A while back I had been tinkering with the category archives and ended up messing up the page content. I've finally gone back and fixed that now so the category archives actually function as they should: a list of titles (with links) in each category.

Today is International Kitchen Garden Day. Admittedly, I had hoped to plan something, a meal perhaps if nothing more, but in the busy-ness of back-to-school I've dropped the ball. Instead I'll be looking out at my yard and appreciating the fact that my newly sprouted beans won't be inundated by the 8 - 15" of rain that we could have received if Tropical Storm Fay had continued our way without weakening.

In my garden, we're still getting jalapenos and bell peppers, a few green onions, and herbs.

I've been planning the fall garden and have ordered a few things that I needed. If you have leftover seed (as I do) you can still use it the next season, and in some cases even for a few years. The germination rate will go down, but you should still be able to get the plants you need by sowing more seeds. I was paging through a book my mother gave me, Rodale's The Frugal Gardener: How to Have More Garden for Less Money, and found a chart of expected life of seeds. (It's not my favorite garden book, but I do reference it fairly regularly.) There's the usual caution about keeping seeds in the proper conditions, i.e. cool and dry. I used to save seed as recommended, in an airtight jar in the refrigerator with a silica packet to absorb moisture, but the last few years I've just been keeping them in a storage container in the house and I don't notice a difference in performance.

What's your appreciation of your kitchen garden today?

If you love okra, you'll love the big feature on okra in the Press-Register's Friday Garden & Home section. (Note: the online article does not include growing tips.) Read and make plans for next year's crop.

While I consider the issues of GMOs (genetically modified organisms) rather out of the scope of this blog, here's a succinct article from Slate which lays out the stakes.

WHAT: Local Food Production Initiative public meeting
WHEN: Monday, August 18 at 6:30pm
WHERE: the Nix Center, 1 Bayou Drive in Fairhope

TOPIC: City Council Member Cecil Christenberry, owner of the Old Tyme Feed & Garden Supply store, will discuss “Planning for Your Fall Garden”.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

See this archived post for more information on the Local Food Production Initiative.

Eat Local Challenge has announced its fourth annual event, the October 2008 Eat Local Challenge. If you're wondering what that entails, here's the summary from their site:

The traditional Eat Local Challenge is a basic concept: commit to eating only locally grown foods for a period of thirty days. Declare "exceptions" that you will not be eating locally, and try as hard as you can to have everything else come from your local foodshed. "Local" is traditionally a 150-mile distance from your home, but can really be defined as any area near you. Some locavores choose their county, state, or region.

Don't tell my husband, but I am seriously considering signing up.

I'm happy to see that the folks up north have extended their Eating Alabama project for two more months, for a total of six. They were originally planning on April through July, but Andrew Grace writes: "We haven't eaten enough food from our great state. We haven't visited enough farms. We haven't talked to enough people concerned about local food, local flavors, and local economies." And of course, "it's unbelievably easy to eat only food from Alabama this time of year." Easy to say if you live in the northern part of the state!

They've posted a lot of good new content and interviews with more producers, so if you haven't stopped by already be sure to check it out.

Via the Organic Consumers Association, a link to Grist's Checkout Line blog, addressing a question on sustainable fish choices. Lots of good links and guidelines, though as always there is no definitive answer to this very tricky question.

From the Organic Consumers Association, a link to a short piece on Grist, Solving the apartment dweller's dilemma: how to have a garden when you're short on space. The answer is container gardening, which is what I always recommend to people just starting out, even people who have yards. You can have as few or as many containers as you want, you can position them in a convenient spot, and the effort involved is fairly minimal, the scale less intimidating than plowing under a section of your lawn. Herbs are great to start with since the payoff is big - so much flavor for so little effort - and the plants, being almost weedy, are pretty forgiving. Many vegetables have dwarf or small varieties suitable for growing in containers (just get large ones), and standard varieties of some plants will work as well. Lettuce and salad greens, tomatoes, peppers, squash, beans, and peas, among others, can all grow in containers.

Via the Organic Consumers Association, a link to this article on Grist: Dispatches from the Fields: Whatever happened to organic?.

This thoughtful piece contains some really illuminating comments on why we need to continue to push for organic food, and has a lot of useful links within the article as well. The authors, both working on small farms, write: "a focus on buying locally avoids a critique of industrial agriculture from all perspectives except that of transportation." That may be going a bit far, since I think - or hope - that for most people there are also issues of fair wages and compensation, supporting the local economy, food that is just plain fresher and better, and at least a chance that small farmers will be more likely to embrace organic agriculture (and these reasons are all cited in the article). My investment in local food is closely tied to the idea of sustainability. But it's true that to focus solely on food miles pushes these other, equally important ideas to the rear.