Resurfacing: A newbie hangs her laundry

It’s been a crazy week. I’m already working twice a week for one client and then I got a rush job from another client, which left me spending every spare moment this past week at my computer (yet neglecting my blog). The state of our home was rather disastrous, laundry piling up in huge heaps at the bottom of the stairs, toys and books scattered everywhere…it’s a true testament to what I do around here on a daily basis to see what happens when I’m otherwise occupied! So first a big thank you for coming back after I abandoned without explanation. And now that the report is finished I was able to get back to a more normal day today. I’d like to tell you about my adventures with laundry…

It was a warm and sunny day and I was washing bed linens when it dawned upon me that now would be a good time to start using my clothesline. For the record, I have never used one before. Though I do have memories of my grandmother’s house and the apron she kept loaded with clothespins (it’s amazing how many of my activities lately bring back memories of my grandparents). I’m not sure whether the clothesline here is just old and decrepit or whether I have a bit of a learning curve ahead of me, but the first thing I noticed when I started hanging sheets is that they sagged the line quite a bit. Okay, actually I have to back up because several weeks ago I hung a large tarp off the clothesline (the one I had used for mixing SFG soil, and which I had then rinsed clean). I made the mistake of pinning it to the top line, which of course caused the whole thing to twist around. Yes, this is how much knowledge our culture has lost that a woman with a PhD can’t figure out how to hang laundry! So today at least I pinned the stuff on the bottom, but then I encountered another problem:

This little doohickey is supposed to keep the bottom line from sagging way below the top line. Ideally it should end up about halfway along your clothesline once everything is hung. So I tried that, and when most of the laundry was hung I ran into another problem:

This other doohicky is a crank that you can apparently use to tighten the clothesline. Well, the red stacking thingy in the picture above will not travel past this cranking doohickey. I ended up creating a snag in the line which started to bunch up my laundry. So I had to take the laundry down and line the clothesline up so that the red stacking thingy didn’t encounter the cranking thingy until I had all my laundry up. ‘Course then I had the sagging problem again, but by this point I was willing to call it a day and hope the learning curve is steep. Here’s the final result:

I’m sure if I play around with the line I’ll figure out where the cranky thingy should be when I started hanging so that it won’t get in the way, but will also allow me to put the red stacking thingy in the middle of the clothesline to prevent sagging. Fortunately the clothesline is high enough up that the kids can play and not touch the laundry.

I will say that I was very impressed with how quickly everything dried, even though it wasn’t in direct sunlight by the time I got around to hanging it. I’d say the temperature was at least 15 C, maybe a bit higher. That’s quite impressive to a newbie clothesline user such as myself.

At this point I am not sure that I’m going to use it for all my laundry. With four people in this family, two of them young children, I do a lot of laundry and it’s all I can do these days to get it put away let alone find time to hang and remove. And we are still far and away from the dry season here. But I will definitely be doing it for sheets and I may experiment with towels, too. My goal is to one day have a setup like Rhonda’s over at Down-to-Earth with clotheslines under a verandah, so that rain won’t be a deterrant. But it’s all about Baby Steps, right?

 

Bookworm Challenge

Another month (well, almost) and another cool challenge. This one is put out by Green Bean Dreams, and is something I can definitely Get Behind (anybody remember that album by William Shatner, and the song “I can’t get behind that”?). Anyways, it’s called Be a Bookworm May 08 and this challenge is going to be easy-peasy for me since I am an avid reader. I’ve been pouring through relevent books on sustainable living, simple living, and related topics since we came up with The Dream and The Plan. You might wonder how a full-time mum to two young homeschooled kids and part-time businesswoman finds time to read anything. Well, I am a fast reader. And I am currently working a job contract that has me commuting 1.5 hours each way, twice a week, by public transit and I have a bad habit of staying up way too late reading in bed after everybody else has fallen asleep.

I maintain a Book List on this blog. Whenever I hear about a book I think I should read, I add it to the On Hold list at my library and when I’m done I review it and add it to my List. There are so many books that have profoundly moved me, but as far as this Simple Living thing goes I’d have to credit Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma as being the first to inspire me to significant change and action. The next was David Wann’s Affluenza and from there it was just a snowball effect for me.

I’ll see which of the big ‘On Hold’ books (listed on my sidebar) come in first and that will be my Bookworm Challenge novel. Currently I’m voraciously devouring The 100 Mile Diet, which is a particularly wonderful read since I live within the same one hundred miles that the authors relied on for their sustenance. The tidbits of local history have been especially poignant. I’ve also got The World Without Us by Alan Weisman which, coincidentally, features a photo of my city’s skyline on the front cover (though the author himself does not live here, nor is from here). I’m looking forward to participating in Green Bean’s Challenge and perhaps discovering some more great reads to add to my list. Happy Reading everyone!

 

Simple Living and Environmentalism: connected

I’ve been writing a few posts about environmental issues lately, like the mass of plastic waste floating in the North Pacific and the problem of exporting our disposable lifestyle to the developing world. When I think about the quintessential Simple Living blogs like Down-to-Earth I wonder sometimes if I’m veering off on tangents that are increasingly removed from the main topic of this blog, which is focussed on our family’s plan to leave the big city and buy a small acreage.

The commitment to curb spending and save money in order to make our dream a reality was the beginning of a journey for me, one that soon led me to discover and adopt the principles of Simple Living. We needed to spend less, to be frugal. This meant recognizing and resisting the forces of consumerism and educating ourselves about money (particularly the perils of consumer debt). As my journey progressed, the connection between consumption and environmental damage became more apparent to me.

Crunchy Chicken posted today about the upcoming Earth Day events. Her words sum up my feelings about the connection between Simple Living and sustainable living. She writes:

It is extremely easy to get sucked into buying into a new lifestyle and there are tons of products and companies out there to help you purchase your way into greener living…If you really want to do something for the environment, stop consuming.

Trying to live a Greener lifestyle while still holding to the consumerist lifestyle of our modern culture runs you the risk of becoming just another consumer, albeit one with a Green label. Yes, recycled plastic garbage bags are better than those made from 100% raw materials, but it’s still another plastic bag that was manufactured, distributed, and will sit in a landfill (or worse) for years. Green shampoos and household cleansers still come in plastic bottles. Biodegradable corn-based containers and so-called biofuels are dependent on an already dysfunctional and destructive corn-growing industry.

Here’s a humourous look at the concept of Buying Green:

Our environmental problems are not going to be solved simply by switching from the purchase of one kind of product to the purchase of another. Crunchy Chicken said:

“…over the last year, I’ve matured from focusing on doing green things that tend to be product based, to really focusing on the necessity of products in achieving a greener lifestyle.”

I feel the same way. This journey I’m on has taken me to the same point. And it goes back to something I wrote early on, that it’s all connected: frugality, consumerism, environmentalism. Since then I’ve found more connections. The desire to grow my own vegetables was partly based on frugality, but has since opened my eyes to the destruction wrought by industrial agribusiness on the environment and our health. It has lead to a growing interest (which is fast becoming a passion) in local and sustainable farming.

I hope this blog provides witness to that connection. I hope our journey can inspire others to question the status quo and make even small changes in their lives for the better. Mostly, though, I hope that I can join with the voices of others who have similarly inspired me and continue to do so on a daily basis (see the Blogroll on my sidebar). I’ll end with this quote from Michael Pollen (which I grabbed from No Impact Man today) about why we should bother to do our tiny little bit:

“If you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change…Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture…Not having things might become cooler than having them. And those who did change the way they live would acquire the moral standing to demand changes in behavior from others — from other people, other corporations, even other countries.”

 

Life without TV

When our family moved back to Canada from the US 3.5 years ago, we decided not to get cable in our new home. Part of it was a due to the fact that finances were very tight back then, but we also felt that Daughter was being exposed to too much TV. She hadn’t watched any when she was a baby and we didn’t want soon-to-be-born Son to end up parked in front of it with his sister. We didn’t even miss it until hockey playoff season when Husband finally caved in and bought a set of rabbit ears (a TV antenna). We now get about 3 channels and the kids watch CBC Kids on weekday mornings for about an hour after they wake up while I enjoy a cup of tea at my computer. The kids come out to play (the TV is in the bedroom) long before the shows are over, without any prompting from me, which is why they are allowed free access to it each morning.

This past week Husband has watching hockey games in the evening and Daughter has been enjoying watching them while we snuggle before bedtime. We saw some commercials last night and had our usual discussion about how they are specifically geared to make us want to spend money on their products. She listens and agrees but cannot seem to fight the lure of advertising. After each commercial she’ll exclaim “Oh, we should get that!”. I am so glad that my kid is rarely exposed to this stuff, because it’s obvious that my lectures cannot match the power of advertising!

My own reaction to the commercials and to mainstream TV in general has become similarly innocent. I am so out of the loop when it comes to the latest TV shows. I’ve never seen Lost or Desperate Housewives, and the only American Idol I can name is that Ruben guy. I don’t know who Lindsay Lohan is or why she is famous. And you know what? It doesn’t impact my life in the slightest.

Watching TV the other night I was also struck by the lifestyle that it portrays and how much it differs from my own real life experience. I’m not trying to suggest that most people live like those on TV, but I think subconsciously we accept the lifestyle TV portrays as normal, we get acclimatized to it.

I was struck by how plastic the people seemed, all shiny teeth and perfectly coiffed hair. The women wear gobs of makeup and are all thin, whereas the men exhibit a much wider range of attractiveness and fitness level (you’ll often see less attractive males paired up with attractive females, but never the other way around). I find the people on TV so fake that I am finding it hard to achieve the “suspension of disbelief” required to get really immersed in a show. I used to watch a lot of TV and I don’t think it has changed all that much in the last four years, but I find that even the really popular series seem contrived to me. We got a hold of a few episodes of The Tudors and Rome (the latter was so violent and disturbing I couldn’t even be in the room while Husband watched).

And then there are the commercials - busy modern women extolling the virtues of disposable cleaning cloths (”Just wipe and toss!”), or shoe sales that suggest no woman can be happy with just one or two pairs. The combination of consumption and waste just screamed out at me in a way I never noticed years ago. I don’t think it’s just because I’m learning about sustainable living and frugality. I think a good part of it is that I just don’t visit that world anymore - I don’t do TV and I don’t do malls and it has lost its familiarity and become very foreign to me.

We’re not a Screen-Free household. We have a DVD player, and an account at Zip online movie rentals. The kids borrow DVDs from our library each week (they’re really into The Magic School Bus these days). And there are some wonderful video podcasts out there: some of our favorites are Sesame Street, Ask an Astronomer, Discovery Channel, and my personal fave TEDtalks.

The point of going TV free is to remove commercialism from our home as much as possible, to reduce exposure of the kids to commercials, to free up more time for family and other pursuits, to better control what shows the kids are watching, and to save money. I highly encourage anybody who is looking to live more simply and protect their children (and even themselves) from the forces of advertising to consider going TV-free themselves. It really isn’t that hard!

 

The truth about Plastic

I am a scientist and therefore a skeptic by nature. I take everything with a grain of salt and I don’t fall victim to eloquent rhetoric, dramatic photos, or emotional appeals when true substance is lacking. I say this because it is not often that I get so affected by something I’ve only just become aware of. Yesterday on the radio I heard of an online documentary about the legendary Floating Island of Garbage. I always thought it was an urban myth, but apparently these guys went there and documented what they found. I decided to check it out myself, so I went to the website and watched the video. It was a very professional production and the information it revealed was positively shocking.

Toxic Garbage Island: episode 1

(there are 12 episodes in all, but you need only watch the first to get the gist of the message; you will probably end up wanting to see them all)

Garbage Island, aka: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is not really an Island in the sense of a cohesive landmass. Instead, it is an area of the North Pacific Ocean that is approximately twice the size of Texas and lies in the centre of a large, circular flow of oceanic currents. These currents pass along the west coast of North America and the East Coast of Asia - picking up untold amounts of garbage and pollutants and drawing the stuff into their centre, an area called the North Pacific Gyre.

In the days before synthetic, non-biodegradeable products were manufactured by the millions, the organic refuse that found its way here represented a source of food to the myriad creatures who inhabit this region. From oceanic scavengers to filter feeders one can imagine the evolution of an entire ecosystem based on the forces of Nature that sweep up the refuse of the sea and deposit it here, in the oceanic version of a landfill. If something is biodegradable then, by definition, something is going to want to eat it. Therefore, so long as the human contribution consisted of natural materials (basically everything up to the last two hundred years) our garbage probably didn’t present too much of a problem to the world’s oceans.

And then along came plastics.

Now, if you are like me you maybe thought that the worst thing about plastic was that it didn’t go away. Bottles and nozzles, hard hats and flowerpots, broom handles and ballpoint pens…I imagined that these items would just remain in their manufactured forms until some time, perhaps centuries from now, when future archeologists would dig it up and wonder at the sheer folly of our disposable culture. But no, the truth is much more frightening than that.

Because you see, it turns out that many plastics are photodegradable. Which means that while floating along on the ocean’s currents exposed to all that sunlight they are broken down into slimy, sticky puddles of plastic taffy that look remarkably like jellyfish to the detriment of sea turtles or basically anything that swims into it, including the jellyfish themselves:

Yet it gets worse… many plastics also degrade into tiny plastic fragments that look somewhat like confetti. The waters of the Gyre are so littered with the stuff that the ratio of plastic particles to plankton is over 6:1 (and in some areas upwards of 1000:1). Just imagine a filter feeder taking a nice mouthful of ocean water and getting ten times more plastic than nutrients in its belly.

I could go on, but watch the video and you’ll come to the same point I’m at now…

…how can we even begin to fix this?

My first thought after watching was “I am NEVER using plastic again!”. But seriously folks, that is not an easy thing to do. The computer I’m typing on right now is made of plastic. My glasses have plastic in the frames. I’m not sure it would even be possible to replace everything in my life that is made with plastic (my car, for example). While I applaud the efforts of bloggers like Fake Plastic Fish and Life Less Plastic the sad reality is that this problem - the toxic plastic garbage wasteland of the North Pacific gyre - is not going to go away because a few of us choose to use stainless steel tupperware or cloth grocery bags. The problem is not only global (want another freaky thought? there are four other oceanic Gyres on Earth…) , but goes to the very nature of our society and its dependence on a material that is non-biodegradable and unmanageable as waste. It’s bad enough that we Westerners created this stuff and then became totally dependent on it, but now we are exporting our disposable plastic lifestyle to countries that lack curbside recycling and waste management facilities.

But even if we were to recycle every piece of plastic manufactured there would still be the issue of garbage (ever seen what happens to the area around a McDonalds restaurant, despite the presence of multiple waste bins?). There’s also those darned nurdles - the tiny plastic pellets that are melted down and then coloured and moulded into the final product - which escape from train cars and truck beds, blowing in the wind like dust, and collecting all over the earth’s surface including the oceans.

I think what needs to happen is we need to make this issue so well-known that people raise enough of a stink about it to prompt some change. People need to start viewing plastic the same way we view non-dolphin friendly tuna. Our society needs to invent/find materials to replace plastic that can be disposed of responsibly and which do not pose such a threat to life on this planet.

In the meantime, I’m going to do my bit by trying to cut all unnecessary plastic out of my life (starting with my shampoo). I have written in the past about being plastic bag free; Google around and you’ll come up with many more suggestions and tips. And if you feel overwhelmed, as I did when I first watched that documentary, just take a deep breath and say to yourself “One step at a time”… Spread the word, and hopefully one day the ecological horror show that is Garbage Island will become simply one more embarrassing episode of human history that we somehow managed to survive without going extinct.

 

Ode to the Diva Cup

Crunchy Chicken puts out these Challenges every now and then, a fun and gentle nudge to get people to try things they may have been sitting on the fence about until someone gave them a supportive push. Her latest is the Diva Cup Challenge ‘08. She did one last year, long before I found her wonderful blog. I’ve been a Diva Cup user for three years (since my period returned after having two children) and the thought of using a tampon now just gives me the willies. I am pretty passionate about reusable menstrual products as a way to live healthy and sustainably. In fact, I was recently invited to be a Guest Blogger over at the Lunapads Blog. So, in honour of the Challenge I thought I would write a list of reasons why I love my Diva (and why you should love one, too).

1) Make like a Girl Scout and Be Prepared. You know those days when you are pretty sure you are going to get your period but don’t know when it will arrive? Could be today, could be tomorrow? You can wear the Diva even if you aren’t flowing. With tampons you have to wait until you start bleeding, hope you are somewhere near a bathroom, hope you remembered to pack your tampons, and hope you catch it in time before you have an accident. Or you could wear a plasticky, sweaty disposable pad and end up throwing it in the garbage if Aunt Flo does not, in fact, grace you with her presence that day.

2) Things that make you go “OUCH!” We’ve all experienced it…you used a tampon that was too absorbant for your flow that day, or maybe you thought the tampon was fully soaked and needed to be changed. Either way you ended up trying to remove a tampon that was still somewhat dry. It hurts! Well, turns out that it is worse than you think. Tampons are made with rayon, which is a synthetic fibre. The individual fibers of rayon are not soft and actually do damage to the lining of the vagina when being scraped along the vaginal walls. So when you feel the pain of removing that underused tampon, you are actually experiencing the infliction of multiple tiny lacerations along the vaginal wall. None of this is an issue with the Diva because it does not soak up all the moisture in an environment where all that moisture is essential for good health. And the medical-grade silicone does not abrade your delicate mucous membranes on its way in or out.

3) And speaking of Flow… I have a pretty heavy flow during the first two days of my period and I used to use Super Plus tampons on those days. I can go much longer with my Diva than I ever could with those most absorbant tampons - it simply holds more fluid. What is really interesting is that I can actually feel when my cup is full and needs to be changed (it’s not an uncomfortable feeling, it’s just a different feeling, if that makes sense). I’m not sure if anybody else has experienced this, but it is darned convenient. Point is, while some worry about having to empty their cup when out in public this is generally not an issue because most ladies find they can go all day without needing to empty it (not that emptying it in public is a big deal anyway).

4) Know your body. Using the Diva allows you to guage your flow. Let’s face it, we are not robots. Our miraculous female bodies change over time and so do our periods. I’ve been menstruating for 28 years now and I’ve gone from having periods every 3 months or so, to a more regular 30-33 days, and lately I’m having much shorter cycles than ever (26 days is not uncommon now). My flow over the course of my period has similarly changed over the years. With my Diva I am always aware of what my body is producing. You may ask yourself why this even matters. Well, if you are worried about pregnancy (yes, some women do get a period or two even after conception) or if you are trying to conceive, if you are thinking perhaps menopause is on its way, or if you just like to be in touch with what your body is doing in case something goes wrong with the pipes…these are all reasons why being able to monitor your flow is a Good Thing.

5) Keep your Blood out of the Landfill. What happens to your used tampon after you flush it? Well, according to the Poop Report (its true, there is a website for everything) solid materials are lifted out of the wastewater as a first step. Which means that no, your used up tampons are not washed and cleaned before they are removed…they go straight to the landfill. Just stop and think about that for a minute. Imagine people who have blood-borne diseases, who are on high doses of medications that are not metabolized in the blood…those liquids (millions of tampons worth of them) are being washed down into the water table every time it rains on the landfill.

6) …if it even makes it to the landfill.

From the PoopReport article linked to above:

“We literally have tens of thousands of these beach whistles lying in the rip-rap around the lagoons. And tens of thousands more get screened out of the composted biosolids when we dredge the lagoons. Ladies, these aren’t biodegradable and belong in the trashcan, not the toilet. The basics of what should get flushed distills down to this: if you haven’t eaten it, or used it to wipe off something you’ve eaten, it goes in the trash. That also applies to the device that these applicators are designed to insert. Wrap ‘em with a wad of Charmin if you are embarrassed by them, but please, please, please don’t flush ‘em

If that ain’t a good reason to quit using tampons, I don’t know what is….

Note: I’ve just been informed by the good folks at Lunapads that the One Year Guarantee for the Diva Cup is NO LONGER AVAILABLE. Apparently Health Canada had issues with sending used cups through the mail or some other such bureaucratic nonsense …so I’m sorry for misleading y’all with outdated information! And thanks to the Lunapads gals for setting me straight!

 

You are what you eat, and so is a carrot.

In my last post I showed you a photo of carrot seeds in the palm of my hand. After I’d poured them out of their little envelope I sat staring at them for a few minutes before I planted them. I was thinking about how amazing it was that such a tiny thing could grow into something as (relatively) large as a carrot, and suddenly it struck me: all the matter, all the mass of that carrot, save this tiny bit of seed, will come from that soil I mixed up and put in the garden box (plus some water and some air). It made me appreciate just how complex the composition of soil must be. And I understood on a whole new level what gardeners mean when they say the soil is key to what you grow.

Then I thought about the book I’m reading, The End of Food, where the author reports that conventionally-produced vegetables have markedly lower nutrient content than the same vegetables did 40 or 50 years ago (we’re talking 40-75% declines in certain vitamins and other nutrients). And I thought about how conventional mass-production monoculture farming depletes the soil of nutrients and then tries to replace them with synthetic fertilizers. Compare the usual potassium, nitrogen, and phosphorus of typical fertilizers with the exhaustive list of substances found in rotting organic matter plus the byproducts of organisms that break down that organic matter. It then comes as no surprise that the commercially-grown carrot is a much different creature than an organic carrot grown in healthy soil. And sadly, as Michael Pollan pointed out in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a carrot labelled “organic” but seeded and raised in a large, monoculture plot where soil is not enriched with organic matter and by crop rotation is not much better than a conventionally-grown carrot, though its impact on water pollution may be smaller.

As I sat staring at that tiny seed I realized that growing this carrot would require building blocks, both to provide the framework and infrastructure of the carrot, and also to provide raw materials from which the carrot will manufacture other, more highly specialized kinds of building block. If we carry this analogy further, then monoculture soil is like those cheap boxes of Lego-knockoffs that come with only one size of block and only three colours. Compare that to the super, mega fun pack of Lego with more pieces than you could ever know what to do with, and so many colours you don’t even know where to start. That is how soil should be - unimaginably complex.

With these thoughts going through my mind I couldn’t help but draw a parallel between that and my own personal experience with building a human. When my children were babies I watched them grow with a mixture of wonder and fascination, knowing that every inch of growth - from fingers and toes to hair and brain tissue - was being built with molecules that came from my milk, from my very own body, a rich source of building blocks itself.

The miraculous, and still not fully elucidated, variety of substances that go into breastmilk are specifically designed by millions of years of evolution to nourish and grow an optimally-healthy human mammal. In the last 50 years or so we have developed infant formulas that incorporate enough of the basic nutritional elements of breastmilk to prevent death by starvation and to grow an infant until such time as they can rely on solid food for nourishment. However, the scientific evidence is now overwhelming that infants raised on formula are not optimally healthy. They suffer from a wide variety of maladies at significantly higher rates than breastfed infants, most related to the immune and gastrointestinal systems. While industry is constantly seeking to incorporate the latest “miracle ingredient” from breastmilk into infant formulas, we simply do not fully understand what goes into breastmilk and the role of each ingredient in the development of a healthy human child.

My guess is that our understanding of soil and its myriad nutrient components is similarly incomplete. Just as a mother’s milk is custom made for her child’s age, health status, and unique environmental circumstances, soil content varies by region and micro-region. Ask any viticulturist how the same grape grown in two different countries can produce two distinct wines and she’ll likely tell you “climate and soil”. Yet of all the nutrients found in organically-rich soil, very few are utilized by commercial agriculture industry. According to Wikipedia the six nutrients deemed most essential to growth (macronutrients) are: potassium, nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium, magnesium, and sulphur. It would thus seem that you can successfully grow a carrot from seed, even in nutritionally-poor soil, simply by adding these six ingredients. But what is the chemical composition of that carrot when grown from such a limited selection of building blocks? And how does it compare to a carrot grown in nutrionally-rich soil from which a massive variety of building blocks can be obtained?

I’m reaching a point where I am not able to see a conventionally grown carrot and consider it the same beast that I will (hopefully) pull out of my garden in a few weeks. I’m beginning to realize that what goes into that carrot is far more important than how much it costs to buy it. In fact, you might consider that the cheaper, mass-produced carrot is of proportional value to the more expensive, locally-grown, small-organic producer variety…you pay less money for the former, and get less nutritional content.

Some bargain.

 

Veggie Tales - garlic woes and salad joy

This past Saturday was a beautifully hot and sunny day. Like millions of gardeners before me, I celebrated the first hot day of the year by digging in the earth.

My first task was to finish the second Square Foot Garden box. In a previous Veggie Tales post I showed how the boxes were built. The first was filled with Mel’s Mix but the second was only half full. So this past weekend we bought more compost (Sea Soil, steer manure, and mushroom manure) and vermiculite to add to the peat moss I had left over from the first box. Here is Daughter enjoying her self-appointed task of breaking up the peat moss.

After filling up box #2 with Mel’s Mix and making the grid with string and nails, it was time to plant! I was particularly excited because I’d bought rainbow chard and salad plants from the Farmer’s Market that morning. Being neither seeds nor bulbs the fruits of my labour were immediately apparent, which made the planting experience seem more satisfying.

Those are four kinds of lettuce. Here are two plots with lettuce on top and rainbow chard on the bottom:

With these leafy little beauties freshly planted, and my onions coming up in mad bunches…

…it’s starting to feel like we’ve got FOOD growing in our yard! By the way, that hyacinth in the background was there as a tiny sprout when I was preparing the garden area and I couldn’t bear to dig it up.

So while things have definitely moved along since our last Veggie Tales report, when I had just a few sprouts that were hard to see against the multi-textured background of the soil mix, we did have some “learning experiences” this weekend, too.

While the radishes and onions were showing signs of life a while back, I still saw no evidence of the sweet peas and snapdragons, nor any garlic. Now, the flowers were a bit of an afterthought and I wasn’t so concerned about them, but I figured if the onions were doing so well the garlic should at least be making an apearance. Finally, I could stand it no longer - I dug my fingers carefully into the soil and pulled out a very moldy and rotten lump of garlic. The other three looked the same.

I decided that I had planted them much too deep, and I also became quickly convinced that choosing to plant the whole bulb was a mistake. I should have broken off the cloves and planted them individually. Hey, the bulbs didn’t come with any instructions so I guess it’s just one of those things that people think everybody knows. Well colour my thumb brown and call me ignorant - I have eaten a ton of garlic in my life but I’ve just never tried to grow any before, okay? Luckily, some of the cloves from one bulb had sprouted so I broke them off, cleaned them up as best as I could, and planted them with the sprouts sticking up out of the soil.

We’ll see if they survive.

I also have not seen any sign of the sweet peas we planted, and I’m thinking we may have put them in too deep. I was pretty sure the snapdragons had met the same fate but then this weekend I finally saw signs of life in that plot: they are the tiniest little leaves I have ever seen and I could not get a good shot of them, but they are definitely alive and growing.

Finally, I planted some butter lettuce and rainbow carrots, both as seeds. As a brand new gardener I am just amazed at how tiny the (carrot) seeds are:

It blows my mind that in a few weeks they’ll be carrots! Ain’t Nature grand?

 

One Local Day

My trip to the farmer’s market today was wonderful! Our region had been waiting for this day all week: the forecasters promised sunshine and temperatures of 20 C and we were not disappointed. The first thing I noticed were the crowds of people enjoying the weather and a small band playing music. The market was on the corner of a lovely residential urban neighbourhood, at a town hall, and the feeling of community was strong.

Strolling past the booths it soon became apparent what was in season right now and I felt like my education had begun. There were lots of salad greens, kale, and swiss chard. The rainbow chard shown in the photo above was picked this morning and I had it for dinner tonight sauteed in olive oil, garlic, and a few red pepper flakes. It was delicious! I’m pretty sure the guy selling it was Albert himself; chatting with him is not something that will ever happen in the produce aisle at Superstore! He also had some sprouted chard, exact same variety, for planting. I bought six plants and also a 12 pack of salad greens (shown at right): Bergam, Red Butterworth, Red Sails, Luma, Cardinal, Conquestador and Salad Bowl (with duplicates of some). I cannot WAIT to harvest a fresh salad from my garden - no more rotting, wilting greens in the fridge! I’ll write about planting them in my next Veggie Tales post.

I also noticed potatoes and apples. I was so overwhelmed by all the sights and sounds that I forgot to ask about that: I’m guessing both have been stored over winter, having been harvested in the late fall…? I’m pretty sure neither are growing right now. I bought a small bag of red potatoes and made a yummy potato salad out of them, using fresh chives and parsley snipped from our AeroGarden just minutes before tossing the salad. I also bought six of the organic Fuji apples, which came from the South Okanagan - about three hours away. I’m amazed that they might be a few months old - they were quite tasty!

Inside the hall we found more yummy stuff. I got sucked into buying some homemade almond and honey nougat - the real thing with rice paper and everything. They were handing out free samples and they were just too good to pass up! I’ve decided the Kalley Kandy couple are the crack dealers of the farmer’s market! My other splurge was some herb Fromage Frais from Little Qualicum Cheeseworks (shown in the first photo) that tasted alot like Boursin but is local, fresh and made by happy cows! We had that for lunch with some crackers and a couple of the Fujis bought today.

I had a nice chat with Wade, the soap guy. I’d promised myself not to buy any solid shampoo until I use up the crappy stuff I have right now, but I did buy a little soap sampler for $4. Sadly, I somehow lost it! That was the only bummer of the day - I cheat on the Buy Nothing Challenge and then don’t even get to enjoy the product (must be Crunchy Chicken karma). But it was neat speaking with a real live person about soapmaking!

We stopped by the Bee Lady and bought some honey. There were several varieties on offer and Bee Lady explained that, for example, Blueberry honey is made from bees who have pollinated blueberry plants - it’s not blueberry flavoured! Since Daughter is used to the who-knows-what-kind-of-flower honey they sell in the grocery stores I asked the lady for something without too much fragrance. She handed us a jar of Summerflower honey. Daughter was particularly impressed with all the products you can make from bees. There were beeswax candles, cloudy and clear honey, bee pollen, honeycomb, and of course honey sticks!

Finally, I bought 2lbs of ground pork - grass fed and humanely raised. The suppliers, Pasture-to-Plate, have a wonderful attitude (at least as far as their website copy says!) and the girl selling the frozen meats did seem to know her stuff - I asked her what type of pigs they were and she knew, said they were well-suited to the region (they are a few hours north of here), though I forget the species name now. I paid $12 for the pork, which is pricey by grocery store standards. But I’m planning on using it to supplement our favorite rice-and-beans recipe so it will go a long way. And it certainly it feels good to buy ethical meat!

As we sat out in the sun munching on fresh-baked cinnamon buns from the Pie Lady (man it was hard not to buy a wonderful fresh-baked berry pie!) I felt like I’d spent a lot of money. I want to eat local as much as I can, and I think I can still do this while being frugal and sticking to the grocery budget. But let’s face it, the cheap food I get at the local big box mart comes with a hidden price tag. There is real value in the food I bought today (I feel a future blog post coming on…). And the truth is, I bought a fair amount of stuff that wasn’t really necessary, not part of our usual grocery list. It’s hard to avoid all the treats at the market. But if I can incorporate farmers markets into my weekly shopping I think it will become easier to restrain myself.

 

Farmer’s Market Joy

With my growing desire to Know My Food, I’ve been yearning for a real farmer’s market. I was getting worried that too many fakes were popping up around here. I saw one market that was basically just conventional food, probably whatever the grocery stores didn’t take, being sold on the roadside in my very suburban neighbourhood. This was last fall right after we moved here. I only saw them about three times before the season ended (or they got found out). Whoever they were, I sure wasn’t going to form the kind of relationship with the grower that Barbara Kingsolver wrote about in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

There were a couple other ones I attended last summer, but again it wasn’t really what I was looking for. There were too many people selling too many things that had little, if anything, to do with what I was going to put on the table (unless you consider organic beeswax candles scented with real herbal tea infusions something that goes on your table). Not that I have anything against people selling natural products but I was looking for Food. I wanted to speak to the people who grew the food, knew where it came from and how it was grown.

I asked around my crunchy friends and of course they steered me straight. Apparently there are a couple of really good farmers markets in town and they aren’t too far from where we live (though we do have to go Into The City). Of course the bummer is that they only hold them on Saturdays. So after going through all this effort to tailor my life so I don’t have to join the tide of rush hour refugees, trying to cram everything they really want to do in life into their weekend, it looks like I will now have to do my food shopping on a Saturday morning. Bummer.

Nevertheless, I’m growing increasingly dissatisfied with the produce at our local big box supermarket. The more I read, the more pathetic the stuff in the store looks to me. Apples that alternate between bruised and mushy to looks-really-good-but-isn’t-ripe and therefore is also not very tasty. There is nothing in the store to tell me whether a food is in season or not, unless you consider price an indicator. For example, I bought some asparagus last week because the price seemed really good (1.98/lb). Usually it is over $2.50/lb. And I thought I remembered reading in AVM that asparagus was one of their first spring crops (the recipe for asparagus and morel bread pudding made my mouth water!). I’m also frustrated that I can’t tell where alot of the stuff came from. Oh sure, the Swiss Chard had little twist-ties wrapped around them with “Product of Mexico” stamped on them. The bagged organic apples say “Product of Canada” yet apparently come from Ontario. I’m not sure why we need to ship apples 3000 miles across the continent. And Ontario is freezing compared to here in BC, so how is it they’re growing apples and we’re not? Most of the loose produce does not indicate where it was grown. And the tomatoes, don’t even get me started…if they have any that aren’t bruised and rotten, they’re barely ripe. I only buy “on the vine” tomatoes because even though they still aren’t as good as the home-grown variety, at least they actually smell like a tomato (takes me right back to my grandfather’s garden). The other ones have no scent at all. I’m currently reading The End of Food and the first chapter is about tomatoes - it’s called “Red Tennis Balls” and now I know why.

But…farmer’s markets don’t start up here until another month or more, so I figured I was just going to have to wait. Then I mentioned it to a friend who read AVM long before I did and whattaya know? The wonderful folks at Eatlocal.org started a Winter Farmer’s Market last year! There are only two buying days left for this season, but one is tomorrow, so go ahead - ask me what I’m doing tomorrow! I’m particularly excited about these guys because I’ve been trying to find an ethical source for pork (I love me some pork sausages!) and I can’t wait to see what they have on offer. I hope I get a chance to talk to some of the vendors and find out more about what’s available locally.