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.