In today's Press-Register, more tidbits on the fall garden. Plant now for harvests in fall and winter.
articles: September 2008 Archives
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.
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.
In today's Press-Register, Bill Finch offers some tips and reminders on how to care for your waterlogged plants.
