“Only in America”
DC Radishes, a fresh start to spring
Article by Charles Fenyvesi reprinted with permission
Spring, the mythic season of renewal, began for me in late January, and it was ushered in by a stranger.
It was the kind of lovely, unseasonally balmy day the nation’s capital offers every winter, making daffodils and magnolias as well as people think that winter has been cancelled and spring is about to break out. I was walking toward the poor end of M Street, downtown Washington’s power corridor. Between 22nd and 23rd streets, in front of a dilapidated row house, I saw a pudgy little man digging up what is known as a treebox: a 2-foot wide, 10-foot-long strip of mean urban sod sandwiched between the concrete sidewalk and the asphalt street.
A tree box in DC
He was in his middle 50’s and wore a rumpled, thick, brown wool suit that must have originally belonged to someone taller and heavier. With sweat glistening on his face, he wrestled with a rusty old spade, stopping only to remove a clump of scraggly grass or a piece of broken brick. He also ran into plenty of chewed-up concrete. Patiently and neatly, he collected all of the debris in an aluminum trash can.
I wished him a good morning and asked him what he had in mind to plant. “First radishes,” he said, stopping his work and pulling a 75-cent seed packet from his breast pocket. “Then some more radishes. And maybe later I will plant other vegetables I also like. I am sorry but I don’t know their names in English. Not yet.”
I found out that he had come from Iran a few months earlier, to join his brother who had a little restaurant in the row house facing the strip of land he was cultivating. Both of them had been in the restaurant business before the Iranian revolution of 1979, but they did not want to live in the new Iran. “Khomeini is no good,” he said. “Khomeini wants to kill, kill, kill.” He turned around faced east and shook both his fists in anger. “In Iran I had a big garden,” he said. “Many radishes.”
He took my arm and lead me around the corner to 23rd street, where a much longer strip in front of another row house and an adjacent parking lot had been raked smooth and protected with a fence of sticks and strings, makeshift but attractive. “Here I finish my work,” he said, beaming. “Here will be more radishes.”
I asked if he had added anything to improve the soil.
“Soil?” he asked. “What is soil, please?”
I picked up a handful and asked if he thought it was good enough for growing radishes.
“Soil,” he said triumphantly, delighted to add a new English word to his vocabulary. He rubbed a little of it between his thumb and forefinger, and then smelled it. “Good soil,” he said. “Good America. Good radishes.”
There is no room for Khomeini’s tyranny in this expatriate’s American garden.
I thought that the soil was typical heavy Washington clay mixed with a lot of urban rubble and much too compact for a root vegetable such as a radish. But I did not want to say anything to discourage him.
He explained that he was planting radishes so his brother could serve them fresh in the restaurant. I must come and taste them fresh, he said, because that is the only way to eat radishes. He assured me that I will love their flavor. “Radishes are special,” he said.
He showed me the size of radishes he planned to harvest, and I thought that his expectations were high. But I did not have the heart to tell him that in America, radishes do not grow as big as apples.
Perhaps his radishes will.
This article entitled “Only in America,” originally appeared in the May 1988 issue of Organic Gardening magazine, in the section called, “Another Look.” The article is written by Mr. Charles Fenyvesi and is reprinted here with permission.
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Photo Credits:
Treebox: photo credit: drewsaunders via photopin cc
Radishes by TACLUDA can be found here: http://www.rgbstock.com/searchgallery/TACLUDA/radish
Soil: photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography via photopin cc