To Shorten the Tail

When we all started working from home, it was right around the time we start to think about what to plant in our backyard garden for the summer. While my pitiful intolerance for any climate above 80 degrees fahrenheit makes summer my least favorite season, the one redeeming quality I find in it is the food we get to eat from our garden — juicy tomatoes, perilla leaves with just the right amount of bite, and the crispy bunches of lettuce that would find its way to our dinner table most evenings to be used as ssam, or Korean wraps. In our house, it’s not summer without our garden vegetables.

Behind these summer meals is my force of a mother. There’s a Korean saying that those with the propensity to overestimate have “big hands”. It’s most often associated with mothers who are overzealous in the kitchen and make absurdly large portions of food. My mom, who undoubtedly wears the pants in our family, has the biggest hands of anyone I know (theoretically, of course). Every meal is a perfectly orchestrated symphony, with an intricate harmony of side dishes, entrees, and soups that leave absolutely nothing to be desired. If cooking were a sport, my mom could win over a football stadium.

I have just one grievance when it comes to my mother’s cooking. There’s another Korean saying that those with a tendency to leave things behind have “a long tail”. With hands as big as my mom’s...well, you can only imagine how long the tail must be. It’s always pained me to see how much food goes to waste in our house. Her passion for feeding her family often results in multiple trips to the grocery store a week, her stomping grounds. My dad, siblings and I trained ourselves to the level of competitive eaters, furiously working to keep up with the feasts we’re served every night. But try as we might, and as quickly as our waistlines expand, the trash can always ends up as full as our stomachs at the end of each day.

In a continual saga that spanned over several nights at the dinner table in March, the main topic of conversation was what we should plant in the garden box. We had just been issued the stay-at-home order in California and my dad, who is not one to sit idle, had grand plans to expand our garden from one to two boxes. With double the real estate, he and my mom meticulously selected our summer crop: the usual perilla leaves, tomatoes, and lettuce, plus new additions of eggplant, squash, cucumber, and peppers.

I could already taste the sweet, crispy lettuce on my tongue, but I couldn’t help but dread how much of it would inevitably go to waste. We ate as passionately as we could, but could never keep up. Mulling it over the nights of garden planning eventually led me to ask my parents a question that, frankly, I couldn’t anticipate their reaction:

“How would you guys feel about having a compost box?”

It made sense to them. Waste from the garden, in addition to food scraps from our day-to-day, wouldn’t be sent to the landfill this way. We’d nurse it over the summer, feed it as we do our own bellies, in hope that it returns a fertile soil to be used in next year’s crop. We also had all the time, and willpower, in the world. It wasn’t like we had anywhere to go. So on the last weekend of March, we built another 12 foot garden box, and a complimentary compost bin. We bought our seedlings, watered our soil, and watched over our box as its contents came to life.

It’s now August, and we’re nearing the end of our gardening season. Just a few weeks ago, both boxes were overflowing with it’s seasonal offering. As a reflection, our compost box is well on it’s way, too. I can’t say that nothing goes to waste in our house anymore, but what I can say with confidence is that in our humble 2x2 compost box, we’ve found a trusty aid to help shorten our collective tails.