kumquat marmalade: surviving botanical boot camp

Golden raindrops beckon me from the newly built pergola. They come from Gingy, a tiny kumquat tree that is one of the newer additions to the Martinez garden, which, with my challenged green thumb, turns out to be more of a botanical boot camp than anything else: who ever can survive, deserves to stay.

There’s been a plethora of attendees at the Martinez botanical boot camp, beginning with the numerous lovely hanging plants, ones that are bright and happy and nourished when I purchase them but end up mangled dry messes: telltale signs of abandonment or over care. I try, I tell you I try. I buy all sorts of expensive potions: organic concoctions with photographs of healthy bright plants splattered on them and microscope writing promising fertility and growth, but then I lose interest or desire or simply and awfully forget, until it is too late and I attack the dead plant with a hearty sprinkling of garden magic and a desperate overdose of water which flushes briefly through its dried roots and splatters loudly on the Saltillo tile as in angry reprieve to my carelessness.

I want to be different about it, I do. I see myself as a lover of all things nature, and my garden is no exception. I wander the aisles of local nurseries, endless outdoor rows of bountiful plants and imagine these beauties nourishing my air and creating a lush tropical landscape upon 9340 N.W. 17^th Street. And then I buy them and they are in shock with boot camp and die.

Mother nature is not much of a help either, supplying no rain when I am too lazy to bother with a hose or offering up unexpected frigid weather that demands I take my hanging plants indoors for shelter. This is too high maintenance for one that has two children that barely made it through babyhood in tact.

Which is why I celebrate proudly the foliage that survives my tough love. There’s Lilly, of course, my twelve-year old Hibiscus plant that was my first child, long before the kiddies arrived. She knows no other home or parent and seems just fine: happily thriving in mountains of bright pink flowers, she is my reminder that, in the garden, I did something right. The nameless cactus has also been quite a resilient fellow, surviving six years of my neglect as well as my children’s constant prodding and poking and tripping over (the 5-stitch scar above my son’s eye is thanks to Cactus…)

So Gingy didn’t know what was waiting for her when I took her from the magical Flamingo Gardens Nursery and stuck her in the earth here. But so far, she’s fared quite well, offering up a healthy explosion of plump kumquats that where dutifully ripped off by my two young gardeners-in-training and then boiled up into a delightful marmalade. She’s now rather barren of course, only tiny leaves remain, that, upon close inspection, sport holes from some sort of fungi or worm or something demanding further care. She is angry with me, I know. I haven’t surrounded her with orchids and pomelos as she was in her former home. I’ve only planted her, waited eagerly and stripped her of her goods. Cheated her in a sense, she must assume. But I look at it another way, hoping she serves as much an inspiration to me as a gardener as she has as a cook. The marmalade is golden, tart and delicious, offering up chunks of peel that give way to the floral citrus of the kumquat. I have jars upon jars waiting to be enjoyed: a celebration of Gingy lines my refrigerator door. As for the tree, I know I must take care of that problem with the leaves. Maybe buy some fertilizer or some ladybugs to put on her leaves for protection. Something, anything; I owe her that much. But for the meantime, I find myself putting it off for later and enjoying another piece of toast slathered with boot camp perfection.