nefaeria

This is just a little update on how the garden is doing. Things are pretty much doing well, although we have had some issues with many of our brassicas this year, with various little buggies nomming them.

There have been hours of hand-picking off eggs and larvae and misting with a homemade insecticide. I have been pretty good at keeping my weeding vow {well, the black bindweed & hairy crab grass come out when seen}, bust as you can see from the photos below, I have left the rest in typical sentimental/lazy gardener fashion. ;)

Here are a few of the beds we have in our two veggie patches:

{bush beans, blue hubbard squash, turnips, greens, radishes currently in these two beds}

{potatoes, beets, carrots, turnips, nasturtiums, pole beans, bush beans, melons, cantaloupe, & wild tobacco in these beds right now}

{pole beans, sunflowers and pumpkins in this bed}

{the growth of the zucchini plants are now noticeable each day}

{our first tomato! it's an "old-timer"}

{russet burbank tatters}

{egg turnips & radishes in the blue container, norland tatters in the other}

{speaking of nightshades, I found some bittersweet growing underneath one of our trees}

{devon mangetout pea blossom. so pretty!}

{devon mangetout pea. we have been harvesting plenty!}

{wee hobo turnips. aren't the cute?}

Yesterday I had a huge craving for greens, so I made a quick saute and it was pretty damn good.

{another shot for beks to show her the pretty pea that was grown from seeds she sent me}

If you wanna give this a whirl...

1 tbsp olive oil
2 young turnips, cubed
Chives
Lamb's quarters
Giant red mustard
Red Russian kale
Swiss chard
Pineapple weed
Apple, chopped
3 tbsp Chive blossom vinegar

Saute turnips in olive oil for about 5 mins. Add everything else and saute for about 3 more mins and nom!

Sláinte!

Laurel

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I have mentioned the fine folks of Piebird B&B and of Soggy Creek Seed Co. a few times on this blog. Sherry and Yan are but two of the gaggle of people doing amazing things in my area, but they sure do stand out.

Recently Yan wrote an article for Alive & Fit Magazine, called Grow-It-Yourself. I found the online version a little hard to read {my eyes aren't what they used to be!}, and I figured that I wouldn't be the only one. So he has kindly given me permission to publish it here for our readers to enjoy.

I think that it is both provocative and inspiring, and the words need to be said. I think that is does target a specific group of people, ones who already have some type of land available to them, and the assumption that they enjoy at least a relative amount of food security.

I will post my own thoughts in more detail later. :)

Sláinte!

Laurel

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Grow-It-Yourself
by Yan Roberts

Growing your own food is learning the subversive art of self-reliance. Taking action and being in charge of the things that you put into your mouth has somehow become radical. Today, being a simple gardener in a highspeed culture is deeply subversive. Quietly walking away from the grocery store and happily growing as much food as you can is the biggest thing us little peaceful people can do. You have permission to break from the norm.

One hundred miles is still too far--but it was just catchy enough to encourage people to make the first step, serving as an entree to our acceptation of being in a relationship with our food. We don't yet have enough producers in our community for us to be promoting the local food movement as the end-goal viable solution. Everything you need to grow the food you eat is within the distance you can throw a beet.

Get some seeds, start with something small--the best opportunity for you to change the world, your community and yourself is in a package of seeds. Plant your own seeds, work your own soil and eat your own food.

Every time we line up in the grocery store checkout aisle, especially when the line is long and the magazines especially puzzling, each of us is given the choice to either continue brutalizing the human enterprise with our addiction to steady supply of faraway foods or to abandon the shopping cart and flee the store without anything.

Local food has become a distant metaphor for us to weight the harm done by our plates, for us to casually tally up our gains and losses--"well this potato only endured a four hour drive so I feel pretty good about myself." We all know now that far-away-foods are a source of strain to Earth and a moral discomfort to ourselves, the movement of local-food gave us that understanding. But the danger before us is that many buy local carrots, three bunches a year, and then feel real good as though something significant has been done, the world will be alright again.

All good ideas are reducible to us; humans are clever that way. We can take a good idea and turn it into an ideology that is somehow hollow compared to the original. What we haven't changed about our eating is our expectations; we still expect other people to grow for us, which would be less detrimental if we has thought to alter the economic farming mode. We had six decades of mass production that turned a carrot into a commodity. Economically we made most of the family farms extinct here at home and then we even went so far as to outsource food production entirely. The more conveyer belts we added, the cheaper and cheaper the carrots got--we seriously undervalued food, while undermining entire environments and economies at the same time.

We need o have a connection into the process of food. Understand the value of a carrot, understand the amount of work and uncertainty and heck, even the tremendous amount of joy that went into that carrot. No significant local food system will establish until more of us understand what food is and what exactly it takes to grow it. We need to individually establish a relationship with food beyond simply eating it.

Okay, I am an optimist. I use the ancient technique of optimism as a navigational tool for distinguishing which solutions will bare the eventual triumph of good. How do we get out of this jam?

All living things are fed, each bit in nature, each of us. Even all the structures of our humanity are kept alive by us feeding into them. "So how," you may ask, "do I stop feeding our food system (before it does the world more harm) when it's the one making the food? How do I cut off its food supply when the supply goes to me?" Well there, you just nailed it...cut off the supply to yourself, cut off your current food supply and you will stop feeding the whole system.

What we put out into the world on a daily basis is our art--every activity that we do expresses to others something about our grasp and our understanding. As we grow and explore life, what's important to us changes and calls out. Make your art out of dirt, seeds and vegetables.

We live in an accelerated time with increasing disenchantment of the current ways. There's a collective unwillingness to continue pretending that we don't know what it is we should be doing. When gardening, you hardly ever wonder what you're hungry for. Full of hope you speak with your hoe, you speak with your hunger for change.

Other civilizations had decades of droughts kill off their food source; we gave ours up willingly when we traded a bag of community for a sac of globalization. We chased away family farms with sticks and rock-bottom prices. We spent half a decade stuck in traffic somehow wrongly convinced that it took less work to mow high-maintenance lawns than tame butterfly-filled backyard veggie plots. Now that we again see the need for growing and getting that food knowledge back, it would discredit those generations of farm-absence if we returned to exactly the way things were. We need to incorporate the changes the world and ourselves have undergone in the time since our society left the farm--we have added the weight of additional morals, a broader understanding and a greater consciousness. Instead of meat, fleece or milk, let's raise our animals for their love and happiness. To many, organic gardening means a reliance on manure from a saddening industry. It's curious to what how plants and people deal with the same problems. The plants wouldn't ever care to correct any of the crookedness of their surroundings in the way we humans try. Do only what plants would do. We both know they are not going to borrow a pickup truck and haul manure from offsite or buy bags of sterile topsoil for their seeds. Here at Piebird, we grow a lot of comfrey which has four times more nitrogen and potassium than barnyard manure. Comfrey's nutrients are mined from deep in the subsoil, tapping into leached reserves unavailable in other plants.

Bring nothing into the garden from off-site. No bagged nutrients, no overpriced stuff from the sea, no dust from volcanoes or salty bloodshed on our beets. Mining nutrients from elsewhere os no better than the strangely uncouth foreign policy of our nations and is indeed a great deal worse. Plus, a garden is a good place to practice those good human skills we can utilize in the other hours of your life--practice making do with what you have around you rather than shopping for what you need. Besides a new hoe ever couple of years, our food costs zero dollars; open-pollinated seeds are saved, soil is enhanced by many buckets of brewed compost tea to keep the microorganisms up.

One thing we tell our gardening workshop participants here at Piebird is, "you can spend less time growing your own food than you currently spend shopping at a grocery store" (especially if you add in all of the hidden time associated: taking out the trash from all of the packaging, sorting the recycling, flipping through the flyers, coupon-cutting, waiting in line-ups,etc). Utilize the processes of nature rather than work against them. Some people perhaps enjoy the noise of rototillers or breaking their back digging dirt. I must tell you that it's much easier to leave the soil alone and leave it to the earth worms--they'll do a better job than you. One earthworm can digest over 35 tons of matter per year. You can build amazing soil fast by creating a habitat for underground life with humus and mulch.

Get growing! Every mouthful of food that you produce yourself will take a truckload of strain off the global food supply. Now is the time to cause your commotion! This is the spring that all other springs were trying for. Happy compost piles everywhere will be purring like housecats. Start your small peaceful revolution with a handful of seeds.

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