One quality that makes the numbers so present is their bigness: On a yearly, monthly, and even daily scale they can be daunting.  To be on track, we need 615 calories each day from the yard — a threshold that has consistently proven difficult to reach.

In fact, we never have.

Yesterday we got as near as ever, consuming 606 calories from the yard.  On top of that, we shared 106 additional calories with our good friends Paul and Amy, who have a fine garden of their own.

What we ate is a good lesson in how hard the daily number is to hit: seven eggs and 2.5 pounds of tomatoes.  Two of the eggs went to pancakes for breakfast, and the other five to excellent egg salad sandwiches for lunch.  We made a raw tomato pasta for dinner, using four kinds of tomato (Yellow Pear, Ace, Roma, and Cherokee Purple) and basil from the yard.  All good, but we couldn’t, and shouldn’t, eat so many eggs every day, nor could we stomach so many tomatoes no matter how varied the flavors.

What worked in getting close to our daily goal was a little bit from the yard in each meal.  What we need to work on is creative ways to use what’s available at the time, in some cases tucking an edible we’re tired of into a larger dish so it’s not so present.

We would also benefit from an additional, reliable source of calories, something like the eggs — but not.  I’ve been considering keeping bees for honey and as pollinators, but will likely wait until our daughter is a bit older before massing stinging insects around the house.  A pair of avocado trees that fruit in alternate seasons might work, supplemented by something high-calorie that keeps well, like a nut.  Another option would be devoting more space to grains or successive plantings of potatoes.

Likely, a combination will best suit our palates and needs, while garnering us more 600-plus days like yesterday.

A little more than two years ago my mom passed on to me a little potted avocado tree, about a foot tall.  A neighbor with excellent gardens and flush avocado trees had given it to her.  It had been grown from seed.  Knowing my preoccupation with plants (because she’s my mom), she re-gifted it to me, and I was able to coax a few feet of growth out of it that summer.  These days it stands a bushy six feet tall.  This past season it sprouted flowers for the first time, but to our disappointment it produced no fruit.  Not one.

I dismissed it as a first-year-flowering thing and moved on.  But in talking with my mother-in-law, Kat, a landscape designer and all-around plant know it all, she expressed concern that the tree might not ever bear.  Chatting at Evergreen Nursery, where she works, we double-checked with the manager, who said the same: It wouldn’t produce because it was from seed.  I needed to get a grafted tree from a nursery.  I had heard this before when shopping apple trees, and, frankly, I was skeptical.  It sounded like something growers and sellers pitched to keep customers on the leash.

It sounded like a dodge.  Trees have grown from seed and successfully reproduced through fruiting for millions of years.  Come on.  My tree grown from seed won’t produce fruit?  Now that it’s commercial, it’s suddenly an evolutionary dead end?  Without grafting, this species is done?  Thank natural selection for humans and their grafting skills because avocados are damn good.

I dug in and researched the shit out of this question.  Irresponsibly, too, because I wasn’t looking for an honest answer but the capitalist conspiracy I’d invented.  But it wasn’t out there.  Not really.

My avocado tree will bear fruit, but not for four to seven years — or longer (trees are patient creatures).  And the avocados it does produce are unlikely to be true, meaning they won’t taste like or be of the same quality as the parent avocado.  That’s the lie.  It’s not guaranteed that the avocados of seed-grown trees will be inedible.  There’s a chance that in their individuality these natural trees might produce some great flavor that we’ve never tasted before.  I mean, all the avocado types we preserve and pass on through grafting originated somewhere, a flavor personality created in a fashion not unlike our own species’ individuality.

Avocados deal in simple dominance, genetically speaking, just as we do.  Their chromosomes have dominant and recessive alleles, and the dominant ones win out every time and are expressed.  The traits come and crash together during sexual reproduction, but rather than a brown-eyed girl, you get a pebbly little avocado with a seed that contains its own flavor profile, its own chance to attract giant (extinct) mammals with guts big enough to pass the seeds once the tasty fruit is consumed.

I wrote this post with the intent of giving away my natural avocado as an ornamental to the first taker on Craigslist.  We have already picked up a grafted, reliable Hass and Fuerte.  No surprises.  But that’s not really sporting.  The Hass cultivar originated in the yard of a California mail carrier named Rudolph Hass in 1935, and now it’s a celebrated type with billions of fans around the world.  Who’s to say that this tree from my old neighborhood, given to me by my mom, doesn’t have the same chance?

This is America, damn it.  This tree could be president.  If it wanted.