Before we get into this week’s Stars, we would like to sincerely thank all readers who wrote in for our Stephanie Alexander book giveaway. We received many intriguing dinner party line-ups, with guests including Vita Sackville-West, the Dalai Lama, Peter Dutton, the ghost of Ursula K. Le Guin, and an acquaintance who lost part of his leg in a shark attack. Alas, there can only be one winner, and her name is… Isabella Chow. If we told you her dinner party guests, we’d have to fillet you.
★★★★★ Gardening
As the Brazilian trade unionist Chico Mendes once said: “Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.” So damn true, though these days maybe it’s more like a high-school theatre department, leaving gardening up for grabs again. In the last few months, your editors have been getting into it properly for the first time via a rigorous course at CERES. There are many great artist- and writer-gardeners (Derek Jarman, Jamaica Kincaid) who have authored books about planting beans and their literary-theosophical theories of gardening; we haven’t read any of them. What we like most about digging in the dirt is that you can do it without a single thought in your mind, except for pragmatic considerations of what seed to plant where, how to position a bed so it catches the morning light but not the afternoon furnace, what to feed your worms… Here’s what we’ve learned so far. Good soil looks like airy, disintegrated mud cake. If you’re gardening directly into the ground in the northern suburbs, it’s possible you are yielding crops full of lead. You can use literally anything—styrofoam boxes, pots, a plastic bottle—to make a worm farm. It’s possible to smell the pH of dirt (neutral is neutral, acidic smells sour, alkaline smells sweet). The reason you water plants first thing in the morning is so that they can photosynthesise during the day, and you should water very slowly, with your hose on a gentle, shower-like setting, pausing when you see bubbles frothing and sparkling on top of the soil, and resuming when they vanish… Okay. Knowledge-sharing circle over. We’ve met enough permaculture bros and spiritually-rich community garden Earth mama narcs to know that blathering about one’s connection to a home-grown brassica wears thin quickly. We won’t go on about it. It’s just that if, like, everyone in your suburb grew just one or two vegetables and then you all met up to trade produce every weekend you’d be self-sufficient before next spring…seriously, man…Who does a monoculture crop really benefit? The Duopoly wants you to keep your hands clean. Resist. Sniff some dirt.
★★★★ Gildas
You know when you think about getting that hair style with the bleached roots, and then you start seeing bleached roots everywhere? That’s how we feel about “gildas,” a beautiful name for a girl, and a Basque snack consisting of a skewer stacked with an anchovy, an olive, and a twisty guindilla (a type of pickled green chilli pepper). Gildas have materialised on every wine bar menu, and we are not unhappy about it. They’re delicioso.
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