How to Grow a Cheeseburger

In which I share my plans for my spring garden and explain why I went missing for a while.

Hello, my friend. It’s been a minute. Please accept my apology for the length of time between letters, but there was a good reason for it.

I almost died.

The tl;dr is that I went for outpatient surgery to fix something at one end of my body and, thanks to the deft maneuvers of the anesthesiologist, wound up with aspiration pneumonia at the other end. The anesthesiologist messed up the intubation and I wound up [Squeamish alert!] aspirating my own blood. The following 10 days were spent in the hospital trying to recover from a Covid-like pneumonia that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. It was “Let’s think about putting you in the ICU on a ventilator and sedate you until you are feeling better” bad.

Thankfully, as a wise man once said — in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” — it got better. A huge and heartfelt thank you to the nurses and doctors (but mostly the nurses, who are incredible people) who worked to save my life.

Special thanks to my friend, Pam Schwartz, for lending me her neck pillow, who is unironically named Dick Clark. He was so helpful I bought one of my own. If you, too, think that resting your exhausted neck on a stuffed penis (complete with foreskin pocket) is hilarious, you can buy one through IHeartGuts.com.

So here I am. Mostly recovered, but not really up to doing a food photo shoot just yet.

Instead, at the recommendation of my friend, Amy Reynaldo, I am going to talk to you today about gardening, and how to cut out the middle man when it comes to meal planning.

It may seem odd to do this in the middle of winter, but if there is one thing I know about devoted home gardeners, it’s that any time spent not gardening should be spent on planning your next garden. The seed catalogs come out at this time of year for that very reason. It gives us something to do until we can get back outside in the spring.

The thing about home gardens is that, very often, growers are limited to raising the raw ingredients for a meal, which then have to be combined with other ingredients to qualify as an actual meal. This is a wonderful experience, but it’s a waste of time and money.

If you wanted to eat a cheeseburger, for example, and you wanted to grow the ingredients yourself, it would rapidly become the world’s most expensive cheeseburger. The costs of growing the wheat and the sesame seeds for the bun alone would be prohibitive.

Not for me. I’m an impatient gardener and I also get a mean hangry, so waiting for all that stuff to grow is out. Instead, I am proud to announce that I have invented a method that I am calling Advanced Gardening (patent pending). When I say “advanced,” I don’t mean that it’s difficult; it means that I am advancing the process along a bit faster than usual. Stay with me on this.

I am not a good baker, because baking is very persnickety and requires an attention to detail that I do not possess. When I cook, I adhere to the culinary equivalent of Bob Newhart’s theory of accounting: “As long as you get within two or three bucks of it, you’re OK.” So you can see how baking a cheeseburger bun might be beyond me.

Instead, I sow them directly in the garden, using store-bought buns. Don’t let anyone tell you that store-bought buns will not grow properly because they spray them with something that prevents them from sprouting. I have done this for years with no problems.

Once the buns are planted and the first few leaves come up, I water them in with a lightly whisked egg and one cup of vegetable oil. If you want the kind with sesame seeds, sprinkle a handful around the base of the plant to fertilize it.

Next comes the patty. Not everyone believes me, but you can grow both meat- and plant-based patties in your home garden. The thing is, the trees take a long time to grow and produce fruit, so be sure to have started your plants three to five years ago for the best crop. (That’s a lot funnier if you have ever planted a fruit tree and then been told you have to wait an eon to see a single apple.) When the patties fall to the ground, they are ripe.

Pickles are easy. I just grow them right in the jar. Personally, I prefer to grow the Vlasic variety, but you do you. They are a vining crop and they tend to get heavy, so make sure to give them some support, such as tying them to a stake. Baguettes come in handy for this. Be sure to water them in with vinegar on a regular basis, and plant some garlic around them for the best flavor.

The highly sought-after lemato plant (tomatuce?) is a recent product of the Lazy Gardeners Guild. The LGG has worked for years to cut down the steps to growing everything separately, and they have produced a lettuce/tomato hybrid that is not to be missed. Juicy and sweet, it adds a lot to a cheeseburger. Water that baby in with some ketchup. Or mustard, if you are feeling spicy.

Oh, right, the cheese. Everyone knows that a good slice of American cheese is the best topping for a hamburger, and if you disagree with me, that’s fine. Go find a cow, milk it, and produce the cheese. I’ll be waiting here for you, eating my cheeseburger. Anyway, American cheese is one of those crops that gives more to the soil than it takes, making it a great thing to have in your garden. It literally removes plastic from the soil and uses it to grow a protective wrapper around the fruit, much like tomatillos. Use whole milk to water your cheese plant, as skim milk is an abomination unto the world.

When the crops are ripe, harvest at least one of each ingredient and then just stack ‘em. Boom, you have a delicious, homegrown cheeseburger.

And it only took the entire summer to grow.

Until next time,
Deb