September 2008 Archives

Though the humidity has departed, warm weather - and insects - linger. Hummingbirds zoom around the Mexican bush sage and Turk's cap, and today I spotted a migrant warbler flitting about in our palm trees. It's been dry, but I still have to do my mosquito dance while watering the garden. The glorious, easy days of fall and winter gardening have not yet arrived. With the first day of the Eat Local Challenge nearly at hand, I worry about the welfare of my fall garden, which I hope will supplement our planned purchases from the farmers market and other sources.

Our pole beans have grown well and have plenty of blossoms, but their leaves are getting chewed by caterpillars. I've applied Bt, but half-heartedly, and you have to be vigilant. The arugula is also showing signs of insect damage, but it's minor. Most distressing, my lettuce has seemingly failed to sprout. After my August post mentioning seed life in storage, I may have finally fallen victim to some seeds gone bad. The packet indicates they're only a year and a half old, and lettuce can potentially last six years, but I've sown liberally with disappointing results. If my second try fails I'll buy a new pack, and after that I'll start suspecting critters. On the plus side I have some Swiss chard sprouts, though no beets yet. A friend generously gave us some broccoli and cabbage starts, along with a few lettuce plants. I've still got green onions and jalapenos (too bad we don't use more of them; one plant always supplies more than enough for our needs and this year I planted two.). We have new basil plants, some oregano, a little thyme hanging on but suffering in the heat, and more rosemary than we could possibly use.

I signed up today for the Eat Local Challenge. As mentioned in a previous post,

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.

I'll be using that basic plan, but I will be out of town for eight days during the month (my home is in Mobile AL) and I know I won't be able to eat a strictly local diet while I'm gone. I am going to try to eat something local every day during the trip. I'm also not going to hold the rest of my family to the challenge. My husband will pretty much have to for meals at home, but my daughter's picky three year old eating habits would be sorely tried. I'm sure we'll all be much happier if she can continue to have her peanut butter, bananas, and avocados.

My list of exceptions, pretty much the standard with one big caveat:

• cooking oils (olive is our primary oil, then canola, and a small amount of sesame)
• spices, including salt
• yeast leavening, including yeast, baking powder, and baking soda
• tea for me, coffee for my husband
• wheat flour. This is a big one, but I'm excepting this because baking is a big part of our family cuisine.

I have to admit, I'm a little less than prepared. My garden won't be bursting with beans and greens on October 1st (at this point I have pole beans well on their way, arugula seedlings, and some brassica starts, and oh yeah, plenty of jalapenos). I don't have a summer's worth of fruits and vegetables stocked away, canned and frozen. And while I have a list of foods I think I'll be able to get, and where I can get them from, I haven't confirmed everything yet. I have what might be called a vague plan.

My husband and I have talked, and our concerns are, firstly, expense. He's worried that our local diet will be more expensive than our current one; I'm not so sure. I think it may prove more expensive, but not by a huge amount. It's possible it may even be less expensive, given that the number of things we'll be able to buy will be limited. The second issue is time and effort consumed in pursuit of local ingredients. With a toddler and already-busy schedules, we're both worried that excursions to buy local may be too taxing (not to mention costly, given the price of gas). I also dislike the idea of personally driving 150 miles for my food because it's inefficient, and while it may be possible to make that effort for a month, it's not realistic to sustain over the course of a year. I'm more interested in what's possible for the average person in our area.

I look forward to doing more planning, and to reporting back on how the challenge goes.

In today's Press-Register, more tidbits on the fall garden. Plant now for harvests in fall and winter.

Culinate presents The organic Top 20 — A shopper's guide, which is a nice visual guide to the produce you should be buying organic because of its high pesticide content, and produce that's safer to buy conventionally grown, frequently because thick rinds mean less pesticides make it into the fruit, or fewer pesticides are used on those crops.

In our area, it's frequently difficult to buy both local and organic. Still, it's something to aim for.

The article links to other produce guides, including the Environmental Working Group, where you can download the "dirty dozen" wallet guide.

WHAT: Local Food Production Initiative public meeting
WHEN: Monday, September 15 at 6:30pm
WHERE: the Nix Center, 1 Bayou Drive in Fairhope

TOPIC: Ed Tunnel, retired Baldwin County Extension Coordinator, will discuss "Fruit Tree Cultivars for This Area."

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

See this archived post for more information on the Local Food Production Initiative, centered in Fairhope. Current projects the Initiative is looking into include establishing a community garden in Fairhope; expanding the season on the Fairhope Farmers Market and perhaps finding a permanent off-street location for the market; educating the public about the opportunity for and benefits of local food production; and exploring ways of encouraging the preservation of farmland in Baldwin County.

The Local Food Production Initiative in Fairhope recommends Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew as a good book newcomers might want to look at. Although I wouldn't call it a "new" way to garden, since it's basically an adaptation of intensive gardening techniques that have been around for ages, it does simplify the planning. Here's their review:

In 1981 Mel Bartholomew published a book called Square Foot Gardening, and offered gardeners an alternative way of organizing their vegetable gardens.

The old way of gardening is to plant a long row of seeds, then another long row of seeds next to the first row, and so on, row after row. Among the problems with this technique are the following: the seeds in a row are planted so close together that the gardener must spend time and effort thinning the crop as it starts growing; there is much open space between rows, causing more area for weeds to grow; this open space also increases the amount of compost, fertilizer, and water that must be applied; and to tend and harvest the garden one must walk through the garden, compressing the soil and making it more difficult for air and water to reach the roots of the plants, causing a smaller and less healthy vegetable at harvest time.

Planting a packet of seeds in one of the rows may also mean that you end up with more of the vegetable than you are able to consume during the short harvest period.

The wide spaces between rows may have been necessary when animals or tractors were used to plow the field, but are really not necessary for the small home or community garden. The technique persists, however, because “that’s the way it’s always been done.” The author estimates that the square foot gardening system grows the same amount of food on 20 percent of the land.

The problems with long row gardening can discourage new gardeners, causing them to lose enthusiasm and spend less and less time tending their garden, and perhaps eventually giving up on gardening all together.

The technique of square foot gardening was developed to make gardening simpler, less time consuming, and with a reduced amount of land, fertilizer, compost and water required. It achieves these goals by limiting the size of the garden to the exact size the gardener needs to provide the food he or she wants for his or her family, and planting just the right number of seeds in each square foot to most efficiently utilize the space.

Mel Bartholomew calls his system “square foot gardening” because you build up your garden in a series of squares, each square measuring 12 inches by 12 inches, or one square foot. Each square (or group of squares) holds a different vegetable, fruit, flower, or herb. The number of plants in each square depends on how large the plants become. Tables in his book tell for each vegetable type whether one, four, nine, or sixteen seeds should be planted, evenly spaced, in a square.

The small one-foot squares are grouped into blocks measuring 4-feet by 4-feet square, giving a total of sixteen squares. The back row of the square can have a trellis so that climbing plants can grow vertically.

Bartholomew says this is enough for one person to have a salad every day during the growing season. A family could have two, four, or any number of 4-foot by 4-foot blocks. His 347-page book gives many tips that will enable even a beginning gardener to start an easy-to-maintain garden in their back yard, or as part of a community garden.

The book is available at the Fairhope Public Library (non-fiction section catalog number 635BAR). (The Mobile Public Library has the 2005 edition.) The 1981 paperback edition can be purchased used from www.abebooks.com for less than $3.00 plus postage. Find more details on square foot gardening online at: http://www.squarefootgardening.com/.

Via the Organic Consumers Association: Eating less, eating local and eating better could slash U.S. energy use, Cornell University study finds.

Grist's Dispatches From the Fields feature the reflections of Ariane Lotti and Stephanie Ogburn, who are working on small farms in Iowa and Colorado this season. Lotti writes:

Why should we care about the loss of what has come to be called the "agriculture of the middle," the mid-sized family farms that were once the backbone of the farm economy? In short, because we lost the grassroots base for action on federal farm policy.

As the farm crisis took hold, policy change could not happen fast enough to stop or reverse the heavy bleeding of farmers out of America's heartland. (Nor, one could argue, was there the political will to keep the mid-sized family farmers on the land.) Farmers lost the farm and left Rural America, and with them went the voice of opposition to farm policies that rewarded the consolidation, monoculturization, and corporatization of agriculture.

If you managed to miss the media blitz, Slow Food USA recently held its Slow Food Nation conference in San Francisco. It was attended by over 60,000 people. At Culinate recent college graduate Eric Hass provides a brief look at the concluding panel in the Food for Thought series, consisting of "farmer [and author] Wendell Berry, physicist and environmentalist Vandana Shiva, journalists Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, Chez Panisse founder Alice Waters, and Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini." He writes:

...Slow Food is an effort to escape the strictures imposed by a monetary scale of value. In its best form, I think, Slow Food implies a personal stance explicitly at odds with the idea that the trophies of capitalism (wealth, efficiency, speed, opulence) make a good life. Life can clearly hold more profound pleasures, some of which can only be found in the enjoyment of a slow meal. It needn’t necessarily be a matter of wealth.

Slow Food has long been criticized for its elitism, but this conference marks a strong effort to give the organization broader appeal. With food at the forefront of the U.S. (indeed, global) consciousness, the moment is ripe.

From Kitchen Gardeners International, Garden Q & A: Laying out your garden. Addresses the basic question of whether to plant in rows or another scheme.

From the Sustainable Table blog:

As part of the Slow Food Nation’s weekend, Participant Productions (producer of such films as Fast Food Nation and An Inconvenient Truth) premiered several clips from their upcoming film Food, Inc., a documentary about our food system.

From what was shown, this film will portray the problems with our industrial food system. Food Inc will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in a week or two, with general release in early-ish 2009. (It will depend on getting a distributor and when they want to release the film.)

My thoughts on the clips - they were a little intense and a little depressing/overwhelming, but they got the message across, which, if you don’t know by now, is that our food system is falling apart. Agribusiness tries to fix it by applying bandages, but it’s simply starting to fall apart - and instead of putting a quick fix on the problems, we need to look at how to redefine the whole structure.

Grist offers a brief guide and a list of resources on how to begin composting. If you don't already compost, the biggest immediate benefit is that you reduce your waste stream significantly, particularly if you compost both kitchen waste and yard waste. A secondary, somewhat longer term benefit is that you can create valuable food for your plants. Bonus: it also helps sequester carbon, for those of you concerned about climate change.

I love composting, and there's nothing quite as satisfying as forking over a pile that's really cooking. However, my own composting experiences have run the gamut from stinky pile of rotting vegetables to static pile of leaves to the aforementioned steamy black gold. You can manage your pile as you choose, and your style may depend on the results you want; I favor the actively managed pile. You need a mix of brown (i.e. dry) and green (i.e. fresh) material, preferably weighed toward the brown though that's always the quantity in short supply at our house. (As Bill Finch pointed out at his vegetable gardening talk, you can take advantage of your neighbors' bagged leaves to save yourself some work.) Avoid meats, fats, and pet waste. Turn frequently, every week or two, and add water as you turn the pile if it's getting dry/starting to slow down. The type of container doesn't matter too much as long as there is air circulation (not a huge issue if you're turning it regularly) and it's covered from the rain. In a few months you'll have usable compost.

My personal favorite composting resource is a little booklet that I got years ago from my co-op, Home Composting Made Easy ($3.95, shipping included), but you can find free online resources at the end of the Grist article.

Have any compost experiences, good or bad, that you'd like to share?

The Sustainable Table's Eat Well Guide has put together a great handbook for people interested in using the web to promote sustainable eating. You can download Cultivating the Web in PDF form.

Via the Organic Consumers Association, a link to this article in the Boston Globe: Lead may lurk in backyard gardens.

Normally I try to avoid sounding alarmist, but I do encourage people to think about the issue of lead contamination, particularly if you live in an urban area. If you're starting a vegetable garden give some thought to location; while it might be convenient to step outside your door to tend your kitchen garden, the soil under the eaves is right where lead paint from your older home may reside. If you're particularly concerned you might want to take advantage of the soil testing mentioned in the article, but commonsense measures include locating your vegetable garden away from the house, and using raised beds with soil from elsewhere.

Guidelines and applications have been issued for vendor spots at the City of Mobile's Fall Market on the Square. The market is a producer-only market, meaning that the vendors must personally grow or produce the items that they sell. The fall season will run on Saturdays, October 4 - November 22, from 8am until 12pm.

In exciting news for our market, the National Farmers' Market Nutrition Program will be visiting on October 11.

If you need vendor guidelines or an application, call Chris Barraza at 251.208.7443.

In today's Press-Register, Bill Finch offers some tips and reminders on how to care for your waterlogged plants.