A nice little piece in the LocalHarvest February newsletter about how to incorporate local foods into your diet.
March 2009 Archives
I always like this kind of green tips list. This one is from The WorldWatch Institute, and includes the by-now familiar mantra "eat local food."
If you haven't seen it before, you might want to check out the Recipes for Health series from the New York Times. Here's their description:
Recipes for Health offers recipes with an eye towards empowering you to cook healthy meals every day. Produce, seasonal and locally grown when possible, and a well-stocked pantry are the linchpins of a good diet, and accordingly, each week’s recipes will revolve around a particular type of produce or a pantry item. This is food that is vibrant and light, full of nutrients but by no means ascetic, fun to cook and a pleasure to eat.
Since we've been eating quinoa lately, this one caught my eye: Royal Quinoa Salad With Tofu and Sesame Ginger Vinaigrette.
Also at the Times, more thoughts on An Almost Meatless Diet and a few recipes from the new book of the same name.
Incidentally, I had my first chemotherapy treatment yesterday and I'm doing fine.
The latest additions to our kitchen garden, after visiting the plant sale, are a half dozen blueberry bushes which we've planted along our front walk. They're flowering right now and I love watching the bumblebees visiting the flowers.
I was thinking that despite my plans to scale back, we still have a lot going on in our yard.
Bananas (haven't yet borne fruit, but we're trying)
Basil
Blackberries (wild, but yield a few handfuls each year)
Blueberries
Cherry Tomatoes
Chives
Fava Beans
Garlic
Green Onions (starting to flower)
Jalapeno Peppers
Lemon (one small tree)
Lettuce (the end of the winter crop)
Parsley
Pole Beans
Rosemary
Sage
Satsuma (one small tree)
Summer Squash
Thyme
In the spirit of the times, if not exactly in the spirit of local food, at Culinate there's a link to this list of Top 100 Blogs for the Frugal Gourmet. Of note, seven items in the "Healthy and Green" section, and a blog I had previously flagged for mention here, 30 Bucks a Week, though admittedly it's a little different doing that in Brooklyn than it is in Mobile.
I tend to be wary of many cheap shopping proponents, since frequently the food that's recommended is highly processed and of low nutritional value. See instead some articles I'd previously recommended from the NY Times, Healthy Foods for Under $1 and from Epicurious, Top 10 Money-Saving Ingredients.
Also at Culinate, Cheap meals: How to think beyond coupons, a piece about the types of meals to plan to save money, rather than specific ingredients or shopping tactics. At our house most of these meals are in the regular rotation.
In a similar vein, in January Culinate provided a link to 65 Cheap, Healthy, One-Dish Meals with Good Leftover Potential at the Cheap Healthy Good blog.
At Culinate, an article about Raised-bed gardening: Advantages over planting directly in the ground. While I have in the past created new raised beds by digging up the surrounding earth, which then became pathways between the beds, it's easier, though significantly more expensive, to haul in materials.
Also from my archive of tagged posts, two from Kitchen Gardeners International's Garden Q & A: Sizing up your raised beds, and Building raised beds the quick way.
I always intend to recommend more books, and at the Slow Food USA Blog there's a post on What [books] inspired you to get involved in sustainable food? What inspires you still?
For those who are interested, NY Times blog DotEarth gives a run-down of Climate and Energy Basics (things pretty much everyone can agree on).
With the growing awareness of sites like Local Harvest, more farmers are taking advantage of the chance to supply listings. Here's the current results within a 100-mile radius of Mobile.
Now is the time to order your grass fed beef from Hastings Farm in Baldwin County. You need a freezer or several friends to split the approximately 90 pounds you'll get from a quarter, at a cost of $540.
At the New York Times, read a lengthy article on the hopes for a green revolution in our nation's food system.
You can also read a reminder about healthy eating from Mark Bittman.
By now you've heard that the White House will have an organic kitchen garden to provide food for the first family and their guests. Ground was broken on Friday by Michelle Obama and a group of school children. I was hopeful that this dream would come to fruit when I read during the campaign that Mrs. Obama had complained about the difficulty and importance of preparing healthy lunches for children, and that she used (at least some) organic foods. It still amazes me that this will be the first garden at the White House since World War II. There will be 55 varieties of fruits, vegetables, and herbs (I'd love to see a complete list). The NY Times article indicates that "the total cost of seeds, mulch and so forth is $200," but clearly that can't be the total cost of the garden. From the plan it appears they're using raised beds, so you'd have to include lumber and hardware, as well as whatever they're using for the paths in the startup cost. Will there be irrigation?
You can read a celebratory article at Kitchen Gardeners International, see expert opinion at the Times Room for Debate column. There seems to be a little snickering about the Obamas not knowing what hard work they're in for. Come on people, can't we (gardeners at least) just be happy about it? Kitchen gardens haven't had this much publicity since, let's face it, World War II.
WHAT: Mobile Botanical Gardens Spring Plant Sale
WHEN: Thursday, March 19, 4-8pm; Friday and Saturday, March 20-21, 9am-4pm; Sunday, March 22, 11am-4pm
WHERE: Mobile Botanical Gardens, 5151 Museum Drive, Mobile AL
COST: $20 for the opening night party and sale on Thursday; all subsequent days are free
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
Gardeners of all sorts - including kitchen gardeners - will want to visit the Mobile Botanical Gardens' Spring Plant Sale. The opening night party includes food and drinks, as well as a chance to be first to get your hands on all those plants. The sale continues with free admission Friday through Sunday. A plant list (pending availability) will be available soon at the Botanical Gardens web site.
This year they're advertising a wider selection of edibles. Included are vegetables and herbs, fruit and nut trees, bananas, berries, and grapes. You'll find varieties you can't get elsewhere, and plants selected specifically for their suitability to this region.
Even if you don't go to buy, or to buy very much, it's great fun to just stroll the grounds and look at the wonderful variety of plants. For best selection you'll want to go early; in recent sales many herbs and vegetables have sold out quickly.
I had a back-issue of Audubon Magazine sitting around, and I read this article a couple of days ago. The Low-Carbon Diet by Mike Tidwell is an argument that vegetarianism is the best way to live lightly on the planet.
WHAT: Local Food Production Initiative public meeting
WHEN: Monday, March 16 at 6:30pm
WHERE: Parlor of the Fairhope United Methodist Church Christian Life Center, in Fairhope
TOPIC: Kitchen Garden: Tips for Growing Great Vegetables in Baldwin County with speaker Harry Anderson, former President of the Baldwin County Master Gardeners
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
Also at this meeting will be a seed swap from 5:30-6:30pm preceding the meeting in the Fellowship Hall of the Fairhope United Methodist Christian Life Center. The Local Food Production Initiative is asking for a $2 contribution to sustain the event.
Local gardeners and seed suppliers are invited to contribute seeds or seedlings. Plenty of little dishes, baggies, markers, and note cards will be provided to help gardeners divvy up and identify everything. Seed and plant donors will please write down everything they know about their seed that might be helpful to recipients. For example: “Green Zebra Tomato: open-pollinated, heirloom, saved from last season, has grown well in my garden for years, heavy producer, medium-size fruit, indeterminate growth habit, about 70 to 80 days to maturity, good slicer, amazing tart flavor, attractive green and yellow stripes.” A seed swap is all about learning from each other.
A prize will go to the gardener with the widest variety of seeds, to the attendee who traveled the farthest, to the youngest gardener, and to the oldest gardener. Everyone will get a copy of “The Plain Gardener Planting Cycle,” the essential guide to when to do what in the vegetable garden around here.
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.
A reader asks where to buy good, rich topsoil for gardening. Let's say you want to build raised beds and need something to fill them with, or you want to build up an area of your yard. I've bought soil but it wasn't anything you'd want to garden in - very clay-ey, not much organic matter. If I were doing it again I'd want to find a source of composted manure and mix it 50/50. Anyone have any experience buying soil locally?
After a lot of thought, I've decided to make public the fact that I'm undergoing treatment for breast cancer, and will be starting chemotherapy soon. It might help to explain the shortage of postings over the last couple of months, and it will also affect my gardening. I don't intend to discuss my cancer on this blog, other than to acknowledge it in this post and give a mention in the future to significant treatment milestones. It is early stage cancer and my prognosis is quite good. It was found by self-detection, so yes, please perform your breast self-exams because they do help you identify when something is out of the norm. I had surgery at the end of January and at this point I feel great.
One thing I find myself resenting about cancer is that it feels like it's become my third job (after being a mom and a web designer). I've spent so much time over the last three months researching and reading and going to appointments and thinking and worrying, that at times it consumes a significant portion of my life. Little time is left for fun things like blogging and gardening (though fortunately, it being winter, there wasn't too much to do in the yard). I'm chagrined to see that during this crisis some of my conservation-minded habits have fallen by the wayside, or have at least been subjugated to the demands of convenience and just getting by. We have driven a lot more than in previous months, partly out of necessity but partly out of carelessness. Our waste stream has increased, and I don't know if that's because we've been purchasing more convenience foods, or paying less attention to packaging and what can be recycled.
When facing a substantial life challenge like this one, it's best to pare down responsibilities, commitments, and stressors to a minimum so you can focus on getting through intact. I've recognized, with regret, that gardening will be taking a back seat. I fully believe in the therapeutic value of gardening, but I'm going to have to undertake it more as a leisure activity and less of a project in and of itself. I'll still have some vegetables growing, and in fact my daughter and I planted pole beans and zucchini on Thursday, hoping to get a jump on the bug population. And we still have plans to visit the Botanical Gardens' plant sale, but we'll be focusing more on landscaping; there will be no major expansion of the kitchen garden, and I won't be ordering any seeds. Nor will we get the chickens we've been talking about for months now.
Another frustrating thing about the diagnosis has been the disjointedness of rhetoric and reality. We're encouraged on all sides - by medical professionals, the government, the media, business - to take charge of our health by making the right lifestyle choices: eat healthy, exercise, avoid smoking, etc. I would never claim that lifestyle choices have no effect, but we are lulled into a false sense of security by thinking that the correct choices will increase our quality of life and lifespan. The fact is that you can make all the right choices and still be handed a cancer diagnosis at age 38, even if you have no family history of the disease. Once you start reading about cancer (and autoimmune disorders; my mother has one), particularly breast cancer and how common it is, even more so in Western nations, you start to think there's something wrong. Researchers think the same; diet is a prime suspect, but so are pollutants in our environment. It's easy to feel angry with our government, which requires that chemicals be proven to be harmful before they are banned, rather than proven safe before they can be used. Of course, it's impossible to attribute my cancer to any particular cause (or set of causes), and I don't sit around fretting about why it developed. What I am sure of though, is that our environment is much more contaminated than it ought to be, and that there are too many people with cancer, and both of these problems need to be fixed. Using sustainable agriculture would certainly cut down on some of our chemical burden.
When the last cold front came through with those nights below freezing, our Great Horned Owl, who'd been absent or at least silent for a couple of weeks, showed up again and started hooting.
We also used the last of our winter's firewood, and when my husband picked up the remaining logs he uncovered the hibernation spot for a group of brown snakes. (Here's a nice little overview of snakes in the state.) They were all small, young ones, and he felt bad that he'd disturbed their resting place. We found some under the wood pile last year as well. Later that night, my husband woke me at 11:15 to tell me there was a snake in the bedroom. I've always been the designated snake catcher in our house, since the days when we lived in a 100 year-old farm house that was built into the side of a hill and had frequent reptilian visitors, including ring necked snakes, corn snakes, garter snakes, and king snakes. The one on our floor this week was about ten inches long and quite slender. I didn't want to pick it up with my hands because it seemed very delicate, so we corralled it with some pieces of paper and took it outside.
Last year I looked out one day to see my neighbor's landscaper gesturing at me. I went out and he asked if I had a shovel. When I asked for what reason, he said to kill a snake, gesturing at the ground towards a small and completely innocuous brown snake on the pavement. I said, oh, let me take it, and came around the fence into the neighbor's yard. I grabbed a stick and used it to help pick up the snake, which I deposited into our garden. The landscaper clearly thought I was totally nuts.
Today when my daughter and I were gardening we spotted another brown snake in the leaf litter, larger than the one we'd had inside (and by larger I mean about 12" long and as big around as a pencil). I managed to catch it momentarily so we could look at it, and it was an attractive orange brown, quite healthy looking. I have to of course add a disclaimer here, to please not pick up snakes if you don't know what you're doing, since you could be harmed and you could harm the snake.
We also saw some green anoles today sunning themselves in the warmth, as well as a five-lined skink, which is a less common sighting in our yard (see the state's reptile page). I called my daughter over several times to see an anole, and she confidently announced each time that she was going to catch it. Sure, I said, laughing. And each time she would try but the lizard would easily escape into a nearby crevice. Once she claimed she'd touched its tail.
Also in the garden, I noticed that our fava beans are finally starting to form pods.
