – even more so during the pandemic – people regularly leave out books and clothing and household decor they’re getting rid of, for passersby to grab if they’d like. And though, in the end, I realize Scarlet and Cecilia and Basilio are still likely to end up at the bottom of a trash bag, we at least told ourselves that maybe some intrepid neighbor – perhaps one of the many in townhouses with backyards along our block – would take the trio home to their own garden. Hope, like replanted vegetable scraps, springs eternal.

Ordered

I was recently listening to my friend Cal Newport’s excellent new podcast, Deep Questions, and particularly appreciated his advice on procrastination. While he covered a bunch of points, one was that people only fully commit to a plan when they really believe it will work. Which, he observes, is one of the reasons why athletes have coaches: if you can find someone you trust, and let them tell you what to do, it’s then far easier for you to (per Nike) just do it.

Over the years, I’ve learned that even works if you’re coaching yourself, at least so long as you can erect enough distance between your coaching and doing selves. When I first started programming my own workouts, I would chart out each day’s workout that morning. But, it turned out, I was far too much of a wimp to make that work; imagining how horrible an exercise or conditioning circuit would be later that day, I would inevitably scale back to something more palatable, and I pushed myself far less than I could have in result. So, instead, I started programming increasingly far in advance, eventually reaching where I am now: programming two weeks ahead. At that gap, future Josh’s suffering seems far more abstract, and I’m apparently willing to subject him to pretty much anything. Conversely, when I’m actually doing the workouts, past coach Josh seems distant enough as to be beyond question. “Well,” I’ll think, “I don’t really want to do this workout, but he says I have to.” And, weirdly, that’s enough to get me to do it.

Recently, I’ve also discovered a similar, albeit much faster, trick for daily productivity. As I’ve written before, when my to-do list reaches too great a length, I’ll reach a point of overwhelm sufficient to grind me to a halt. Instead of just choosing something and chipping away, I’ll stare at the over-long list, and not do much of anything at all.

But, this week, facing an unexpectedly long lineup of obligations, I instead took my list and randomly sorted it, then started at the top, and worked my way sequentially down. Small as it may seem, taking the choice of next task out of my own hands has been enough to get me going. I no longer was choosing to do something; I was just being told (albeit just by a stochastically scrambled version of myself) what I had to do. And, dumb as that sounds, it seems to have worked. (Witness this post, as blogging was otherwise on the list of stuff I was studiously not getting done.)

As a general principle, then: either get someone you trust to boss you around, or boss yourself around at a (temporal or technological) distance. Amazingly enough, it totally works.