A garden (and a blog) grows in Brooklyn

Retirement projects and spouses on social media.

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I was asked recently what I do to de-stress. To be honest, I haven’t been coping well. My sleep continues to be a mess and I’ve lost weight this summer. I’ve never had much success with meditation and I’m also now off yoga because of worsening spinal disc issues.

But there is one thing that has given me calm and joy this year and that is gardening.

Yes, I have become that person who putters around the house all day, endlessly fussing over my houseplants and obsessively picking aphids off my petunias. What else am I going to obsess over once my kids are gone? I’ve extended the puttering to my mom’s house too, tending to her plants like those plant-care consultants who come in once a week to water and maintain greenery in offices. I always thought that was a cool job.

But, hey look! Our balcony garden is growing!

The current state of our south balcony—peppers and tomatoes, mostly…

…and lettuce and herbs on our north balcony

We’ve always been casual city gardeners, growing a few pots of herbs on our back balcony. But around the mid-point of summer, which is where we are now, laziness with watering usually sets in and by the time we return from a week or two away in August, we’d come home to a bunch of sad, dying, and neglected plants.

This year, we decided to take balcony gardening more seriously, even starting some plants from seeds and planning more strategically about where to plant what and when. Mark has started to document all our learnings, with plans on publishing recipes using what he grows from our garden in the future.

Yes, against all odds, Mark is now a blogger.

It’s a blog!

I know.
It is kind of funny.
But there’s a back story to this.

You may remember that when Mark and I closed our Brooklyn bakery in 2020, he picked up a Covid-era temp job. He suddenly found himself with time on his hands in the evenings when he would get home from work. If you’ve ever owned your own business, then you know all too well that your work day isn’t confined to the 9-5. Even after a full day of baking in the kitchen, there was always more to do whether it was bookkeeping, chasing after invoices, pre-labeling bags, or printing out postage for packages. This new-found leisure time after dinner was a huge lifestyle adjustment.

Cooking has always been, and still is, Mark’s main joy and pastime, but when the novelty of Netflix binging wore off after a few months, I suggested he might need an “old man retirement hobby.”

During the years of our business when I was running our social accounts, I was always having to remind people that I wasn’t the baker or the one with all the culinary knowledge. Whenever there was a cooking question, I’d punt it over to Mark who would holler the answer from across the apartment, and then I’d hit reply and type up a response.

So it occurred to me late last year that with all his years of chef experience, it might be kind of fun for him to start his own social media accounts and finally get the face time behind his work that he always deserved—which is ironic I know, considering I’ve quit most platforms one by one.

And now, we’ve become that annoying married couple who talk to each other on social media and I kind of hate myself a little.

I’m embarrassed for us

I’m learning that “retirement”¹ is a gradual process and it can sometimes be a painful life transition as we figure out how to quit workaholism. For now, this urban garden blog is a fun side project that keeps him (us)² busy and offers a little incentive to keep our balcony gardens thriving for an entire planting season.

Mark also likes the idea of an online repository for his recipes that the kids can access because right now, they’re scribbled in a 25 year old notebook that is literally disintegrating and handwritten in writing that nobody else can read. And you know what—I think many of us want to leave some kind of legacy behind.

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And now, a little side story

Some time ago, I got a Google alert that our old business name was mentioned with a backlink. With all that was going on with Covid and my dad, I totally spaced on renewing our domain even though we closed our business and didn’t need it anymore. So I thought to myself, oh, someone must have bought it after I let it expire.

Of course curiosity got to me.

So I typed in the URL that was ours for over a decade and what loaded on my browser was a food blog. Ok, that’s cool, I thought.

Until I went over to the about page and found a photo and brief bio of a woman named Jenna.

Well, that’s funny, I thought to myself. That’s my name, what a coincidence.

Until I went over and clicked on a few more links and found that whoever was behind this “Jenna” just scraped all of our press mentions, wholesale stockists, social accounts, and contact info. They even kept Mark’s phone number up as their contact number.

Long story short, I sent a cease and desist letter requesting all that stolen content be taken down and when I got no response, wrote to the hosting company who took it down for me. I realized the site was basically a link farm optimized to earn ad revenue and whoever owned it was using all our backlinks for SEO.³

Lesson learned: don’t let your domains expire if they have any kind of worth.

I hate the internet sometimes.

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Related reading

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Links and things

• Why Gardening Is So Good for You (NYT gifted link)

• What to Know About JD Vance, Trump's 'Anti-Gen Z' VP Pick (Teen Vogue)
  I appreciate Teen Vogue’s journalism to get election issues in front of young voters, and they’re doing some great reporting that not even the big publications are willing to touch.

• Journalism has become ground zero for the vocation crisis (The Conversation)

• Good Recipes for Tough Times The Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Bittman Project reimagine the modern recipe. (Mother Jones)

• Speaking of growing things in containers, The Whitney Museum currently has an exhibit on the 8th floor called Survival Piece #5: Portable Orchard, an installation of 18 varieties of citrus trees. This indoor orchard explores the possibility of a fully sustainable food system amid a questionable future. What was striking was how perfect every leaf and fruit was. When asked, the museum attendant answered that the citrus will be harvested later in the season, which then elicited this jolly response from a museum-goer, “Fabulous! I hope it’s accompanied by a cocktail party!”

  

1. I put retirement in parenthesis because are we ever not going to hustle with a side project, freelance, or a little something-something?

2. So, Mark is not a photographer and while he’s learning how to write blog posts, it needs heavy editing and lots of photo assets and why why why did I make more work for myself, just why?

3. The link farm site went back up when they removed all our content. I think I was more offended that they very intentionally used my name for the “author” who is 99% not a real person and turned her into a white woman.