Summer Hibernation

A few people will notice that I've been away awhile. I wish I could say that I was busy driving along the winding roads of the Luberon in the South of France all summer (where this photo was taken a few years ago), but such is not the case. Chalk it up to apathy. My ambition fades like a flower when summer temperatures soar, burning the garden to a crisp and drying up any impulse to wander outside to take photos or lovingly tend the garden. My inspiration for writing withered like the plants in the garden.

As the temperatures cooled this past week or two, I began to toy with the idea of writing again but found myself uncharacteristically sick with a fever and hacking cough that lasted nearly a week (the week isn't up, yet I'm still hacking). But, like the garden, I've begun to produce again. We may yet squeeze out a few more tomatoes, an eggplant or two, and some poblano peppers. I'm ready to begin the fall garden and to re-begin my writing.

Since it's obvious I haven't been writing, what have I been doing? True to my obsession with food, I've been reading about food, watching The French Chef with Julia Child, cooking, and eating with friends and family. For fun, I read The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry by Kathleen Flinn. Flinn talks about losing her job and then deciding to fulfill her dream of attending Le Cordon Bleu in France--not just attending, but earning a certificate and the title of chef from the famed cooking school. I loved revisiting Paris as I read her book, and I've tried a few of the recipes she's included. I believe I'm going to have to eat my way through each one as the first two were delicious!

Flinn inspired me to learn more about technique, so I ordered Professional Cooking by Wayne Gisslen, a culinary school text, and LaRousse Gastronomique, an evidently famous culinary encyclopedia. I'm into the fifth chapter of Gisslen's book; and I'm working through "A" entries in LaRousse.

Still hungering for more of food and France, I started reading My Life in France by Julia Child, who also attended Le Cordon Bleu in the forties. It was interesting to compare the experiences of Child and Flinn at the school, which began as a perk for subscribers of French cooking magazine, the name of which escapes me. By the time Flinn attended in the late 1990's, it seems the school had become much more prestigious. I'm still reading Child's book, which has prompted me to search eBay for Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volumes 1 and 2, co-authored by Child. I'm watching a couple of auctions now, but each has exceeded my $10 self-imposed limit. I may have to make an exception for Julia!

There will be more about food, cooking, and gardening later. Until then, bon appetit!

Summer Salad

I cannot believe that I've let a month go by without posting--it will not happen again. Though I've not been writing, I have still been gardening, learning, reading, and cooking. I also helped a friend of mine with her Young Writers program and traveled to a bluegrass festival. But enough of that, let's talk food.

The photo you see is from a recent lunch with my friend Glenna, which was inspired by watching an old DVD of Julia Child making Salade Nicoise on the French Chef.

This beautiful salad deserved a photo of its own, but I couldn't help posting our little table in the corner of the kitchen with the beautiful napkins we bought while in Apt, France, two glasses of my favorite Sancerre, fresh cut flowers, and crusty French bread. Bon Appetit!

There was a bit of timing involved with this as I had a few potatoes left in the garden to harvest, and I wanted to use those potatoes for our lunch. Only one tomato was ripe from the garden, so I used that in our salad as well; and the eggs and cucumber came from Randle Farms. I wish I could say everything was local, but I cannot.

The potatoes have definitely been a learning experience, but that's what this year's garden is all about--learning so that we can be more productive next year. You can see the potatoes poking through the soil. This plant was fairly typical of what was produced this first season in the garden; each plant had two to three small red potatoes with lots of tiny spud babies (you can see one at the top center of the photograph).

The harvest at the left was what remained of the three last plants in the garden. With twelve plants, we did have a few meals with our own potatoes, but this was disappointing. What did I learn? A number of things. Potatoes are soooo easy to grow. I let a few potatoes from Earth Fare sprout eyes, and then I cut them into one-inch pieces and threw them into the ground, and covered them with straw after the plant appeared. Then I just waited. Even though I planted them during the window of opportunity suggested by Farmer's Almanac, it was too late in the season for this part of Alabama, I think. One of the causes of a small crop is hot temperatures, and we had plenty of that beginning the last week of May with temperatures consistently 90 and above. Potatoes also take up a good bit of room in the garden, and they take a lot of nutrients from the soil, so when I plant another crop in the fall, I'm going to plant them in a huge container. We'll see what happens.

Like a summer salad, this post will be several things tossed together in order to catch up.

In March and April, I wrote about Meatless Mondays, which was started by the Johns Hopkins Bloomburg School of Public Health. Today is Monday, and I wondered what might be floating out there on the internet from recipe sites, so I went to two sites with which I'm familiar. Apparently Meatless Mondays was not on either site's radar this week.

Yahoo has a weekly feature called "What's for Dinner This Week," and this week is mainly about meat. Five of the seven days feature pork, beef, or chicken; one day is vegetarian with a Mediterranean pizza; and one day features a fish recipe. Epicurious.com also has a section called Everyday Cooking that features menus for weeknight suppers, and meat is definitely on their menus this week with four out of five offerings made with poultry, beef, or salami. The remaining weeknight features fish. As for me and mine, we're having a summer squash and mozzarella tart for supper tonight. Father's Day weekend (yes, weekend at our house!) was filled with meat, and I'm ready to get back to vegetables.

Speaking of meatless meals, I did finish Diet for A Small Planet by Frances Lappe, which was listed as one of the top 10 sustainable food books by the Audobon Magazine website. While I enjoyed much of what the book had to say, especially Lappe's emphasis on connecting food to values, I was a little unsure of the recipes offered. I will try some of them, though I don't think she will replace Deborah Madison as my go-to cookbook guru for vegetarian fare. It is a good read, though, and may give you pause in considering US farm policy, hunger, and eating. Lappe looks at the "values" associated with policies that promote boundless growth in grain production and how that grain is exported not to hungry people around the world but to ranchers who feed that grain to animals who will then nourish anyone with the financial means to put meat on the table, which, incidentally, doesn't include any of the world's starving people. I agree with one of her concluding statements saying that turning everyone vegetarian isn't the answer to feeding the world's hungry, and while she seems to think it is a good place to start, I realized after reading her book and other food-related news, hunger is a much more complicated issue with no one solution. I do think a good place for everyone to begin is to look at their own set of values and bring their eating habits in line with those values. That's my family's focus this year.

To Be (a Locavore), or Not to Be (a Locavore); That is The Question

That really is the question. After reading Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which is as entertaining as it is informative, I have been plagued by one more aspect of my eating habits. For those of you who don't know the premise behind the book, Kingsolver and her family left their home in California to return to the family farm in the South with a resolve to eat only locally. The family agreed that each person could have one non-local food item (I agree with the selection of coffee and bananas!), and all other foods would come from their garden/homestead or the local farmers market. They began with vegetables but expanded their project to include turkeys, chickens, and beef, as I recall. It was an effort of love, research, patience, and experimentation, all of which Kingsolver chronicles in her book. I would give more specifics, but I think I lent the book to someone (I'm getting more careless/carefree in my lending habits).

We have friends in British Columbia who are growing and buying as much as they can, if not all, of their food locally, but what of the rest of us who don't live on a farm or in a bountiful agricultural area or in an area that supports favorite foods? For example, I love asparagus but am not a huge fan of collard greens. Unfortunately, sources abound for collard greens, but there doesn't seem to be a local source for asparagus even though it can be grown in the South. Instead, we usually have to choose asparagus from Peru or Mexico or some other locale thousands of miles away--so we choose not to buy asparagus except on special occasions. If our experimentation goes well this year, we may plant asparagus next year and wait three years for the first harvest.

I'm sure some people dismiss the idea of eating only locally because it is so difficult to eat 100 percent local fare. Even Earth Fare's idea of local is produce from North Carolina, and they violate the local premise by importing some of their red peppers from Israel and some of their beef from Australia. There are times I must decide if it's more responsible to buy from Mexico or California. In part, that is why we decided to expand our gardening efforts this year.

Anthony and I don't begin to pretend that we eat 100 percent local food, but we do try to be as local as possible. Blooming Colors, which is where I took the above photo a couple of years ago, has a market place offering wonderful, fresh goat cheese from a local farm (in Tallapoosa County, I think) and vegetables from Auburn and the surrounding area. Not everything is local, but quite a few items are. We also participate in Randle Farms CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and purchase 98 percent of our meat, most of our eggs, and some vegetables and fruit from them. The Randles grow their food using sustainable, organic practices. They offer half shares of meat and you can split a vegetable share with a friend as we did this season. Email them for details if you're interested.

Why eat local? Some say that it saves on fossil fuels, though I found a site on the web that disagrees with that premise. Everyone, I think, could agree that local food tastes better than food shipped from, say, Peru. I know that our decision to eat more locally and grow what we can is based in part on trying to save fossil fuels and having fresher food, but it's also about supporting local, small businesses and farms, and loosening the grip of giant corporations on our food supply. We don't like the practices of international corporations and their increasing control over the food supply. Every little bit an individual does helps, or so I like to think.

If you're interested in starting your own local, food-growing "experiment," you're just in time. The season is right and resources are a key stroke away. I started my planning phase with a book by Rosalined Creasy titled Edible Landscaping. The National Gardening Association has a website with tips, as does Mother Earth News and universities and extension services, including ACES. The good news is you don't need a lot of space in one area because you can spread plantings throughout your front and back yard where the light best fits your growing needs. If you live in an apartment, you can try a method called vertical gardening.

So, get gardening! It's therapeutic as well as delicious!

Good Things Grow in Compost

If you've ever started a new garden in the Alabama clay soil, you know what it means to amend soil. Last year we didn't worry about amending the little garden we started in an area of the backyard that had served as an herb garden because the soil seemed decent enough. This year, we doubled the size of the bed, which necessitated bringing in more dirt in the form of mushroom compost, peat moss, and top soil.

We also decided to start a compost bin to reduce the waste we put into the landfill and to have a source of rich soil we can add each year to the garden. Using some old wooden pallets Anthony found, we built a pretty primitive compost bin, and we've been adding egg shells, kitchen scraps, coffee grounds and leaves. The other day, I walked out to the compost pile to empty a container of kitchen scraps, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but lots of little green seedlings. The organic butternut squash guts that I threw into the pile weeks ago germinated!

Of course, this is the wrong phase of the moon to plant them. I can either take a chance and plant them now (the waning moon and the time for root crops) or wait until Saturday. They appear to be doing quite well in their temporary bed, but we're not adding to the compost pile or able to turn it while they "rest" there. All sources about composting will say that turning is important to speed decomposition. The Alabama Cooperative Extension Service says that a well managed compost pile will decompose in two to four months whereas a poorly tended one will take about a year to decompose. The link above will provide some basic information about composting. Food scraps that don't include meat or fats, grass clippings, leaves, and paper (avoid paper with colored inks and petroleum-based inks) are all good compostable materials.

The benefits of compost are many. Not only do you reduce the amount of garbage you add to the landfill, but compost helps poor soils become more arable. If you are trying to grow food without the use of pesticides and commercial fertilizers, compost is one step in achieving that goal. Mother Earth News magazine's April/May 2011 issue may provide some incentive to begin composting with its article about killer compost. Follow the link to read the entire on-line article.

The article begins with a warning: "Do not bring compost into your garden from outside sources unless you're certain it was made from herbicide-free materials." The article focuses on one particular type of aminopyralid herbicide from Dow AgroSciences known as Milestone and related herbicides sold under the brands Confront, Curtail, Forefront, Hornet, Lontrel, Millenium Ultra, Reclaim, Stinger and Transline. Reports of crop poisonings related to this herbicide come from Montana, North Carolina, Washington, and Pennsylvania. Googling the herbicide, I saw links to reports of problems in the UK as well, and it is evidently used in forestry applications. The thought is that this poison made its way into compost via manure and persists in soil for years rather than weeks as Dow claims.

Mother Earth News suggests contacting Dan Kenny of the EPA's Technical Review Branch at 703.305.7546 or at kenny.dan@epa.gov to voice your concern and to ask the EPA to take action on this problem. According to Mother Earth, the EPA granted conditional approval of Milestone in 2005 despite inconsistencies in Dow's Environmental Fate and Ecological Risk Assessment report.

Though I haven't yet seen an article naming this problem in Alabama, I did find an ACES release listing aminopyralid herbicides for controlling thistle weed on pasture land, so I suspect it may be a problem in our state as well. Sounds like a good reason to start your own compost bin!

Dressed for Success

This is, admittedly, a terrible photo, but my defense is that I took it with my husband's camera at 6:55 p.m. on manual setting without a flash--I couldn't figure out how to make the flash pop up. Given that, I'd say it wasn't a bad photo, just not what I would like to publish.

This is one of seven broccoli seedlings that I planted Feb. 6. I thought I had planted broccoli and spinach, but after seeing the spinach sprout in the garden, I think that I somehow planted only broccoli.

Broccoli in the spring may be an exercise in futility, at least in Dixie. I remember hearing that the only good time to grow it in the South is in the fall. But, this year's garden is really one big experiment. I've grown broccoli from plants purchased at Lowe's, but I've never tried growing it from a teeny, tiny seed. This is experiment No. 1.

As for the title of this posting--do you see the tiny cardboard ring around the base of the plant? The Healthy Garden Handbook by Mother Earth News suggests putting tarpaper collars around the base of broccoli seedlings to prevent cabbage maggots from gnawing the tender stem. I didn't have tarpaper, so I cut strips from a toilet paper roll and "dressed" each seedling before planting it.

If this garden experiment works--even modestly--we probably won't have saved any money this year (Anthony calls it the $1,000 garden), but we'll have better broccoli than you can buy at the store because it will be fresher than anything you can get at the store--and more nutritious. And, we'll be happier knowing that fossil fuels weren't used in the cultivation or transportation of our veggies.

Rooting in the Garden

Thinking I hadn't ordered seed potatoes in time--and too eager to wait for their arrival anyway--I cut up four small red organic potatoes that I bought from Earth Fare last month. If my information was correct, an organic potato from the grocery store can sprout and grow into potatoes in the garden, but a run-of-the-mill spud from the store cannot. We shall see.

Unfortunately, I don't know what variety they are; they are simply small red potatoes. I do know, however, they are not one of the three deemed worthy of McDonald's french fries. Follow the link to read more about McDonald's and its influence on potato growers. The site where I obtained the info says it cannot be redistributed or rewritten. After reading the article, I am puzzled. One of the favorite varieties of McDonald's is costly to produce and not very environmentally friendly. Why, oh why, then, are McFries so inexpensive? I think it has something to do with the way our government hands out subsidies. You can go to McDonald's and get a value meal for cheap that is filled with high fructose corn syrup, fat, and many calories. The movies King Corn and Food, Inc., can tell you about the corn, and Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, which I mentioned in an earlier post in January, can tell you about the real costs of your happy meal. Fast Food Nation was recently listed in the Audubon Magazine as one of the top ten books on sustainable food. See other choices by following the link.

Well, enough about potatoes. While I was hard at work planting potatoes, beet seeds, green onion seeds, and carrot seeds, Anthony was rolled up like a pupa in his hammock reading. I'm just giving him a hard time. He was actually decimating the backyard, making it less jungle-ish.

Even though I only planted seeds yesterday, I felt as though garden were fuller despite the vast coffee-colored soil and dots of greenery here and there. I think I was "fuller" from the good gardening vibes and dose of vitamin D from being in the sunshine.

First Fruits

Waiting for the moon; and by all accounts, this super moon should be worth the wait. Be that as it may, it doesn't help me get my garden planted. As I wait--both anxiously and eagerly, I'm enjoying seeing glimpses of the future bounty. This tiny fig, I hope, will join others in a manchego cheese, prosciutto, and fig sandwich later in the summer. If both produce well, and I can beat the birds to the bounty, I hope to make fig preserves this year. Maybe my friend Glenna's mother will share her recipe.

You can also see the blueberry bushes that caused such a problem last weekend. They've been pruned and have blossoms. Today, we bought four strawberry plants to add to the two already planted in the same bed.

I had seedlings to show, too, but I can't get my pictures to cooperate--they want to bunch together despite being added at different times. So for now, this will do.

Tomorrow begins the waning moon, and it will be a good day to plant my potatoes, beets, and carrots.

If you have a minute, watch the video clip from NASA about super moons.

Spring Planting

With the beautiful weather we've been having, it's hard to show restraint and NOT begin planting. The husband and I have used the past several weeks of warm weather to do garden chores: breaking up concrete to double the garden bed; amending soil; building a compost bin; buying seeds; studying planting by the moon. Yes, planting by the moon. I read where a gentleman in England experimented on his potatoes, planting some according to the moon (a waning moon for underground crops) and some at a different time. He said you could see the difference. Not exactly a guarantee, but it is encouraging.

In the whiskey barrel, you can see the violas that look so happy and smell so sweet, spires of red onion, and miscellaneous greenery--lettuce mix. I hope to be able to plant some cherry tomatoes in here for the summer.

We've planted another fig, and blueberries and raspberries are waiting for their beds to be prepared. Red onions are in the ground, and I planted sugar snap peas Friday. Sage is cut into mini-plants for rooting and sharing, and a few seedlings of broccoli and spinach have pushed through the soil and begun sprouting their first sets of true leaves. Today is the second day of the second quarter moon, the waxing moon; and according to moon-planters, never plant on the first day of any moon phase. I'm waiting patiently for the weekend. That is the recommended day to plant raspberries, but seeds rot in the ground. I'm a wee bit late for tomato seedlings, but my plan is to start them Sunday or Monday. It could be my eagerness to plant is ahead of actual planting, in which case, I'll be starting them right on time.

We'll see how this whole business of planting by the moon goes. I'll keep you posted. Check out Farmer's Almanac for more information about planting by the moon.