I've already seen Christmas trees piling up on the curb around town. With just a little effort, you can keep that tree out of the landfill! The City of Mobile is collecting trees at eight locations through January 7. If you're worried about getting needles in your car, just bag it in a large trash & leaf bag for the ride over. If it won't fit in your car, saw it in half and you'll have an easier time getting it in your trunk or hatch.

Recycled trees will be ground into mulch that will be available free to the public on January 10 at the Greater Gulf State Fairgrounds. I've been told that you shouldn't apply the mulch right away, but should let it compost a bit before applying it to your plants.

The city also provides some post-holiday recycling tips if you have packaging and gift wrap.

Happy holidays to you. I hope you've been able to enjoy a little local flavor for your holiday (or winter) meals. If you have, I'd love to hear about it in the comments!

We were given a bag of oranges and grapefruits from a friend's yard. That's one of the nicest gifts - free, local, and delicious.

Our garden has yielded a small but steady supply of lettuce, arugula, green onions, herbs, and now broccoli. Our cabbages have heads of varying size, and I have to confess that, having never grown cabbage before I'm not entirely sure when to harvest it. I may try one this week and see if it seems mature. There are some insects eating leaves, so winter is not entirely pest-free.

We've had a couple of hard freezes, but I haven't lost any plants. In our location we're usually warmer than outlying areas, and the raised beds give some additional protection too, keeping the plants just high enough to escape the frost. I've covered our young lettuces a couple of times, and so far they've been fine. What about you, have you lost anything to frost?

My husband's and my gift to ourselves this season was a dog. We adopted a young adult dog from ARF. She is a great family dog, very calm and good with children, but she has plenty of energy and enthusiasm for walks and trips around town. It's a learning experience, too, as she presents different challenges from our previous dog, a boxer whom we raised from puppyhood. We've had her for a little over a month, and we're still working to get her on board with the idea of rewards-based training, since it seems a little foreign to her. You may be wondering what a dog has to do with local food, but it does present a problem - dog poop. Since the dog uses the same yard to potty that we do to garden edibles, poop scooping is a necessity, and even with my meticulous trips around the yard I worry about contaminating our food, particularly in the new beds I built that aren't raised. I've been trying to train her (on the leash) to use a specific area of the yard that's away from the garden, but I'm not always the one to take her out to do her business. Anyone out there got any tips for gardening and canine sanitation?

Hopefully you've been busy with your families and don't give a hoot about the lack of recent postings. I've been busy too, and unfortunately dealing with some personal health issues. Nonetheless, with the new year coming up I'm looking forward to getting plugged in again. I think we'll have a lot to talk about with the upcoming change in the administration, and spring planting season is really just around the corner.

That reminds me, Bill Finch says now is the time to plant your peas! Get out in your garden and get busy (and that includes me!).

I didn't anticipate this lengthy absence, primarily due to our family being sick most of the month of November. Thankfully, at least for the moment, we're all back to about 80%.

The month of November saw the close of the Mobile farmers market, and sadly I missed the last day because I was out of town.

November also brought the harvest of our four remaining satsumas and our one Meyer lemon. The satsumas were good, though a bit watery compared to some I've had, so I think we may have left them on the tree too long, and a couple seemed to have been touched by frost. The lemon is good. I'm still using it, parceling it out squeeze by squeeze on a variety of things from crepes to salad dressing.

Also of note in the backyard garden, we have cabbages and broccoli starting to head up (though I've trimmed the broccoli to encourage growth of side shoots), arugula persisting, some late beet seedlings, lettuce finally starting to take hold, rows of garlic for next year's harvest, and young fava bean plants.

We've also been enjoying the company of a Great Horned Owl. Remember how I complained about our abundance of squirrels? It seems to have caught this predator's attention, as he (or she) has taken to perching in the top of a tree that leans over our yard, announcing his territory. We've heard him any time from 5:45pm to 5:45am, and as well as I can judge he seems to fly from perch to perch throughout the neighborhood hooting. I assume he's trying to attract a mate, but so far I haven't heard a second one. I just hope he's catching squirrels occasionally.

We're into November now and I've put an end to my local foods diet. I've been battling a rough cold and am thankful that my husband could make me a pot of chicken soup.

LESSONS LEARNED/PLANS FOR NEXT YEAR

If we do this again next year (which I think likely we will), some things will definitely have to change.

1. We will plan ahead and have more food put by. I made an admittedly last minute decision to participate in the challenge and had no opportunity to store food. There were plenty of things I could have put up - strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and peaches, for example - that would have given our month more variety, especially in terms of fruit.
2. Likewise, I'd try to plan our garden better so as to have more food available in October. By the way, we never did get to use our lemon. It hasn't ripened enough yet.
3. We will expand our local radius. We went with 150 miles, the default terms of the challenge, but in our area that's too restrictive. While we do have available to us things that people in other parts of the country don't have - fresh tomatoes and seafood being prime examples - there is simply not enough variety in the range of staples and fruits. If we expanded our area we could encompass rice and corn meal, which would be two welcome additions. For some products I might also try to buy from within a regional area (say the adjacent states).
4. Making ALL your own food is a lot of work. I had exempted flour so I could keep baking, and I found myself baking not only multiple times a week, but on occasion multiple times a day. This meant the kitchen needed to be cleaned multiple times a day. I didn't anticipate the significant increase in labor. It was tiring. That's another reason it would be nice to fall back on rice every so often.
5. You can get a lot of pleasure from making food with simple ingredients. Sandwiches, among other things, are a brilliant invention.
6. Eating locally is a great way to reduce your household's waste stream. I already knew that most of the trash we generate is food packaging, and that became abundantly clear during the Eat Local Challenge. With the bulk of our diet being made up of fresh produce and baked goods made by hand, we had MUCH less trash, perhaps a quarter of a kitchen trash bag from the entire household per week (not counting our cat litter waste), whereas normally we might have one loosely packed kitchen trash bag, sometimes a bit more or less.

SURPRISES

1. There were two items that, for practical reasons, got added to my list of exceptions: onions and butter. I looked for, but could not find, local onions (you can get them here in the spring/summer, but not in the fall). In my ordinary cooking I use onions on an almost daily basis, and I found that particularly with a reduced list of ingredients I could not do without them. I tried to use as few as possible. Butter, on the other hand, is more of a luxury, but we ate a lot of eggs and I find it difficult to fry an egg in anything but butter (I've tried using oil but did not like the results). Again, I bought organic butter and tried to use as little as possible.
2. You can get tired of things you like, even things you really, really like. I LOVE fresh baked bread, so much so that baking is a standard part of our cooking routine. But after a month of eating bread as my only grain I didn't want to eat bread any more. Ditto with sweet potatoes, which do not rank nearly as high as bread on my list of favorite foods. I'll be happy if I don't have to eat any more of those for a while.
3. Sometimes exposure does not broaden your palette. I hoped I would learn to like greens, since I knew we'd have to eat them during the challenge and prior to this point, frankly, I have not enjoyed them. Turnip greens are what's widely available here this time of year, and in the end I decided that I found them tolerable but still did not like them. It's disappointing, because greens are really good for you.
4. We did go about $125 over our typical monthly grocery budget. We also spent a bit more on gas by driving around to get some of that food. I hoped it would be less costly.
5. I actually did not lose any weight during the Eat Local Challenge, though I suspected I might, and my husband said he thought he had. I think my high consumption of baked goods (mostly bread and muffins, but also pancakes, popovers, and the like) kept my weight steady.
6. I did not miss chocolate as much as I thought I might; there were only a couple of moments of true craving. Though many people exempt chocolate, I did not even though I consider myself a True Chocolate Lover. Perhaps it was knowing the challenge would only last a month.
7. What I missed most: onions were up there at the top, though I eventually gave in and added them to the list of exemptions. Next probably came rice, oats, and fruits like apples. (I won't say pasta because theoretically I could have made my own.) I found myself fantasizing about the baked Indiana apples I had made earlier in the month. Also salad greens and broccoli.

CONCLUSIONS

It's not very feasible for an average family here to subsist long-term on only a strict diet of local fare. There's just too much that you need in your diet that's not available locally. I think a reasonable amount of vegetables and protein can be had locally, but not grains or (fresh, in-season) fruits. Therefore, a modified local diet could work. If you disagree with me, I'd love to hear about it!

I've saved some choice ingredients for our final week of the Eat Local Challenge, and the change in seasons means we'll be getting a little variety in our diet. Breakfast was my usual goat milk & honey muffins, chock full of toasted pecans. Lunch was tomato and arugula sandwiches. Dinner was this tasty salad, made with lettuce and arugula from our garden, Sweet Home's Bayside Blue cheese, market tomatoes, cucumbers, and satsumas, and vinaigrette with Perdido Farm's wine vinegar. Unfortunately, that's all the lettuce that's mature now, so we won't be having any more salad this week. Still, it was nice for a change!

For readers outside the Gulf region, if you're not familiar with satsumas (I wasn't before I moved here), they're better known to most people as mandarin oranges. The fruits are sweet and juicy, with a good orange flavor. They are small and the skins are easily removed, both attributes which make them popular with children (like my daughter, who loves them). Satsumas are one of the most cold-hardy citrus, and they can be grown even in the north part of the state. We have a young satsuma in our yard that we planted this spring, and it's weighed down by eight fruits. If you have a friend with a satsuma in her yard, you generally know it, because mature plants produce more than a single family can easily eat.

Earth Day was six months ago on April 22. I made a note to myself at the time to revisit my Earth Day resolutions six months later, so here we are.

• Be politically active on environmental issues: C. I've certainly done some things, and have signed a lot of petitions. However, I haven't written any of the personal letters I'd like to send. There's still time to do that, and after the election will be a key time to get messages to legislators.

• Reduce waste; maximize recycling and compost, Freecycle, make consumer decisions that minimize packaging, minimize use of disposables: B-. We recycle everything the city's program will accept: paper and cardboard, glass, steel and aluminum cans, plastics 1 & 2, and kitchen grease. (Also, I forgot: batteries can be recycled at Dueitt's Battery Supply on Springhill Avenue.) We compost, although we still frequently have cooked food waste that we have to throw out. I save up items to give away through Freecycle. I do make purchasing decisions based on packaging, though most of our waste remains food packaging (one thing that's become extremely clear during the Eat Local Challenge). I haven't figured out how to ditch plastic bags & wrap for storage. I do reuse them as much as I can, and foil as well. There are plenty of disposable bag alternatives, but I haven't ponied up for any of them yet.

• Set up a clothesline: B+. We set up TWO clotheslines, and I love it. My sense is that it has reduced our electric use, though I don't have the figures to prove it. My husband won't use it for his laundry, however (he often does his laundry at night), so we aren't dryer-free. And there are, of course, days when it rains.

• Convert all household bulbs to CFL: A-. We have done this, with the exception of two candelabra bulbs that are over our fireplace, and one fixture that won't accept anything but halogen. I have had second thoughts, however; with a young child in the house I envision a couple of our lamps getting knocked over and releasing mercury vapor, so I'm considering switching those back.

• Buy shade liners to help insulate house better: F. We haven't done this because frankly we can never afford it. Shade liners are $20 - $25 each, and we have A TON of windows.

• Install screen doors to improve ventilation: A. Done. We would still like to replace a screen door on the back of our house with a storm door, but again that will have to wait until we can afford it.

• Minimize driving; use bus and walk as much as possible: B. We sold our second car and my husband now rides his bike to work. He has logged well over 1000 miles at this point! We also carpool our daughter to school. I do try to drive as little as possible, and there are usually a couple of days each week - sometimes more - when the car doesn't leave the driveway. I don't use the bus as much as I would like, but I always consolidate errands. There is very little driving out for one item. Still, I think we could drive less. I've been tracking our mileage and the lowest we've gotten is just over 500 miles in one month.

• Join environmental organizations: F. Haven't done this. Again, it's an issue of cost.

• Eat less meat, more organics, more local food: B-. We have DEFINITELY accomplished this during the Eat Local Challenge, and during market season I try to buy as much local produce as possible. For organics, I buy only certain items...again, an issue of cost, but I do as much as I can. We don't eat a huge amount of meat, mostly seafood and poultry and rarely beef or pork. We do consume a lot of dairy and eggs (and are planning on raising our own chickens). We do eat two to three meatless meals per week, but we could definitely reduce our meat consumption further. I'm trying to embrace the meat as condiment style.

• Buy used and recycled products when possible: D-. I really should be buying recycled paper products (for toilet paper, for example; I do buy recycled printer paper, though we use very little of that), but I don't. I'm not good about planning to buy toilet paper, so typically I realize that we're out and get it at the first available place.

• Minimize junk mail: B. I've used Catalog Choice to greatly reduce the amount of catalogs I receive, and we don't get a lot of unsolicited mail. I've gone to paperless billing for most (but not all) of our accounts. Still, if I were more vigilant I could probably reduce it even more.

If you read my previous post about Earth Day, you'll see that the last item was "rethink your consumption." Given our limited budget, we're not big consumers to begin with, but who knew that there would be a global financial crisis and now EVERYONE would be talking about reducing spending?? Frankly, I never thought I'd see it, but I'm gratified that at least for the time being there seems to be a cultural shift to at least reconsider our consumption.

Aside from persimmons, there has been no fruit available here. There were satsumas at the market last Saturday, but I paid for mine and, much to my frustration, left them on the table. Today there were satsumas, tangerines, and kumquats.

In addition to the citrus, also at today's market were: baked goods, candy, cucumbers, eggs, cut flowers, honey, jelly, melons, okra, pasta, peas (shelled and unshelled), pecans (shelled and unshelled), persimmons, pickles, pumpkins, seafood, soaps, summer squash (yellow), sweet potatoes, textiles, tomatoes (ripe and green), turnips and turnip greens, vinegar, wine.

NEXT WEEK ONLY, November 1, Mobile's downtown market will be held at Bienville Square instead of its usual location because of the Senior Bowl Charity Run.

My menu has been rather monotonous, so I won't bore you with details. I've been baking a lot - sometimes twice a day - and one new recipe I tried was for popovers. If you've never made them (I hadn't), they're very easy, tasty, and fun. They're made with an egg batter, similar to a crepe batter, and baked in muffin tins. During their time in the oven they puff up into high, rounded, hollow domes, at which my daughter and I marveled as they baked. We had them at breakfast, but you could easily use them in place of rolls at dinner.

In the garden, I've harvested another serving of pole beans, and the occasional arugula for accenting sandwiches. The squirrels have been absolutely pestilential this fall; it must have been a banner year for them. Generally I regard squirrels with tolerance, if not benevolence, despite their semblance to tree-loving rats. Whatever their activity in the garden, they don't eat the plants and so it's never been an issue. However, this year there are SO MANY of them, and they've all decided that my neat, newly planted beds with their loose soil are the perfect place to store and/or forage for nuts. Numerous holes have been dug, even around my newest additions like the banana tree, butterfly bushes, and dill (they actually overturned that one with their digging). In the future I may have to apply netting so the seeds have a chance to sprout and grow.

When I decided to take this challenge, part of my driving interest was to see how feasible it would be for the average person, with an average income, to eat locally. I anticipated I would do more driving than in a typical month, but I figured my budget could probably absorb it. However, here we are at day 18, and when I reviewed my funds this morning I decided that even with the price of gas a dollar lower than it's been in recent memory, I really couldn't afford to drive to Ocean Springs to pick up the locally raised chickens from Live Oak Farm I had planned on using to add variety to our diet. I was disappointed, but hey, the average person isn't going to travel far and wide to put local food into their pantry. So it's realistic, right? We'll just have to make do as best we can on what we can get here.

Today, making do included a breakfast of scrambled eggs with arugula, lunch of homemade sandwich bread with blackberry jelly, and a dinner of pizza with tomatoes, arugula, basil, and Sweet Home cheese. There were even leftovers for tomorrow.

At today's Cathedral Square market: baked goods, candy, corn, cucumbers, eggplant, eggs, cut flowers, greens, honey, jelly, pasta, peas (shelled and unshelled), pecans (shelled and unshelled), persimmons, pickles, plants, pottery, pumpkins, satsumas, seafood, soap, summer squash (zucchini), sweet potatoes, textiles, tomatoes, vinegar, wine.

Creativity was on the back burner today, with my daughter requesting more pancakes for breakfast, and another round of shrimp po'boys and sweet potato chips for dinner, with the addition of a serving of green beans from our garden. Blanched, with a little salt and pepper, they were fresh, tender, and delectable.

The morning's trip to the Botanical Gardens plant sale netted me some herbs and a "Blue Java" banana. We already have "Gran Nain," a dwarf variety, but it didn't bear this year; the main stalk died over the winter, so the clump we have now is all pups from the spring.