My sister sent me a picture of a tea canister about a week ago, and asked me if I could decode what kind of tea it was, because she doesn’t drink tea with caffeine in it.

 

This is a tea that a friend gave her from Taiwan, and her attempt to translate the characters left her extremely confused. It turned out that’s because it was a Japanese tea and so the characters for “Kyoto” and “sencha” were the Japanese reading, and everything else was in traditional Chinese characters. It took a little bit of time, but we figured it out and eventually we discovered that she didn’t drink it, but I would, and lo and behold.

 

Tea.

 

This tea is made with rose petals and…something else I never managed to translate in addition to green tea, and it’s a delightfully delicate blend, which, as you know, I almost never say except that I’ve said it seven times in the last year, so apparently I need to eat my words and admit that I like tea blends.

 

Rose can be a really overpowering flavor, but in this blend, it’s there as a soft highlight. This went well with my breakfast this morning, which was cucumbers, tomatoes, an herby dill and parsley yogurt, some smoked salmon, and lemon-pickled red onions that I made a few nights ago for falafel and have been using ever since.

I cannot possibly tell you where to buy this tea, but I do suggest having sisters who get tea as gifts of appreciation from Taiwan!

I have been burning things lately, little by little.

 

Let me explain. A while back, I talked about holding myself back on the garden plans and limiting myself to a few beds because my tendency is to go full hog on something and then overwhelm myself. I promised that I would try to optimize my garden instead of maximize my garden.

 

It turns out that optimization is maybe even worse than maximization. You see, optimization is hard, because there are no completely right answers in gardening. Take for instance, this question: what do you construct your raised bed out of?

 

Ask a Reddit forum, get 19 separate answers, all of which someone will say have disqualifying issues. Pine decays too swiftly. Cedar is too expensive and still decays. Pressure-treated wood leaches chemicals into the soil. Metal isn’t as breathable and impacts soil health and biodiversity.

 

I made a giant list of pros and cons and then made a decision and then said, “no, this is also not right,” and went back and forth and finally found a few people who had done something that (they have claimed) helps create a bed that lasts longer, probably, although I would have preferred to see some kind of control group testing.

 

Anyway, it is based on the shou sugi ban method used in Japan, and it involves charring the surface of the wood (usually cedar, but I don’t really have good cedar available to me where I live), wire brushing off the soot, and rinsing away the other stuff. Oh, and then, if you want, treating it with tung oil for that last step of weather resilience. (We do something like this in the US: look at the base of a wooden telephone pole and you’ll see that we in fact do burn things for longevity in the soil.)

 

So naturally, I have been doing that.

 

Did I mention that optimization is worse than maximization? It turns out that if you want to optimize your garden, you should be rotating plant groups out of beds, and so in the name of optimization I talked myself into four garden beds, which was the opposite of what I wanted. Also a dedicated bed for strawberries, so ha ha ha that’s five garden beds. Also, I wanted them to be about sixteen inches high for not destroying my back reasons.

 

To make a long story short, I have been working on treating the wood for my “small” “optimized” garden since February.

 

A lot of that has been down time: I was going to knock it out in three days (ha), but it turns out, it takes a lot longer to char the surface of the wood wielding the propane torch than I thought, and it takes so much longer, and you’re mostly holding the torch in the exact same spot, that I ended up mildly pinching a nerve in my shoulder and getting weird finger numbness. So I had to back off until that got better and my PT gave me some exercises to help with that. When I went back, I knew I couldn’t just spend nine hours a day on both days of the weekend blasting through this because I tried that and it didn’t work.

 

Instead, I have been trying to consistently burn things for about an hour a day, every day that we’re not in fire danger territory, and so far, that has been the way to make forward progress. (If you’re worried about me getting things in the ground in time for spring, don’t—Denver has a late start to the growing season because we’re at altitude and the weather here is very tricky and loves giving us late spring blizzards.)

 

It is very soothing to burn things for an hour a day. I made a short video if you want to see what it looks like.

This is not a fast process. It is not an easy process. I finish every day covered in soot from the wirebrushing. There are many times when I ask myself what the heck I am doing and I am only finishing the process at this point because it would look ridiculous to have unburned wood mixed in haphazardly with the burned stuff and there is no turning back once the burning has started.

 

So every day I do something and I have conversations with myself as I do, and I think about where we are in this country, and I don’t think about how much I need to do, only about what I need to do today. The only way forward is burn by burn.

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