Christmas Dinner

Our Christmas dinner was actually more local than the Thanksgiving one was. For Christmas dinner we had a tavern ham that came from Idaho Falls, mashed potatoes--some of which came from Buhl and some which were grown in the Nampa area, gravy made from the ham drippings (okay, so the gravy thickener came from Somewhere Else, USA), and asparagus--which I'd blanched and frozen last spring when it was in season) grown somewhere around here in the Treasure Valley. It was a simple meal, but it was nice, and it was easy to fix. I confess, the fresh garlic I put into the mashed potatoes wasn't from Idaho, but if the fence-spraying boy scout hadn't ruined my home-grown green onion and leeks, I'd have probably had some of that to use. All in all, it wasn't too bad a holiday dinner on the locavore front, and using one of the few containers of frozen asparagus for a special meal in the wintertime was pretty fun. It felt like a novelty, which of course it was, since prior to taking up the locavore mantle, we never used asparagus at all. Now it's a springtime mainstay and a wintertime indulgence.

I received a big glossy heirloom seed catalogue in the mail recently, and now I think I know what Barbara Kingsolver meant when she wrote about how much she likes to look through them when they arrive. This one, from Baker Seeds, is almost as big as a calendar albeit much thicker, and so full of beautiful full-color pictures of vegetables that it might as well be a coffee-table book in its own right. Sigh. Barring any more fence cleaning/staining issues, I think this book might just have the power to inspire me to try gardening again in 2009.

Rice and Beans

The budget is tight enough to warrent using lots of rice and beans--but rice doesn't grow in Idaho, and the last time I went to get long black grass seed "wild" rice, it was out of stock. So other than some imported rice and barley, we're eating a lot of mixed beans, as many local as I can buy. We have bean soup two to three times a week--sometimes for lunch and dinner. I'm still trying for locavore eating, but it's a real challenge during the winter, when the Huz is clamoring for "green veggies" like fresh spinach and lettuce, not green beans and spinach. Time to start preparing sprouts again. Still, I guess locavore eating for at least six to eight months out of the year is far better than zero months.

Turkey Economics

It was time to buy the turkey for Thanksgiving. Last year, a farmer not too far from us had organic free-range turkeys available for sale, and if you didn't reserve one, you could come on a certain date and choose one from the ones that hadn't been reserved or claimed. We got one that had been ever so slightly damaged (clean knife wound, probably sustained during the cleaning and plucking process) and were able to buy it at a small discount per pound. That worked out very well. But this year, the farmer did not raise any turkeys for sale. So I went to the local Co-Op on the date they'd said their organic turkeys would be in.

I had a choice of whether to buy a frozen organic free-range turkey from California at $3.09 per pound, or a frozen free-range turkey (not certified organic, but as good as) from a local source. The local turkeys I saw in the freezer box looked wonderful, large and well-formed and everything that you'd want in a turkey. But they were also $3.69 per pound. I'd so much prefer to buy local! We bought and ate local veggies from farmers' markets all summer long, and it was great. But with the economy being what it is and our budget being so very small right now, 60 cents more per pound to get a local turkey was just too much. So I had to go with the one from California. At least the distance from California to Idaho isn't as bad as it could be. We could live clear across the United States from our source. But if money wasn't an issue, I'd have bought that locally-raised turkey in a heartbeat.

Our locavore experience so far has been a matter of making as many changes as we can without completely breaking the budget. When it comes to veggies, milk, cheese and butter, we've done well. Farmers' markets are off season right now, but we bought a bunch of potatoes from a wonderful lady we met at the Nampa market this year, who we consider a new friend. I'm making all our butter now from cream we have delivered from one of the not-horribly-far-away Idaho dairies. The other day, we used some of my home-grown frozen spinach on a pizza. There are gourds of various types in the garage, both home-grown and locally grown and purchased. I still need to go buy a case or two of local apples and make a bunch of dried apple chips and applesauce, but fortunately, apples do well in cold storage and some local harvest should still be available through approximately February. I've even found locally grown and milled spelt flour at the Co-Op, and the same day I bought the turkey, I also bought the quintessential budget food item: locally grown beans--Great Northern, pink, chili, and split baby garbanzos, all grown in Idaho. As soon as the stock is replenished, I'll be buying more of the Idaho-grown long black wild "rice", which is really a type of grass seed. And red lentils are also grown here.

But some things we use, we just can't get locally or in state, so we usually compromise on those items. Nobody's giving up tea in our house...like, ever. And three out of four won't give up coffee, either. Chocolate. White suger from sugar cane--no beets allowed, since pretty much all Idaho beets are now genetically modified crap. Fortunately, since we started trying to go local back in February, I've been learning what I can get when, and how much work I'll have to plan on doing to get and process it locally so as to have some of whatever it is for winter. It's great to know I won't have to give up most of my favorite things just to eat locally. The few things I actually depend on from out of state are also from out of country, and that list is fairly short. I just wish that the economics of all this would change enough so that more people could support our local farmers gladly and without fear of breaking their budgets. I'll try to post soon about some of the highlights of our farmers' market experiences this summer. We met some truly wonderful people who, in their own special way, are doing great things for our local population in specific and the planet in general.

Restitution

Well, the head of our homeowners' association and the father of the boy scout whose team messed up our house and garden have been attempting to fix the problem. They brought over some thinner or cleaner of some kind from the paint store, but at this point, they'd left it so long that the oil-based fence stain didn't come off the house when they tried to clean it. Then they wanted some of our leftover house paint so they could paint over the damaged area. The only paint we had left is very old and very thick. So they went to the paint store to get some paint in the right color, only my husband had made a mistake and didn't give them the right color, and they failed to double-check and make sure it was correct, so they ended up getting the trim color instead of the main wall color. Now they have to go get the right color and return next weekend to paint that wall of the house.

This whole thing is just a major headache for all concerned, and could have been so easily avoided. I did manage to go to the Co-Op and find out the prices for organic food of the varieties that were ruined in my garden, so hopefully we will at least be able to replace the organic food we lost, even if it's not locally grown. I hope the negligent parties learned something from this mistake. If so, then it wasn't a total loss.

What Next?

A friend just sent me info on the tainted Halloween candy scare. First there was the pet food problem, and now this. Here's an article on the situation. I'm just shaking my head over it all.

What did I say in a previous post? Stupid Homo Sapiens and their chemicals.

The family and I went to see Wall-E tonight, and while it was cute, it was also pretty frightening to contemplate. An Earth covered with garbage, while up in space, there's a spaceship like a luxury liner filled with fat, bloated humans floating around on hoverchairs with robots waiting on them hand and foot. Whoever wrote that did an amazing job of portraying a post-apocalyptic Earth while also telling a tale of romance, action/suspense, and redemption all at the same time. But when it was over, I wanted to go hit the treadmill and re-plant the garden even though it's late October. Which, I'm sure, was exactly the point.

Tonight the Huz and I took out three bins of recycling, and a large rolling garbage bin that was less than half-full. The neighbors had no recycling bin at all, their garbage bin was overflowing with trimmings from their trees and shrubs, and they also had several large black plastic bags full of more trimmings--all spilling out onto the street. I'm not even sure why anyone would put bags full of organic matter into the landfill in the first place. In the days before fossil fuels and global warming, people used to heat their houses with wood. What the heck happened that now we're stuffing perfectly good wood into bags and cramming it into the landfill where it can't even biodegrade?

I think I'm going to make some cookies and homemade candy for my kids, and check over the candy they do get Trick-or-Treating as carefully as I can, and...hope for the best. But I'm getting very tired of being disappointed in my fellow humans.

Looks Like Relish

Smells like relish, too. I admit I haven't tasted it yet, because with pickles you usually wait two to three weeks for it to finish pickling after you've processed it. But the jars all sealed and I now have nine beautiful pints of green tomato relish on my counter. The bad thing was how much of my time was eaten up by the process of making this stuff. The good thing is that assuming it tastes good, I now have all the relish I'll need for quite a while, since we don't use all that much, and I was able to use most of my remaining green tomatoes. It's nice that the early frost didn't make the garden a total loss. (No, that would be the Boy Scouts...oh, well.)

Apparently the homeowners' association is going to try to make some kind of amends for the damage the Scouts did with their stain, but they're hoping they can just clean the stain off the side of the house rather than repainting. News for them...it was oil-based stain on a porous surface. We can wash the stain off our bikes easily enough, since it didn't want to stick to the automotive paint or the steel, but we can't wash it off the leeks and green onions and probably not off the side of the house. Again, oh, well. At least they're willing to address the problem somehow.

I still have enough counter-ripened green tomatoes to make one more batch of that marvelous soup, and tonight we're making pizza with the sauce from the last of our vine-ripened tomatoes. Now that I've mostly dealt with the tomato issue, it's apples next. I need to find a place to pick up a case or three of local apples, and then I'm going to make major amounts of applesauce. I go through that stuff pretty fast when it's available, so I need lots of it to last me and the family until next fall. I think I want to make it out of yellow delicious apples--the stuff I made from our tree was amazingly good, and my teenager even decided she loved it. She devoured the last of what I had made, and now I'm starting to crave more. It makes Tree Top taste like some kind of pale imitation of applesauce. At least the apples will be pretty easy to process. I have the hand-cranked peeler-corer tool for the dehydrated apple chips, and the Squeezo will make short work of the squishing process for the cooked apples for applesauce. In fact, since I really don't need any other ingredients, I'm anticipating that the whole applesauce-canning project could be finished up in two or three days' time once I have the apples.

I do have a container of small Principe Borghese green tomatoes to do something with, and I'm thinking I may just dehydrate them the way I did the ripe ones. Given the dehydration process, I wouldn't think their lack of extra acid would be a problem in their preservation, so it seems like a good way to get a few more sun-dried (dehydrator dried) tomatoes. From the two heirloom Principe Borghese plants we had this year, we got an entire cereal-box-sized container full of dehydrated tomatoes. Not too bad.

The kids and I went out to the pumpkin patch this afternoon--same place we got our strawberries and the few blueberries I managed to go and pick a few months ago. Given our hectic schedule right now, we barely managed the pumpkin picking. We had about one hour today in which to go to the field, find pumpkins, ride the hayride back, pay for the pumpkins, and leave so we could get my younger daughter to her dance class on time. It felt a little rushed, which was a shame, but at least we got to do it in the first place. I also bought some little pie pumpkins for the Huz to process later. Maybe we'll do one pie for Thanksgiving and one for Christmas. I don't know. At least they'll be chemical-free pumpkin.

Green Tomato Relish

Thus far, we've been able to use quite a few of the green tomatoes we saved from the frost. We've had green tomato soup twice, and the Huz said if his mom would have had the recipe years ago when he was a kid, he wouldn't have minded about her wanting to use up the green tomatoes. And for the past couple of days, I've also been peeling, coring and chopping green tomatoes to make green tomato relish. It takes me about an hour and a half to get enough prepared and chopped for one quart, let alone four quarts, but after a very long couple of initial chopping sessions yesterday and two more such sessions today, (plus finally asking for a little help from the Huz) I finally got enough total chopped for my four quarts. It nearly used up all the green tomatoes that were still good, and we'll be able to use the rest of the green and/or indoor-ripened tomatoes over the next few days, so the annual bout of "what do we do with the tomatoes?" is nearly over.

The recipe for green tomato relish is from the Ball Blue Book, and it wouldn't be nearly so bad if it weren't for the need to peel, core and chop. My neck and shoulders hurt a lot from all the chopping, and for a while there, my right hand was starting to get sore as well. But the chopping is finally done, and the tomatoes, peppers, onions and cabbage for the relish is sitting there, salted, working on the second step of the process. We'll see how it all turns out. Based on the sheer amount of work involved in making it, this had better be the best darned relish ever.

Not Again!

After this summer's earlier garden vs. chemicals disaster, I had done what the extension office recommended and soaked down the beds to leach any chemical residue out of the soil. Then after it had had time to dry out again, I'd finally found time to transplant my Carantan leeks into the empty bed. They were looking really good. My spinach plants had bolted and re-seeded themselves, and I had a nice crop of baby spinach coming up. I also had a square of green onions that were getting to be a nice, usable size, and just as soon as I ran out of the ones in my fridge, I was going to pull some up. Then this last Saturday, the second disaster of the year hit. The name of this disaster? Boy Scouts of America. Eagle Scouts, to be exact.

They'd left a cryptic little note on our front door saying that they were going to be painting the fence along the main road in our subdivision--the one that is on the north side of my house. I didn't worry too much because I'd already harvested all the veggies I was going to be able to from the garden boxes on my side of that fence. I didn't worry about the east side fence because they didn't say they were going to be staining that. In any case, the Scout involved didn't even leave me a phone number to contact him if I had any concerns about his project. They did, however, warn us in that note to move anything that was close to the fence so it wouldn't be sprayed. So on Saturday when I was busy and there was no one at home to stop them, he and his group sprayed their stain on my north fence.

And all over the side of my house. And my east fence, which they hadn't said they'd be staining. And next to that east fence, all of my leeks, green onions, and spinach, not to mention the one chard plant that had come up following the earlier fence-cleaning disaster. The last of the food I was going to get out of my garden, toxic, poisoned, and wasted. Again! I'm even more angry about that than I am about the stain that can't be washed off the side of my house.

We can't just re-paint the area of the house that got splattered, either. We'll have to re-paint the whole side! I can't fathom how human beings can be so completely clueless and so destructive. That stain on the house alone represents more than a thousand dollars of damage, since we'll have to hire a painter to come and re-paint it. We don't have time to paint it ourselves, for heaven's sake, and the house is only, what...four years old? Did the Eagle Scout think that I could manage to move my house so it didn't get splattered by his stupid sprayer?

Who stains subdivision fences as an Eagle Scout project, anyway? That makes no sense. We don't even have a high percentage of elderly in our community who might be helped by such a gesture, and it's the homeowners association's job to maintain the community area fences, etc. Now they're going to get a big bill for the damage. I'm done playing Ms. Nice Girl.

Stupid homo sapiens and their chemicals.

It's Good

Green tomatos make a decent soup; who knew? I found a recipe online and finally tried it, and not only was it edible and no one croaked, but the soup actually got the thumbs up from all three family members. In fact, the Huz said he wished his mom had had this recipe 35 years ago when she was trying to find a way to use green tomatoes. It's great to have something to do with it, so it doesn't go to waste! That, and when money's tight, it's great to have just that much more food that I didn't have to buy from a store. Now I have to get some prepared horseradish so I can start making green tomato relish--and probably some green tomato ketsup as well.

The horseradish root I got this year came available locally in the spring, but I didn't need it until now, when I'm wanting to make green tomato relish. I think I'll see about possibly making the prepared horseradish when the root's available and then freezing it until fall when I need it for relish.

Frost

It froze Wednesday night, and Thursday I looked outside to see all my tomato plants, eggplants, squash plants, beans, etc. wilted. I was hoping for a couple more weeks of harvest before frost; in the past, frost has often waited until Halloween before coming, but not this year, dang it. We had a late, cold spring, and now just when my tomato plants were really coming on great with a huge bunch of tomatoes, now it had to frost before October was half over.

My family and I went out this afternoon and took everything we could; all the squash, the three cantaloupes that had volunteered over by the grape vine, the few beans that were left, the last of the tiny little lemon cucumbers, the baby eggplants that weren't through growing, and of course every tomato we could get, from the blushed, starting-to-turn ones to the completely green ones. I'll find something to do with those green ones; I've seen one recipe for chutney, and while I have no clue what one even does with chutney, I'm sure I'm about to find out. I can't afford to turn my nose up at anything that could be used for food.

Tonight I made more applesauce from the last of the bad apples that I'd picked off the tree or gleaned from where they'd fallen. It was almost another quart--not bad at all, really. And we did actually get a dozen nice, clean apples from the tree; the codling moths left us that many, which is almost three times the number we got last year. Now that I know the bug-killed apples make decent applesauce, I'll start collecting and using them much earlier next year, as soon as they're a decent size. The riper they are, the better, but even the not-so-ripe ones made okay applesauce. Hey, it's food, and non-chemically treated food at that. That's obviously why the bugs and birds have been liking it so much. At least the family got a few nice apples for our trouble. Much as I hate to say it, though, I may have to give up and spray next year. That tree had so many apples that I hate to think how many were wasted that wouldn't have been if not for the moths. We'd have had a bumper crop, just from one tree. I'll have to ponder that and make a decision by spring.

I'm bummed today, though. I hate to see the growing and harvest season end; I feel as though I've barely had a summer, and now it's over. Oh, well. We learned a lot with the garden this year, we found out what worked and what didn't, and we'll know how to do it even better next year. And we did get quite a bit of harvest from our tiny backyard garden spaces. Everything is as it should be...and the wheel turns.

Canning and Eggplant Harvest

Gary just canned two more boxes of peaches we purchased from a local farmer. We got thirteen quarts out of it, plus some peaches that were just blanched, skinned and soaked in juice, for use on oatmeal. He canned about six more quarts than that, but five of the lids were too old and they failed to seal. We're still eating those peaches, which now live in the fridge until they're used up. As we love canned peaches, it's not too much of a hardship, though it would have been nice had the lids still been okay to use.

On the same night as the peaches, I canned another quart of pickles from mixed green and lemon cucumbers, and one quart of tomato juice. I've found that one quart of juice from our tomatoes will either make a great soup (with water added) or will cook down into a decent sauce for eggplant lasagna or vegetable spaghetti. It is stretching it a little to make one quart into enough sauce for a big lasagna--two quarts would probably be better--but in a pinch, it'll do. The good thing about the eggplant is that it has some of its own moisture, so the resulting juice makes up for the lack of extra sauce when cooking, especially if you bake it with the top on the pan. My younger daughter was wondering when we'd have pasta lasagna again, and I told her we'd do it during the winter months, when there are no eggplants to harvest. It's nice to be able to have a slice of Ciabatta bread with fresh butter with your lasagna and not feel bad about all the carbs. A person could actually eat eggplant lasagna, cheese and all, and still lose weight. A gluten-intolerant person could also eat eggplant lasagna. Granted, it's missing that pasta taste that most people are probably used to, but it's delicious anyway and not so drastically different from regular lasagna that it can't be recognized as one.

On a related note, the last eggplant we harvested from our garden was even larger than the one pictured earlier in this blog, and I've just pulled up a carrot worthy of the Findhorn project.

Fall Harvest

I just pulled up the last of the mammoth snow pea vines today. I should have done it weeks ago, but amazingly, some of them were still bearing until just recently. Even today, a couple of the vines were still green, and I pulled some fresh pods off them. Not very many, but still...snow peas in late September. I also harvested a bunch of lemon cucumbers and a few of the green spacemasters, which I'll pickle tomorrow.

I picked up most of the fallen yellow delicious apples from around the tree, most of which were still green and had codling moth damage. Then I washed them off and cut them apart, separating the good parts from the bad. At first, I thought it might be a case of diminishing returns, but as the good apple parts began to pile up in the pan, I realized that that wasn't the case. The good pieces/parts filled the large pan I had, and after I'd boiled them a while and put them through the Squeezo to remove the skins and turn them into sauce, I ended up with a quart and a half of applesauce. Not only that, but this applesauce tasted so good on its own that I added absolutely nothing to it. No sugar, no cinnamon--nothing but apples, cooked and strained, then cooked just a touch more. I didn't can it, but it'll keep just fine in the fridge and be eaten up soon enough; the kids have been asking for applesauce, and now they have some. I'm just glad that not all of the apples from our tree will have gone to waste after raising a new generation of codling moths.

I also brought in a decent-sized bowl of green beans, and there should be enough to can maybe a couple more quarts. We didn't get as many as I'd have liked, but on the other hand, we did eat a lot more fresh this year than we have in the past, and we still have plenty of canned quarts left over from last year's canning.

Tomorrow I need to hit the bigger part of the garden and get all the tomatoes that are ready--maybe enough to can a quart or two of sauce, or so I'm hoping. The aphids have decimated most of the volunteer kale, but I think there's one plant still in decent shape, and there's self-seeded baby spinach starting to grow in the spinach bed. I brought in a few more of our white carrots, and then had to cut the largest of the new Rosa Bianca eggplants, as it had grown so large and heavy that it pulled the plant over onto its side. I think it'll straighten up gradually, as there are two smaller eggplants forming over on the opposite side. This latest eggplant is even larger than the last one. I'd thought Rosa Biancas would be small to medium in size and more pink and white, but these are nearly as big as the standard large purple eggplants, and they're actually purple and white in color. I'm impressed at what we've gotten from just the three plants--well, technically just the one plant so far, but the other two are forming fruits as well. All told, I'm delighted and amazed by how much harvest we've gotten from our small garden, and how much I've actually been able to put away for winter. We'll still have to buy some things to put away and some to suppliment us this winter, but we've made a huge step in the right direction this year. I ended up harvesting, processing and cooking all evening, but given that it's the Autumnal Equinox and a harvest festival, it seems fitting.

Changing a Carbon Footprint

For several years, my family and I have been setting out items at curbside for recycling. When we moved to our newer house, I asked the recycling service to give me an extra recycle bin for when our to-be-recycled items exceed the capacity of the first bin. We've actually used the second bin quite a bit, especially when plastic and cardboard packaging materials start to pile up.

The last time we set out our garbage can, I looked inside to see just how much garbage we were actually contributing to the landfill. There at the bottom of the large bin I saw two kitchen-sized garbage bags and one smaller bag. That's it--for a family of four, for one week. I'm pretty proud of us. We also set out two recycle bins filled to bursting with used cardboard, paper, plastic, and steel cans. Every so often, we drop off items such as glass at the recycling center, since the curbside service won't pick up glass. We donate miscellaneous used items to a local thrift store, and we have two Earth Machine compost bins in the backyard, tucked away near the back fence between the garden and the roses, which not only help mitigate any odor (which is actually very little, if you have a good composter) but also screen the black plastic from view. I've mentioned before that these composters look like big Darth Vader helmets, but they get the job done. We dump veggie or grain-based kitchen waste into one while the other cooks away on an earlier batch of compost. When that one finishes, we'll switch. It's perfect for a family of four, and for a good three years or so, we haven't had to throw out any kitchen waste into the garbage unless it's meat-based. All the veggie peelings, fruit, grain and the like go into the composter--not to mention any of the lawn clippings that we don't need to lay on the pathways in the garden to help keep the non-edible weeds at bay. With the composters, we've been able to reduce our garbage down to a surprisingly small amount, when even in families of only two people, we've observed huge loads of garbage being thrown out. My daughters and I speculated recently about what the garbage men must think when they come to our house. Maybe they heave a sigh of relief and say, "Oh, good! There's the house where the garbage can is never heavy and never hurts my back." You're very welcome, Sanitation Engineers!

It's not that hard to change a carbon footprint. Recycling and composting can take care of most of the waste from even a large household, and it's so easy that after just a short time of doing it, it soon becomes an old, familiar habit. I really think that if we all just pitched in, cleaned up our acts and houses and recycled most of our waste, collectively we'd make a huge difference for our planet. I hope that soon more people will come to realize just how vitally important this is.

Pickles

Finally there were enough cucumbers the right size at the same time to make pickles. I did them tonight; I got a pint of green cucumbers, a quart of green cucumbers, and a quart of lemon cucumbers. They all sealed--yay! I'm still hoping for a few more this month; there are still plenty of flowers on the plants. One of the lemon cucumber plants is even trying to climb right up the side of the apple tree. It's strange to look into the apple tree and see cucumbers hanging there.

I haven't decided yet whether to buy some pickling cukes from one of the farmers at the market. I'd much rather have home-pickled organic cucumbers than the ones from the big-box stores, but the pickling does take a lot of work and a lot of time, and I still have most of the asparagus pickles I made earlier this spring. I have to think about it and decide while I can still get cukes at the market. Hmm.

Blessed

I am amazed at how well our garden has done this year, despite the few setbacks. The tomatoes have been ripening, and not only are they producing pretty decent amounts of tomatoes, but some are of an astonishing size as well. When I go to pick them, often they practically fall into my hand, and the taste makes me never want to eat a store-bought tomato again. It's like the difference between a meal of bread and water and a six-course feast. The tomatoes in the basket are from the Amish paste plants that I started from seed in my house back in February.



These are my three eggplants, and as you can see, the largest plant has produced an eggplant of enormous size for the heirloom variety called Rosa Bianca. It's bigger than any of the ones I've seen offered for sale at the farmers' market this year!






























The beans are tying for a new batch of flowers, for another producing run before fall frosts hit. The mammoth melting snow peas lasted late into the summer. We're getting cucumbers now--both lemon cukes and the little spacemasters, so I need to do some pickling while they're still in production. The volunteer kale seems to be going nuts as though to make up for what we lost earlier this summer. White carrots are maturing and look good, and I'm able to save seed from the radishes for next year. Just being out there with the plants, looking at all the food they're producing for my family makes me happy. Other than eating out, we've been living off local food all summer with very few non-local items on our table. We all seem to be in pretty good health, and even the kids now turn up their noses at the sickly pale big-box-grocery-store tomatoes. If asked my opinion on the local food experiment and getting more fully in tune with the planet, I'd have to say we've been blessed.

Harvest

Wow, it's been a month since I last posted! It's hard to believe that much time has gone by already. We've been harvesting things from the long planting beds next to the north fence, which helps mitigate the damage to the greens bed from the neighbors' household cleaner a few weeks ago.

I've gotten a wonderful harvest of edible snow peas this year--and I'm actually still getting a few, though they're nearly done now. This was an heirloom variety called mammoth snow pea; they grow very tall and produce long into the season. We'll definitely be growing them next year; their sprout rate was almost perfect. Beans in the north beds are coming on, as are cucumbers, so soon I'll need to be pickling cukes and canning beans. I can't freeze much more right now, as we still haven't managed to clean out the garage enough for a new chest freezer yet--but we'll have to soon as our beef will be ready in a month or two.

The tomato plants are busily making nice tomatoes, but I'm not sure all the Amish Paste tomatoes are actually Amish Paste. Some look different from others, as though maybe someone at the seed company made a mistake and some are a different variety. Oh, well. They look good, anyway, and I'm sure we'll be able to eat them, so no big deal. The Principe Borghese look great--about the size of small apricots and a nice tangy taste even after being dehydrated. I'll dehydrate most of these, except for the ones we use on pizzas over the next month or two. This particular heirloom variety is the one touted as being best for making sun-dried tomatoes, although I did not sun-dry them. I used the dehydrator. Much faster.

We've also gotten what little broccoli was available, but I'll be removing the plants from the bed soon, to give the beans more room and sun. We've got nice sweetmeat squash coming on as well, growing right out of the mound underneath the apple tree, easily watered from the lawn sprinklers. And a volunteer red winter kale has been producing nicely, which also helps mitigate the greens damage. The largest eggplant is getting a flower finally, and there are peppers on some of the pepper plants I put in between the tomato plants, so we'll at least get a few of those.

The greatest gift of all was a windfall of some free apricots--very small ones, but lots of them, from a big old giant tree that was probably planted near an old farmhouse long ago. There are enough of these sweet little fruits, maybe, to help satisfy my older daughter's craving for apricot jam, though they're far too ripe to process as anything but jam or fruit leather. I'm still hoping for some apricots and peaches to can just as fruit in light syrup, rather than making into jam. But at least the jam for this year will be taken care of, much to my relief. The kids won't feel anywhere near as fruit-deprived over the winter if they can still get strawberry or apricot jam or fruit leather from time to time. And there are always the winter apples, which usually hold out a long time--leaving only a tiny gap between the last of them and the first of the strawberries.

All in all, it isn't too bad a harvest, even with the earlier garden mishap.

Poisoned

Our neighbor decided to clean and then re-stain her back fence. So she got some stuff called "household cleaner", mixed it up and put it in the tank of a power sprayer. First, she misted the cleaner all over the fence--a reasonably gentle spray, but still capable of spreading to other places in the vicinity. Then she proceeded to power-blast the supposed dirt off her back fence, sending up a great plume of cleaner/water about fifteen feet high. Some of that hit the back corner of my garden, which isn't very large to begin with.

After my younger daughter came running to me in distress, I went out to see what had happened, and found the leaves on the lambs quarters nearest the fence, plus all the leaves in my three-foot-square bed nearest the fence covered with huge droplets of this chemical-laced water. I yelled to the woman to stop, and asked her what she was using, which she first claimed was just water, then explained that the stuff in the sprayer's tank was the cleaner diluted with water. "But I used a different nozzle," she explained. I looked at the bottle of cleaner, which just said "Household Cleaner" and did not list any ingredients but warned that the stuff could not be eaten, as it was poison. The problem is, the chemical water and the regular water still went through the same sprayer attachment, different nozzle notwithstanding, so even if it was just the "regular water" that hit my plants, it would still have some of that chemical in it. I called Sears, who could not help me at all. Then I called Craftsman, who could not find a chemical list for "Household Cleaner" but who advised that I treat it as you would any household cleaner and DO NOT INGEST. Which of course means that I cannot eat any of my vegetables from that bed.

All of my beets, kale, chard, and collard greens are useless now. I had to pull up the entire bed worth of greens and throw them all away, because there is no way to be sure that even if you wash the greens, that household cleaner would not still be on the leaves. (I also lost that one standard cabbage I had blogged about earlier--it was in the neighboring bed but had water droplets on it.) I don't even know what the case is with the soil underneath the plants--did some of that cleaner run down into my soil, and how will that impact my abilty to replant?

The woman knows that I lost the entire bed worth of greens and that it's her fault. She apologized and agreed that when it comes time to paint/stain the fence in that corner, she'll do it by hand. But it's too late. The damage is already done. She just cost my family well over two month's worth of organically grown greens--what we would have consumed, what the plants would have continued making, and what I might have been able to put away for the off season. If my daughter hadn't seen what happened, what then? Our greens would have sat there in the hot sun, absorbing water laced with household cleaner, which we would later have consumed. In essence, our neighbor poisoned my family and didn't even realize what she was doing.

I feel sick.

Support Your Local Farmer

I know people are concerned about what they consider to be the food crisis. I know they're worried that the government's subsidizing of farmers growing corn for ethanol will mean more food shortages for us, since the farmers will then grow corn for ethanol and not for food. But there is another way to look at that. Maybe instead of a problem, this can be a chance to improve our whole food system and take it in a more sustainable direction.

If you want good, healthy food grown sustainably and in season, consider supporting your local small farmers. You know the ones I mean--the ones who sell their produce at farmers' markets and through CSA's. Quite frankly, the food is amazing. I haven't bought produce other than certain items that aren't grown locally (like mushrooms) from a big box store in months. I've grown lettuce, kale, spinach, beets and beet greens, snow peas, michili, and radishes all in my tiny backyard garden. Lamb's quarters have provided themselves for free, as have sunflowers. I've purchased supplementary spinach, kale, bok choy, lettuce, green onions, green garlic, carrots and potatoes from local small farmers since the farmer's markets opened in late April/early May. I've found no-spray local strawberries and put up jam, and tomorrow I'm going after blueberries. My family has eaten fantastic sausage, pork chops and more from that same farm. My own apple tree in the backyard is laden with apples, and a friend's family has a tree full of cherries. Another friend has grapes she doesn't want, as I've mentioned before, and I've also purchased a grapevine of my own. The food is available, and it's wonderful. It's not that hard to do this. It just takes an open mind and a commitment to quality. The local farmers are wonderful people I would never have met if I hadn't decided to get out of the big-box rat race. If I help support them I'm also helping myself to better food and ultimately, better health. (For one thing, I'm not worried about getting a tomato contaminated with E-Coli. Last year it was spinach, this year it's tomatoes. What next?) In the wake of GMO's, E-Coli, and food labeling problems, supporting my local farmers sounds like a win-win to me.

Greens

Spinach season is officially over in my garden; I'm just waiting for the seed heads to mature and then I'll pull up the plants and save the seeds for the next planting. Most of the wild lambs' quarters are in the same boat. They're towering over the planter boxes, so I need to go ahead and clear them out, freeze or use whatever leaves I want to use, and make sure there's seed either for them to re-seed themselves for next year or for me to do it. The beauty of lambs' quarters is that they are slower to bolt and grow beautifully in this climate, which gives them a slightly longer season than spinach. The leaves are smaller than spinach leaves, though, so it's a trade-off. Or it would be, if I'd deliberately planted lambs quarters instead of spinach or kale. The fact that they planted themselves is actually pretty great. They're by far the most prevalent weed in my garden, just by dint of my pulling all the others and leaving the lambs quarters mostly alone. I mean...why eradicate something that's perfectly edible? If you don't want it in the garden, just let it get big enough to put out some nice tender leaves and then pull it and eat it. Seems like a shame to waste perfectly good food when so many people out there are so worried about the perceived "scarcity" of food nowadays. Food's all around us, people. It's just that we might have to give up our dependence on corn and actually eat some greens.

With spinach and lettuce season going out, kale, collards and chard are definitely coming in. I've also got some wonderful heirloom snow peas--those are the edible pods--and they're right in their prime, with blossoms coming on all over. Looks like it won't be terribly long before my largest broccoli starts to form heads, and I have one green cabbage that looks like it might actually form a head. If it does, it'll be my first successful standard variety cabbage. The michili is done. I pulled the last of the plants a couple of days ago, we stir-fried half of it and I have half in a bag in the fridge. So we got several meals from the michili I planted way back in February, though I'm still not sure whether I'll plant it again next year. Darned tasty, but spiky little monsters! Huge leaves though, which with a family of four is always a plus.

Bean plants are looking good in the three north fence beds, so I expect good things from them later. The thing is that even with all the various heirloom veggies I put in this year, I'm still a little stymied for options right now. Lately it's "Would you like greens for dinner, or greens?" "Oh, by the way, do you want greens with that?" If it weren't for grains and animal proteins, I think dinners might be a truly daunting experience. Thank goodness for the berries becoming ripe! Variety is good whenever possible, even on a mostly locavore diet. I only know so many ways to cook greens, and I'm really looking to expand my repertoire. Obviously I need to go buy Deborah Madison's Greens cookbook. Don't get me wrong; I'm very grateful for the success of the greens and for the food they're providing for me and my family. I'm sure I'll miss them terribly come winter when the only greens we have are frozen or canned.

In a Jam

Strawberry jam, to be exact. The no-spray farm down the road from us opened its gates for U-pick strawberry season. Tuesday, we and a couple of friends went down there and picked strawberries all morning. Imagine being able to pick fresh, sweet, ripe strawberries right from the plant and pop them in your mouth without having to worry about what might have been sprayed on them. That's exactly what we did; in fact, I think my younger daughter ate more than she put in her tray. The farmer jokingly said, "If you don't come back with hands and mouth stained red, we'll send you out again." My daughter didn't need to be sent back out; that's for sure. Our family spent a great morning picking strawberries together, and somewhere during the process my teenager said, "We should make this a family tradition." I tell you, folks--when a teenager wants to create a family tradition, it's time to sit up and take notice!

The Huz and I processed about five full flats of strawberries over the next couple of days. I think it came out to eighteen 12-oz jars of strawberry jam, plus a tiny bit extra; several dehydrator trays of strawberry fruit leather; two dehydrator loads of strawberry chips; and several bags of (cane) sugared frozen strawberries that could be used to make more jam or used for desserts, etc.

We'll be going back for a few more trays worth of strawberries before the season is over; I want more to eat fresh, plus I want to dehydrate a lot more for future use in salads and hot cereals.

Doing Without--Or Not

I had to attend a local writers/readers conference this weekend and wasn't able to go to the farmers' market on Saturday. Makes me jealous of the countries/places who have almost daily green markets. If there was a daily market, one needn't have to choose what to do on Saturday based on one's need for groceries. While the farmers' market was going on yesterday, I was attending classes and panels, and then there was a luncheon with a keynote speaker I didn't want to miss. The conference was held in the building right next to the area where the Boise farmers' market is held, so I had the feeling of being so close to the groceries I needed, yet so far away. Just outside that door were many of the vendors I've been purchasing food from since late April, and my inability to go shop with them during the limited hours they'd be there meant that my family would have to make do with less food this week.

Or not. If I had to choose a weekend to not buy market food, this was an acceptable one. Right now, my own small backyard garden has abundant heirloom lettuce in two varieties, spinach, giant chinese cabbage, kale, wild lambs quarters, and radishes. I still had two complete bunches of red romaine lettuce from the farmers' market of the previous week, one bundle of bok choy, some cilantro, green garlic, green onion, and a couple of leeks. There are also several white heirloom carrots and probably at least one onion and a couple of small potatoes left. We just recently picked up a bunch of frozen organic/free range chickens. We still have beef left. Plus, the organic farm down the road has finally opened its gates for U-pick strawberry season. My friends and I are really excited about this; we've been planning at least one outing to go pick strawberries, and they're finally ready! We'll go out and pick one day this week, then probably come back and make a bunch of strawberry jam/jelly. Looks like the Squeezo strainers will finally get some use, as will all the jelly jars I bought in preparation for this weeks ago.

I think I can manage to feed my family this week after all, despite the fact that I missed the farmers' market. Maybe I can be a writer and still eat, too.

Frozen Assets

The spinach--what hasn't bolted, that is--has gone crazy. Every few days I have more large leaves that can be harvested, though I will have to stop sometime so as to not divest the plants of all of their leaves. I have officially blanched and frozen more spinach this year than I ever have before, though the amount is still fairly small compared with the number of months one has to go without fresh spinach. But that's okay. No matter how small the amount of food I manage to harvest and process this year, it'll be more than we had in previous years.

With practice, I've gotten the steam blanch/freeze process down pretty well, and can keep going at a reasonably steady rate until it's done. Chop, steam, dunk in ice water, pack freezer container, repeat. Or rather, chop more raw spinach while the last batch is steaming, then dump newly steamed spinach in ice water, dump newly-chopped raw spinach into the steamer basket, set the three-minute timer, then start chopping again. It goes smoothly enough once you have the hang of it, and it doesn't take nearly as long as canning. However, it does require a freezer, which requires both space and electricity, so there's the trade-off. We buy green (wind) power from the power company, so I hope my use of the freezer isn't too heinous.

Saturday, I made a rushed trip to the farmers' market, and then we went out to a nearby local farm and bought some frozen whole chickens. They're raised humanely without hormones, so they should be great. The only downside is that I really prefer to just buy boneless chicken breasts, not the whole chicken. I don't like dark meat, but the rest of my family does, so we'll see how I deal. I'm angry at the large factory farms that participate in a system with such inhumane and unsanitary methods. If it were really safe, humane and sustainable to buy packaged chicken breasts, I'd much prefer that. I'm not looking forward to having to skin, butcher and de-bone whole chickens when all I really wanted was a few chicken breasts to roast in the convection oven. Using the whole chicken on a regular basis sounds like way more work than I have time for. I'll have to see whether I can find a green source for prepackaged chicken breasts to use at least part of the time, like when I'm in a huge hurry and need some meat to throw in a stir-fry fast. Actually, that's almost all of the time.

Well, I'll manage, or learn to manage. I'm astounded by how really spoiled we modern people really are, with our professionally butchered, prepackaged meats and other foods. My grandmother may not have known how to run an ATM machine or use a computer, but I'll bet she knew how to butcher her own chicken. That's more than I know, so there's one more thing my spoiled little self is going to have to learn. Tsk, tsk, what will I do?

Michili Ouch

This year I started some Michili Chinese cabbage indoors clear back in February, and transplanted it into the garden as soon as the weather allowed. It's been doing better than the regular cabbage or broccoli. Apparently it does well in cool weather, and has had a great spring so far, since this spring has been cooler than usual. The leaves have been getting bigger and bigger, and finally this evening I harvested some for dinner.

Problem: the leaves and stems of this variety have hundreds of little prickly spines on them. This is one of the reasons I left them so long before I harvested any; I just was not sure what to do with all those little spines. As I cut the outer leaves off the plants, carried them into the house, washed them and chopped them, I kept getting stuck by the spines, which my skin reacted to with redness and even a few tiny swollen spots. (Those went away in about half an hour or so.) These leaves may be food--but they're darned unpleasant to harvest and work with! So what ended up happening? Were we able to have it for dinner, or was it the opposite scenario?

We ate it. I washed it, chopped it, and stir-fried it with some pieces of chicken breast, green garlic, green onion, baby bok choy from the farmers' market, a little salt, black pepper and low-sodium soy sauce. It tasted just fine; no spines detectable at all. I suspected the spines would wilt when cooked, and fortunately I was right, or I'd probably have already been out there uprooting the rest of the plants! So we'll use the rest this year and I'll harvest it with gloves on, but I might not be so quick to plant it next year. Perhaps I'll plant bok choy instead, as it tastes just as good but doesn't seem to have any spines whatsoever.

Tomato Update and More

Okay, I just realized that it's been a while since I updated the tomato situation. Turns out that the nutrition situation was indeed the problem with the tomato plants. They'd greened up considerably even before I transplanted them into the beds, and now they're not only back to a vibrant dark green, but they're growing again, tentatively beginning to flower, and one even has a tomato forming. Between the frequent rain storms lately and the watering system for when the weather is dry, they're getting plenty of water. My main concern now is that they're still more spindly than I'd prefer, and I'm a little worried about how those thinner stems will hold up when the plant has to bear fruit. They're in cages, but...the problem is, the plants are still too small for the cages to help them. I have stakes on each one, but they may need some additional help if their tomatoes come on before their stalks and vines are thick enough to support fruit.

The apple tree is covered with tiny little fruits; I'll have to get on a ladder and trim some of those off soon, or as the apples develop, their weight will pull the young tree apart. This may sound silly, but as long as we had freezing temps at night, I kept talking to the apple tree during the too-warm days, telling it to hold off on popping those blossoms until after the last frost. Last year it went too early, and we lost most of the blossoms to that, and the rest to codling moths. This year it waited; literally the day after the last frost, it popped most of the blossoms it had barely been holding in check. Now it's covered in tiny little apples, and in jeopardy not from an outside problem like frost, but from its own fruit. Who knew the life of an apple tree could be so fraught with risk?

Pick 'em or Hold 'em

So far, the spinach is holding. By that I mean I'm still able to harvest from the bed that was planted last fall, though it's trying to bolt and probably won't hold out much longer. The spring-planted stuff is doing beautifully, producing nice big leaves and supplementing what we're getting from the bigger bed. I hope for at least a few more harvests before things get too hot and everything bolts.

I confess, in past years I've been a little too timid about actually harvesting the spinach and lettuce that came up. It's like I was trying to leave it in the garden until it got bigger or something, trying not to "use it up." The result was that I often let it go to waste while I was saving it for a later which came too late or never came at all. The only way to help it hold off bolting is to harvest it regularly enough that it tries to replenish the leaves you've picked. And even then, if the weather is warm enough, it will still bolt. So if you want spinach, you have to pick it while it's there to be picked. Today I brought in enough for another small container of frozen spinach--roughly one gathering basket full of spinach is about enough to fill one small freezer container after blanching. Now that I'm getting used to doing it, the process is going faster for me every time. Now I just need to find/make room in the garage for a small energy star chest freezer. We have an upright, but with all this preserving of our own food, we'll need more freezer space, I'm certain.

I've also been pulling the larger lambs quarters when they've volunteered in a bed that was designated for something else. The rest, I leave where they are and snitch leaves now and then for salads. I might actually freeze some lambs quarters as well, this year. They're a lot like spinach, and grow wild around here. I leave a few to self-seed, and then the next spring I mostly leave them wherever they come up in the garden. Free food, right off the land; that can't be a bad thing.

No Farmers?

How can you have a farmers' market without a farmer? Over the past month, I've been to four different farmers' markets, and only one of them--my local one--didn't have at least one farmer in attendance.

The larger market in Boise has a decent number of farmers. The problem with the Boise market is that it's in the heart of downtown, and the only decent place to park is in one of the parking garages in the area. So in addition to whatever you pay the local farmers or artisans for their goods, you also pay about $5.00 in parking garage fees--depending on how long you want to linger at the market. The second largest option would be the Nampa market, but it's also in a downtown area, and while not as crowded or problematic as far as parking is concerned, it can still be tricky to get in and out of there. The benefit to my local market is its location; it's held in a large community center parking lot along a major road, and not only is access easy, but parking is free and plentiful. Unfortunately, the farmers are not. I've stopped in twice, and struck out on finding an actual farmer there on both occasions. They claim this spring's unusually cool weather has been the problem, and that all the greenhouses with produce are going to all the other markets. But the spinach in my outdoor raised beds--including the spinach we just planted this spring--has been harvestable for at least two weeks now. So not all the local produce has to be coming from greenhouses! After stopping by at the Meridian Farmers' Market, I drove down the road into Eagle, turned right, went down the main street a short way, and encountered the Eagle Farmers' Market, where I almost immediately found--guess what?--a farmer. So how can Meridian be so conspicuously without? The one market closest to me and easiest to get to, and it has no farmers thus far. They assure me this will change in a week or two, but...so far it's been disappointing. There have to be at least a few small farmers living in the Meridian area. In fact, I think I may have heard of at least a couple online. So what's the problem?

If my backyard garden was capable of producing more than not quite enough for my own family, I think I'd be tempted to go and be a farmer for the Meridian Farmers' Market just on principle. A farmers' market without a farmer. Sheesh.

Farmers Market Day

Today was another farmers' market day, and this time I didn't have a cold, thank goodness. Today was one of the hottest so far this year, with temperatures in the 90's. There is one lovely shady pedestrian avenue between two buildings at the very entrance to the area used by the farmers' market, and I wish they'd station all the food stalls there. It would be so nice to be able to shop for food in two neat rows of stalls in the shade, and not have to run around in the sun at all. But then, I guess that's just incentive to get to the market as early as possible--to beat the heat.

This week I didn't have to buy any spinach, though I did buy some mixed lettuce. My heirloom 4 seasons lettuce is looking very good and so is my romaine, but they won't be mature for probably about a week. My spinach, however, is going nuts, and the 4 squares of heirloom spinach I planted just this spring is already almost as big as the older spinach in the other bed that was planted late last fall. So I'll have a great spinach harvest for the next little while, but I know it won't last long; the plants in the older bed are already wanting to bolt. We're supposed to drop temperatures about ten degrees or so on Tuesday, with temps in the 70's expected for several days following that, so maybe we'll catch a break and spinach season will be able to hang on for just a bit longer.

Today's biggest finds at the market were the locally-grown, no-pesticides potatoes, which included a nice little bag full and some nice big bakers. I can't remember the exact price, but I thought it was very reasonable. The other prize of note was a bundle of huge green onions for a dollar, and by huge, I mean nearly the size of leeks. I don't think I've ever seen any that large before. I was really glad I brought the mid-sized cooler today, and not the small one. It's finds like these that make you realize the whole local thing is just as worthwhile as they say. You'd never find potatoes or green onions of that size or quality in a big-box grocery, where everything has to be uniform. There was also a lady with heirloom tomato plants, and I was able to get my two Principe Borghese from her. So it was better than a grocery/department store--one stop shopping, but with fresh air and no chemicals. The only thing I needed but couldn't get at the market was some Ball freezer containers for the spinach I'll be blanching and freezing.

In our own garden, I managed to transplant the tomato plants I'd grown from seed. This was one reason I was a little late to market--I actually got up and worked in the garden in the morning. I finished transplanting the last two tomatoes and all the peppers this evening. Just a few more things to get into the ground and then all there'll be to do will be water, weed, and wait.

Empty Nester

Well...not really. But eight of my baby tomato plants did go off to their new home today. I had been growing quite a few extras to trade to a friend who has a larger garden. In exchange for some of her produce, I was to provide some heirloom tomato plants that I started from seed. So today she stopped by, and went home with five Amish Paste tomato plants, two Burbank Reds, and one mystery tomato that volunteered itself from seed from last year--my guess is that it's a cherry tomato, or a Roma.

I'd been more and more concerned over the condition of my tomatoes--they were turning yellow or olive green and yellow, they were thin and spindly, and some of their leaves were curling, drying, turning purple on the undersides, or a combination of the above. After looking up a few things on the Internet, I determined that it was probably a mineral deficiency. A couple of days ago, we gave them some Miracle Grow, and by this evening, the leaves were visibly improving. The green leaves were greener, and even some of the yellow leaves were showing signs of returning green. So...lesson learned. Small potted tomatoes will likely need feeding; the small amount of soil they're growing in will likely run out of nutrients before the weather has warmed enough for them to go out in the garden. Tomorrow I'm going to prepare the main planting bed for them. I've already put in some crushed eggshell to help with calcium content; the next step is to get some of that good compost we've been cooking for the past couple of years and work it into the soil, then add some of the topsoil we bought for the other planting beds--we're going to have a bunch extra. Then I'll put in my tomatoes and peppers. I have ten spots for tomatoes, so they'll be filled by six of my home-grown Amish Paste tomatoes, and two home-grown Burbank Reds. I plan to purchase two Principe Borghese, but if I can't find any to buy, then I'll just put in the two extra Amish Paste that I grew and call it good. If all goes as I plan, however, I should be able to pass on the two extra Amish Paste tomatoes to a friend.

I'm just SO relieved that the leaves are greening up again! Honestly--it's like having sick children, sort of. The other night my girls and I went to see a movie called "The Future of Food," and at several points I was so horrified I just wanted to cry. The GM issue is even worse than I thought, and I already thought it was bad. Afterward, we discussed it and the kids agreed: the issue of the heirloom tomatoes and the other plants we're growing has gone from being just Mom's nostalgic hobbyist project to a moral, ethical and physical imperative. We have to change the way we think, the way we eat, and the way we think about what we eat. At this stage of the game, the issues of whether the apple tree waits to flower until after the last frost or whether the raised-from-seed heirloom tomato plants are nutrient deprived have taken center stage in our formerly fast-food, eat-on-the-go, rarely-cook-our-own dinner lives.

Different Grocery Shopping

We've had our first harvest of spinach from the stuff the Huz and kids planted in the garden last fall. I now see the importance of getting new plants started in late summer/early fall. The only other spinach or lettuce showing up in farmers markets so far this spring has been grown in cold frames or greenhouses. I won't be able to harvest a second batch for about a week or so, but at least we got one meal from our own garden.

My Amish paste tomatoes are beginning to flower, and I'll be putting them out in the garden probably later this week. They've done fine for the last few nights out on the patio; they're inside right now only because there was quite a stiff breeze blowing outside and the kids were worried the plants would be wrecked. Soon enough, though, the tomatoes will have to go out and stay out, wind or no wind.

It's funny; with this locavore focus, when your weekly grocery shopping is limited to Saturday mornings and you have to be somewhere by 9:30 a.m. or risk missing out on a limited amount of produce available, it changes your perspective. Before, under no circumstances would I have pried myself out of bed in the throes of a bad head cold and headed off to shop for food. I was careful to touch only the food I was going to buy and have minimal contact with the farmers so as not to pass on the cold virus, but shop I did, despite it being the most miserable shopping experience I've ever had, bar none. The part of my brain that loves going to the farmers' market was the only part of me that enjoyed Saturday, with the colorful food, stalls and vendors and beautiful weather. The rest of me was just doing whatever it took to get through and get back home. After the farmers market, I needed to pick up some plants at a nearby greenhouse, during which time I stumbled around in a sort of stupor while trying to remember the names and varieties of the plants I needed. When I finally got home in the early afternoon, we put the food away and I headed straight back to bed. Today, I'm somewhat better, though that's not saying a lot. But at least it was Mother's Day, and if I wanted to spend the day in bed, I could--and did.

Our haul from the farmers' market yesterday included two bags of mixed lettuce greens, a bag of spinach, a bag of arugula, two bundles of bok choy, and a bunch of green garlic. That came to $26.00. I also bought another bag of spinach at a different stall for about $4.00, a loaf of spinach, ricotta and mushroom bread for $6.00, and a jar of marionberry jelly for $5.00.

Last night's dinner was a chef salad composed of one bag of spinach, one bag of mixed greens, and the bag of arugula, plus some sliced baked chicken left over from the previous night's dinner. Tonight since it's Mother's Day and I'm still too sick to go out to a restaurant, we're ordering pizza. Tomorrow it's back to the locavore program.

Turmeric Works

As of this post, we have had no more problems with ants. To clarify, I did have to squish a few more that had already gotten into the house prior to my application of turmeric along the bottom of the front door frame, but there have been no more entries through there, and no further evidence of ant infestation in the house over the past couple of days.

I'm not sure whether it was the turmeric specifically, or just the fact that I blocked the ants' entryway with a fine powder that they couldn't wade through. The main thing is that it worked like a charm, and no chemicals (read: non-edible substances) were used.

Ants

Okay, this evening we had ants milling around just at the bottom of our front door. Since this is a blog about green living, I thought I'd mention what I did to get rid of them. I won't use chemicals unless it's a last resort, hopefully after trying every other organic solution first. We--and by "we" I mean humans--have to get away from the idea that the quick chemical fix is the first line of defense against pests. Pesticides, among other things, are killing our pollinators, so pesticides should not be the first thing we think of when faced with a pest problem.

With that in mind, I turned to a piece of human technology--the internet--for help. By Googling organic ant control I found a forum with many different possible solutions. Skipping the boric acid suggestions (boric acid is still a poison, after all) I settled on turmeric as a possible answer for my situation, as it's said to repel them. I squished all the ants that were already inside, and then applied a line of turmeric to the floor at the bottom of the door, right where they were all milling around and going in and out. When the last ant tried to get out through the turmeric and failed (the turmeric didn't kill the ant, but the ant couldn't seem to wade through it to get through the tiny little crack that was their access point) I figured I had a winner. So for now the ants are gone, and we'll see how things go and whether any more are able to find their way inside.

Asparagus and Musings

I bought 8 more bundles of local asparagus at $1.59 per pound, pickled 6 more jars of it and blanched and froze another large container full of it. That makes 3 frozen containers and a total of 12 jars of pickled asparagus, plus whatever we ate for dinners over the last three weeks. Granted, two of the jars had to be kept in the fridge due to sealing issues, but for my first pickling experience, I think I've done pretty well. This makes more pickled asparagus than we've ever had in our house before, but then we've never even bought any before, so that wasn't much of a stretch. Turns out this recipe is a little more tart than the kids really prefer, but they'll eat one now and then, and the Huz loves them. So at least I'm feeding somebody with these things. I don't think I'll put up any more, though. If all goes well, we'll have regular cucumber pickles later this year and probably pickled beets as well, so there's a limit to how much stuff we need to pickle.

People wonder how cost-effective locavore eating is. I just looked up how much a case of 12-oz. jars of pickled asparagus would be, and found it to be around $40.00. I bought about $25.00 worth of local asparagus, only pickled the thinnest spears and froze or cooked and ate the rest, and paid about $8.00 for the case of empty 12-oz. jelly jars, which I will use again and again. So even adding in the cost of the gas for heating the water, the little bit of vinegar, salt, sugar and water for the brine, plus the tiny amount of pickling spice--I saved quite a bit of money doing these pickles myself. And apparently they're considered a specialty item. Not too bad on the cost front.

The second pickling session went more smoothly than the first and didn't take as long, so I have hopes that my learning curve on the canning and preserving will be short. I did help my grandmother with canning while growing up, but it's been a long time and I didn't pay as much attention as I should have while I had the chance. Who knew that in my 40's I'd wish I could go back and learn from her again, or even just be able to call her on the phone and ask how this or that works and what method is best for what vegetable? Maybe we'd have something worthwhile to talk about at last, instead of the weather. How odd to have more in common with someone once they're gone than you did while they were alive.

And what will my kids do when they're grown up and on their own? Will they, like me, have to learn how to can from a book, or will they learn from me while they have the chance? (After I'm finished learning from the book!) Eeep. What we as a society have forgotten in the way of basic survival skills would fill volumes, and it's a darn good thing someone has had the presence of mind to remember and document them! I know what raw vegetables look like; I've grown them, picked them, and helped to preserve them. But I recently ran into a young man in a big box grocery store who looked at a raw head of broccoli and asked what it was. He honestly had never seen fresh broccoli before--all the broccoli he'd ever seen had come from a box or a can.

To quote a movie villain: I weep for the species. But then I actually go to the farmers markets and talk to real, local, organic farmers, I watch the honeybees mob my now-fully-blossomed apple tree, I look at the plethora of books now coming out on how to eat ethically, organically and locally, and I think that if this grassroots movement becomes the next great fad--which it looks as though it's going to--we may yet have hope for our own survival. Wouldn't it be amazing to find a way to have our modern society and still be able to live, breathe and eat in it, too?

Water and a Little Patience

Finally, the sprinkler system is fixed. Now we can actually water our lawn, which was busily dying on us. We could have watered it with a hose using city water, but there's a reason we have pressurized irrigation water here, and I hate to pay more to use city water during irrigation season, when the water is so much more affordable.

We'd been using city water on the garden--giving it almost-daily drinks with a watering can. My two planting beds along the north fence will have to be watered by hand for a while longer, as there's no drip system hooked up to them as there is in the main garden spot. But that's manageable unless we have to go out of town for too long at a time.

The tomatoes are still alive, and the instances of yellowed leaves were caused by the same issue--water. Now we're getting a handle on how much to water the plants in coconut-fiber or peat pots to keep them from drying out. I transplanted the largest tomatoes to 4-inch coconut-fiber pots, and separated out all the Carantan leeks, each into its own 3-inch peat pot. In that one little starter flat, I had nineteen leeks. I could have had twenty-one if I'd wanted to transplant the two tiniest leek seedlings, but I decided not to bother with those, since they were so much smaller than all the others.

Outside, the spinach planted last fall is getting nearly big enough to eat, we have lots of volunteer baby lambs' quarters both in and out of the garden boxes, the lettuce is coming up, and so are the more recently planted spinach and the snow pea plants. It seems that the worst frosts are behind us, but I say that with extreme caution. At least the apple tree waited until a couple of days after the most recent freeze to blossom out. Maybe we'll get more than seven or eight apples this year.

High Tide

We had a flood in our back yard--in the vegetable garden, no less. When my husband went to turn on the valve for the sprinkler system, which runs on irrigation water every summer, something blew and soon we had a deep pool of water. Of course, the way the system is designed for the subdivision, the main shut-off valve for every four houses is located in the back yard of one of the houses. For ours, it was in our south-side neighbor's yard, and for the first two days we couldn't seem to catch them at home to get permission to go into their yard. Then yesterday evening I hit the jackpot. I caught them at home briefly between errands, and they let me into their yard, where their landscaper had covered over the valve box so it wasn't visible. And the neighbors weren't sure exactly where it was, since their system is self-draining and they never need to mess with it. Argh.

Long story short: we found it, and fortunately it was close to the surface and not buried under one of their landscaping rocks. So we were able to turn off the main valve, pump and bail most of the water out of our hole in the garden, and then replace our defective valve with a new one. American plumbing parts, made in China. At least there's no longer a flood in my garden! I was starting to worry that it would undermine my raised beds. Most of the ground underneath is so full of clay that I could have done some fantastic sculpture with the mud we dug out from around our valve and pipes. Now that the valve is replaced and the leak stopped, there's just a little more hardware to replace and fix after the hole has time to dry out for a couple of days, and then hopefully we can install a new raised valve cover box, button things up and put my garden spot back together again. Just in time to plant the sunflowers along the fence--I hope.

Did I mention that while all this was going on, we had rain?

A Different Time

Part of the principle of local eating is the notion that one is supposed to preserve foods while they are in season, for eating later when they're out of season. But not everyone thinks this way. This evening I was at our local big box grocery buying the one brand of local pork they carry, and I also picked up two boxes of jelly jars for canning. "Canning? Different time for it," one man remarked as I wheeled my cart toward the door. Well yes, it is a different time for canning if you're only talking end-of-summer produce, but that's not what I'm after just now. As it happens, our area is now fully into asparagus season, and I just found a deal on asparagus for $1.59 per pound. Last night, I used up half of the one box of tall jelly jars I had on hand while pickling some of the slender asparagus spears, and if we expect to have any jars for strawberry jam in late May or early June, I need more jars. Would you want to wait until the last minute to get your jars, right when the same idea occurs to other would-be jam makers, and then be unable to find any jars just when you need them most? Of course not. I doubt this guy noticed they were jelly jars and not just any old type of canning jars. Most people really don't have a clue what things ripen at what time of year.

So last night I pickled six jars of slender asparagus spears, and blanched and froze the ones that were too fat for pickling. It was a long several hours of work, but when I was done, I had five of my six jars seal, with the sixth going into the fridge to finish pickling in safety. No biggie on the failure--we still get to eat them, and this way we can decide whether we actually like pickled asparagus or not. If not, we can always give the other jars away as gifts later--like fruitcake. But I'm betting they'll be great. In fact, I may do a few more before the season's over, just for good measure. It's the first time I ever canned or pickled anything by myself--i.e. without an experienced canner there doing the bulk of the work while I "helped." This time, it was all my show, so I'm proud of myself. I made a bunch of mistakes, but still ended up with five jars out of six sealing. And I learned a lot, so maybe I'll be more organized next time. The jars of asparagus pickles look so great, I can't stop staring at them. I feel like the little kid running to mommy with a really great piece of artwork saying, "I made this!"

Life, Dirt, and Asparagus

It looks as though the tomatoes are going to be okay. While the yellowed leaves haven't necessarily turned green again, the tomatoes are putting out new leaves up top, so at least they've recovered enough to start growing again. Now it's just a matter of having weather mild and sunny enough for them to go outside during the day. As to the larger ones in the plastic pots--they're getting huge. I swear I can see them change in size over the course of just a few hours. If they get much larger, I may have to transplant them from the 3-inch pots into 4-inchers. Now, the 4-inch pots I bought have an interesting feature. They're made of a recycled coconut shell fiber, and will decompose directly into the ground when I transplant the tomatoes into the garden beds. So once the tomatoes are in those pots, I don't even have to remove them in order to plant them. Cool, huh?

I would have taken new pictures of the huge tomato seedlings this evening, but I ended up making a run to Lowe's to get more peat moss. Last week we had eight cubic yards of topsoil delivered to our driveway, and had to shift it immediately into the back yard so it wouldn't get anyone in trouble with the subdivision's homeowners' association (or the City's law enforcement--you can't block a public sidewalk.) It took a few hours' labor with shovels and wheelbarrows, and fortunately our friend with the grapevines came over to help. I guess my shoulder must have been out of place before we started the work, and then it got worse over the past week, so as usual I ended up at the chiropractor. But the beautiful thing is that the Huz got two of the new raised planting boxes done and in place, filled with a mix of that nice dirt and some peat moss. The teenager and I actually planted peas in the first box a few days ago, and now that the second one is in place, we'll be planting more peas early this week. The Huz tells me the boxes were expensive to build, so I'd better grow lots of food. With any luck, these boxes will hold peas in the back, beans in the middle, and cucumbers in the front where they can drape themselves over the side. Companion planting, and the most efficient use of box space I could come up with--so we'll see how it works. Now all we need is for the nights to stop getting below freezing so the soil will warm up and seeds will sprout.

As a consequence of the cold nights, our area is still waiting for asparagus, which was here already at this time last year--or so I've heard. Since this is our first local-food year, it's the first time I've really paid attention to asparagus season, and I'm here to tell you, it really brings home our relationship to the earth, the climate, and their changes. I can't gripe about the cold because it's the first normal winter our area has had in years, but...it's really hard to eat locally when all the Co-Op has left for local food is ancient cold-storage potatoes and onions--and we've been lucky to have those. Last fall's cold-storage "fresh" apples are gone. So we've been eating food from California again, looking forward to the day when our own area gardens have something to feed us. I don't have any idea what the farmers' market will have to offer when it opens next weekend, but I'll be there with bells on.

Green Chives, Yellow Tomato Leaves

I'm trying hard to hang onto the smallest of the tomato seedlings. We've been having such cold weather so far this spring that it's been hard to take them outside into the sunshine. And lately a new problem has cropped up (no pun intended.) The tomato plants in the 3-inch plastic containers seem to be doing fine. They keep growing, their leaves are green, and they're looking pretty good despite the fact that they no doubt need more natural sunlight. But the ones I transplanted into the 3-inch peat pots don't look as healthy as they should. For the most part, their newest leaves are still a nice deep green, but some of the older, larger leaves have turned yellow, and they just aren't growing much at all. The flats of tomatoes live right next to each other, in the same window. My only guess as to what's wrong is that the tomatoes in the peat pots were staying too dry. The plastic pots don't "breathe" or allow for air passage through the sides, so they retain water longer and the soil doesn't dry out as easily. But the ones in the peat pots had perpetually dry soil in the bottoms of the pots though I'd given them the same amount of water as the others. When I tried to take care of the dry soil problem, I had to add some serious water in order to get the peat pots to turn damp on the sides. Over the last two to three days with the extra water, some of those yellow leaves seem to be getting darker--perhaps on their way back to green, or so I hope. I'm taking note of this for next year--it seems much trickier to keep the right moisture balance in the soil of plants growing in peat pots as opposed to plastic. I may have to switch to only plastic pots in the future, unless I figure out just how much water the plants in the peat pots will need to stay green and healthy until transplant. It also occurs to me that the peat pots might present a problem with temperature regulation--the plastic pots would tend to keep the plants' roots warmer. In the summer, they'd hate that, but in a cold spring, it could be actually helping them. I need more observation on this....

I hope I don't lose any of them. All four of the Burbank red slicing tomatoes are in peat pots. I'd hate to lose them, and I'd hate to lose any of the others I was saving for trade.

On a more encouraging note, the chives growing in the large container outside are doing quite well, and so far have needed very little water due to plenty of rain this spring. If we are to obtain as many local foods as possible, (which of course includes herbs and spices) we'll have to preserve as much of the home-grown items as possible over the course of the spring and summer. To that end, I harvested some chive stems tonight, cut them to the standard size, sprinkled them onto one of the new fruit leather trays (which has no holes for them to fall through) and put them in the dehydrator. I'll have to do this fairly often throughout the season in order to harvest enough to last all year. They smelled so good when I cut them that it was tempting to just microwave a potato and use all those chives immediately...but I behaved myself. There should still be plenty of time for fresh-cut chives on potatoes later.

Locavore Progress

While at this stage we're still partially depending on grocery chain store produce to keep our diet reasonably balanced, we have been able to have a few meals that were either all or mostly local in content. Last night's dinner was a big spaghetti squash from an organic farm only about 133 miles away, with a spaghetti sauce made from a quart jar of our own diced tomatoes canned last year, plus bits of red onion from the above mentioned farmer. The shredded mozzarella cheese was, regrettably, neither organic nor local, and I have no idea where the herbs/spices came from. Gradually, I hope to do better. But at least the main components were relatively local, and our home-canned tomato sauce was amazing. When I opened the jar, the contents smelled as fresh as if we'd just picked the tomatoes. Tasted that way, too. It was the first time I'd had homemade tomato sauce from home-canned tomatoes in a very long while...and it reminded me again part of why we're going to be doing this in the first place. Commercially canned tomato sauce is practically tasteless in comparason...and I had both kids go back for seconds. The Huz had thirds. I dunno...was it a hit?

We finally got back in contact with our friend who raises his own grass-fed steers, and we're all signed up to buy a share of half of one, which we'll eventually slaughter this fall. So come fall the freezer will once again be full of natural lean (and safe) beef. Good thing, too. I'm seeing the amount of meat in the freezer get lower and lower; we're nearly out of roasts and hamburger, and as usual, it's mostly down to the various cuts of steak. Now I need a good source of local humanely raised chicken, pork and turkey, and I think I have a good one in mind--less than 30 miles away, too.

I found the grapevine I want, and bought it...now I just need to get its spot ready so we can transplant it soon. I know that's putting the cart a little before the horse, but I didn't want the nursery to be all out of stock before I had a chance to clear the spot where I want to put the grapevine. And whether that all goes to disaster or not, we still have our friend with the old, well-established grapevines. The deal is that we can have the grapes if we want, in exchange for a few jars of the jam or jelly we make from them. Pretty sweet deal for both of us, really.

And then there's my recent impulse buy. I was shocked to find myself actually visiting two local nurseries within the month of March. Usually, I wait until the last minute--May, sometime--and get what I can get and miss out on everything else. I guess that's why I've never seen rhubarb rootstock available before. I don't like the stuff, personally, but the Huz does, and it might be good added to something else. I've heard people swear by strawberry-rhubarb jelly. So I brought home a rhubarb root--partially as a gift for the Huz, and partially because I've been going a little crazy waiting for the first local produce to appear. The funny thing is, even after I plant this root, we can't harvest hardly any of it this year. But if we never plant one, we'll not have any next year, either, so...there's now a piece of rhubarb root awaiting transplant as well.

March has decided to go out like a lion, and after a brief hint of spring the weather has been cold and rainy with freezing nighttime temperatures for well over a week now. I dare not take the tomato seedlings outside much due to rain and gusting winds, so of course they're growing like weeds inside my 68 degree house. They're gorgeous, but they need to not get too big, or too tall. So I'm hoping our cold weather evens out soon. Great news on the water-in-the-mountains front, but here in the valley we're still waiting for the first asparagus. If that means we must eat more organic lettuce from California for another month, well...one step at a time, I guess.

New Seedling Pics

Okay, here are the most recent seedling pictures. Those from the initial mid-February sowing are now five weeks old. The tinier ones are probably about three weeks old; I planted some seeds in the pots where I thought nothing was coming up; then the ones I'd been waiting on from the first planting came up, and then even later, the new seeds I'd tucked into the flat to replace them came up--so I ended up with many extra seedlings. In view of our locavore plans, that's good--I can trade the extras to friends with larger gardens in exchange for some of the veggies they grow that I don't have room to.

GMO's

Read this article. I beg you. If it doesn't scare you as much as it scared me, then I'm not sure you're even human. I don't need to say more here, because the article pretty much says it all.

Some days I really fear we're doomed as a species, but I'm trying to hang onto my optimism with all my might.

As soon as they're downloaded from my camera, I'll post pictures of my heirloom tomato seedlings. I don't know if they'll make you feel any better after you've read the aforementioned article, but it's worth a try.

Re-potting

Today I re-potted the tomato seedlings, as the greenhouse advised me to do. Each of the Amish Paste tomatoes now has its own 3-inch pot. As it turns out, I had just enough plastic pots left over from prior plant purchases to house the transplants. In every case, when I removed the seedlings from their starter pony pack, the dirt they were growing in crumbled apart because the seedlings hadn't had enough time yet to form a root ball. This turned out to be a good thing, because I had to gently separate the roots of the two (and sometimes three) seedlings in each compartment of the pony pack. They came free easily and no roots were broken, as far as I could tell. Had they grown together for enough time to form a joint root ball, they wouldn't have been as easy to separate.

Before the transplanting, they'd spent three or four hours outside in the sunshine, and weren't displaying anywhere near the shock they'd shown the day before when they went outside for the first time. Today, since they were already outside and I had the dirt and new pots available, I went ahead and transplanted them. Then I brought them inside. Before long, some of them had started to droop, but I watered them gently and turned the sunlight gooseneck lamp on them, and by nightfall, most of the droopers had already righted themselves. Two of them, I didn't even transplant out of the pony pack at all--both because I had no more pots and because they were each in their compartment alone in the first place. They were also smaller than the others--neither has its second set of leaves yet. In order to have the right number for the spots in my garden, I need a total of six healthy Amish Paste tomato plants. That leaves space for two Burbank and two Principe Borghese.

One tomato plant can easily cost from $1.79 to $3.49, depending on size and rarity. So the total savings for me to grow my own from seed is negligible. I'm doing it more for the experience, and for the fact that not all varieties of heirloom tomatoes are available from the greenhouse or other local nurseries. This way, I can grow the varieties I want, and I don't have to be limited to anyone else's whim. Also, it's fascinating--being involved in the process from the very beginning to the end when I harvest the tomatoes. This'll be the first tomato-growing year where I haven't grown Roma, and although it's proven to be a prolific producer in the past, I wanted to go with Amish Paste this time--so we'll see.