garden Archives – Lisa Scottoline

By Lisa Scottoline

You may recall I mentioned earlier that I water my garden too much.

That problem is now solved.

Because I’m out of water.

Our story begins when I noticed that the water pressure in my house is low.

Hmm.

By the way, I have well water. We live like pioneers in our township, which has no police, fire, or garbage removal, though I don’t have to sew the American flag.

Thanks, township!

Anyway, the water level in my well generally goes down when there’s no rain, but it was getting worse and worse until I realized that something must be wrong in the springhouse.

If you don’t know what a springhouse is, welcome to the club.

All I know is that it’s a picturesque little shed that houses where the water comes up from the well. More than that I can’t explain, because I have no understanding of how my springhouse works. I never go in there because it’s damp, dark, and scary, like a basement on steroids.

I called the plumbers who specialize in wells and they wanted me to show them the springhouse, so I was shamed into going in. Inside were strange black gauges, weird blue tanks, and two body-size open trays of water, which is the water I drink, evidently laying around all day and night, so that bugs, snakes, paramecium, and God-knows-what-else can swim around in it before it finds its way into the glass that I put to my parched lips.

Delicious.

The plumbers inspect the well and say that it’s fine, so we all leave the springhouse and troop around the lawn to solve the mystery of why I have no water. You don’t have to be Nancy Drew to notice that the grass in my front yard, near the garden, is surprisingly soggy.

Uh oh.

So we go find the faucet for the garden hose, which is in the garage, and the plumbers guess that the pipe must be leaking under the garage, since it was never used until I put in this stupid garden. They say it must have been corroding, but the corrosion was holding it together.

Like me.

Anyway, we trace the leak backwards to the basement under the garage, which is another place I never go because it’s damp, dark, and scary, like a springhouse on steroids.

As soon as we open the door, we see that the basement brims with water. Pieces of wood, broken glass, and kreplach float by.

Long story short, we call in the plumbers who specialize in flood damage and they use three pumps to pump the water out of the basement. They figure out where the leak is in the pipe, but also surmise it can’t possibly be causing the soggy grass. In other words, I have two leaks in two pipes, caused by watering the garden!

Yay!

We call in a third set of plumbers who specialize in second leaks, and these are the guys who put on their booties before going to work.

For a middle-aged woman, a plumber is a booty call.

They find the leak under the soggy lawn but are not sure exactly where. They explain that they will need to dig trenches and lay new water lines, and that an estimator will come out on Saturday to tell me how much my gardening hobby is going to cost me.

Obviously, I have a green thumb.

Dollar-green.

So by Sunday night, as I write, my entire front lawn is a swamp.

The only dry spot is the garden, where the flowers left by the deer are dying of thirst.

By Lisa Scottoline

There’s nothing like home improvement to improve your life.

At least, not in theory.

I say this because I’m adding a garden room to my house, even though I don’t even know if that’s a thing, because I have a garden and I want a room in front of it so I can see it through the window.

Like TV, only without Andy Cohen.

The garden room is attached to the kitchen and since it needed a door, the oven and cabinets had to be moved, and in any event, you see where this is going. Adding a garden room meant that the kitchen got remodeled. Because the thighbone is connected to the leg bone and the leg bone is connected to the wallet.

Anybody who’s ever started home improvement knows that as soon as you improve one thing, you have to improve other things, so that everything is New and Improved, like detergent, only much more costly.

But I’m not complaining.

I feel lucky to be able to make these changes, and since I work at home, I’m spending 24/7 on the premises, I want to premises to suit me. And while we’re turning that frown upside down, let me add that since I’m still terribly single, it’s great to have everything exactly the way I want.

Finally.

And then I’ll die.

My epitaph will read:

HERE LIES LISA SCOTTOLINE

DID SHE IMPROVE ENOUGH?

To stay on point, remodeling the kitchen means that I’m starting to look hard at my priorities, namely, spices. Please tell me that I’m not on the only woman who owns approximately 75,932 spices, accumulated over decades, and that the spices are dusted off every decade, which is the only time they’re even touched.

I’m looking at you, cardamom.

How this came about is that when I moved the oven, I lost the shelf above it, which is where I kept the aforementioned spices, and that meant that I had to find the spices a new home or concede the obvious and throw them out.

So I began to cast a skeptical eye at my spice rack.

And it took me on a tour of my own life.

Let’s begin with Marriage Rookie Enthusiasm.

In that time period of my life, I had just married Thing Two, my daughter Francesca was young and I had two stepdaughters living at home. I wanted to be not only the best mother of all time, but also the best stepmother, so I instantly bought American Mom spices, which you use when you bake apple pie. You know the autumnal array of allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves.

To make a long story short, I made exactly one apple pie.

Divorce ensued, but I got custody of the spices.

Then it was just Francesca and me, and being Italian-American, I decided that I was going to make homemade tomato sauce, or gravy. Mother Mary made the best gravy ever, but she refused to give me the recipe because I was a lawyer.

Don’t ask.

I watched her do it and she always used onion salt, garlic salt, salt salt, and extra salt.

No fresh spices were involved.

Yet it was delicious.

Still I could never make gravy as good as she did, and in time I gave up, though I still have the garlic salt. I feel certain that Mother Mary approves, smiling down from heaven and hoping that the garlic salt has solidified into a sodium bullet.

The next stage of my spice life was Francesca going to college, and that was when I decided I wasn’t going to act mopey because I was an empty nester, and believe me, I got over that fast.

LOL.

But in spice terms, that was the time of my Indian Awakening, an idea I got from a Williams Sonoma catalog. I bought every Indian spice known to man, extending well beyond starter curry into garam masala, turmeric, and vadouvan. They came in round pots full of orange and yellow powders, like nightmare blusher.

These were the coolest spices ever, but I never looked at them again because as an empty nester, I stopped cooking altogether.

Which was coolest of all.

This brings us to the present day, when the only spices I use are salt and pepper.

They require neither shelf, rack, nor cabinet.

They’re sitting alone together on the kitchen island, like survivors of a suburban shipwreck.

Where they’ll stay until the next Williams Sonoma catalog comes in the mail.

Classic Column: Gangrene Thumb

Classic Column: Which Spices Would You Take To a Kitchen Island?

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