Notes from Aboveground

Cukes not nukes

NB: First draft summer posts! Just typing and sending—trying not to belabor the writing!

Here I am sitting next to my garden on Tuesday night. I planted these starts in late May. Now, by mid-July, I have harvested three cucumbers, have nine tomatoes developing (still green), and a handful of peppers starting to poke out. The marigolds are on fire.

Two tomatoes, two marigolds, one pepper (Hatch green chilies, I think), lemon cucumber, Kirby cucumber, shiso, and a nasturtium plant.

I often come out in the morning, around 5:45 a.m., at first light and drink my coffee. Wearing my bathrobe, I fawn over the plants for the first 20 minutes of the day; trim back the tomatoes, help the cucumber tendrils hook onto the trellis, sniff the flowers, look for the Black Widow that lives in the wall.

With each sip of coffee, I like to think about the vastness of information stored in each seed that grew that plant. And like a 6-year-old puzzling out the Galaxy for the first time, let that blow my mind. It’s fun, it’s free, and apart from telling you, dear reader, a totally private interior event. And I like to think it’s organically mind-blowing compared to this little manufactured mental blast:

Cat: Claude, how many total cucumbers can one seed create over 10 generations?

Claude: We’d actually run out of Earth space by generation five. By generation 10, we’d have more cucumbers than stars in the observable universe.

Thanks, Claude. You’re a good calculator. Also, seeds are wildly important—there are 1,700 seed banks around the world, which are treated with the same levels of security as nuclear arsenals.

But what I really came to talk about is the interior experience of this little garden.

My podcast boyfriend, Ezra Klein, in a conversation with novelist Gary Shteyngart, declared recently, “Silicon Valley types … [are] on a tear against interiority.” Yes, yes, say more mensch! He summed up how technology is serving up exclusively experiences that create sensations or reactions, which means we bypass a form of introspection that is core to the experience of our interior selves.

Gary says back: “And books are the best way to get into interiority because, what is a book? It’s a communication between one consciousness and another. … This is like a mind-melding Vulcan technology. You’re in somebody else’s head, and somebody completely different from you, hopefully.”

Books, seeds. Same same Vulcan technology. I don’t need to get high to communicate with plants. I know you’re following.

Growing the garden, like reading, takes time. I am in the satisfying part of the summer when plants do actually grow bigger from the morning viewing to the evening viewing—but mostly gardening is just a lot of looking, watering, and peaking under leaves.

It is the antidote to everything in technology these days; apart from a tablespoon of plant food mixed in a watering can every week, there is nothing fast, instant, or sensational happening in the vegetable patch of 828 Allendale Street.

That’s all. Get your grow on. Tell me how it’s going. Pressing send!

May 2026—Start of the garden.