A Good Read

For anyone who would like to know a little more about the current state of agriculture in this country, and why there is a local food movement afoot, I highly recommend this book.

Joel Salatin is considered by many to be the guru of the farm movement.  And while his farm may not seem small to a person who has a few chickens, a few sheep, and maybe a horse or goat, by industry standards, it is.

More importantly, he shows us how the industrial giant that is the food industry ("industry" being the operative word, and yes, I'm using it repetitively on purpose) is doing its best to control everything we eat - not just their corner of the market (their corner, of course, being over 90% of what we eat).

He also highlights the nutritional merits of normal food vs. industrial food.  Why do I want to have my own chickens?  If having FRESH eggs wasn't enough of an argument, or having more flavorful, more nutritional eggs wasn't enough of an argument, how about the fact that eggs purchased from the store are required to be bathed in chlorine before they can be sold?  Eggshells are permeable, folks - let's think about this.  (Chlorine is a poison - just in case you didn't know.)

Now, I may not agree with the man's politics, nor with all his thoughts on how wild areas are under-utilized, he makes a good number of salient points.

I don't offer this book up for your consideration to try to change your opinion.  I offer it to further the cause of education.  You can make whatever decisions you want - just be informed before you make them, that's all I ask.

Another Reason To Raise My Own

I know this will make some folks say "see - organic food is no better than regular, only they charge you more." It's things like this (when we find out the facts) that give organic such a bad rap.

Buy local.

Know your farmer.

Raise your own.

Putting Food By

Sunday's chores.

But Wait, There's More!

Just when you think the garden had given up its final ghost, you remember the sweet potatoes that are lurking under the row covers.  I had dug a sample from the sweet potato bed back when I dug my other spuds this fall, and the scrawny little roots left a lot to be desired.  So, I essentially wrote them off as a lost cause and not something I would plant again.

But Tuesday when I got home from work, I decided to dig the rest of them up.  Maybe, just maybe, there would be a sweet potato or two worth the labor.

Boy, was I mistaken!

It's hard to appreciate the harvest there in the wheel barrow.  I had planted just shy of a dozen slips, which were not in the best of shape when they arrived from Maine this spring.  My first sampling did not improve my impression of these veg, but when I stuck my spading fork in and forked up the first plant, I was shocked and amazed to see sweet potatoes of colossal size (pictures do not do them justice):

The harvest directions I found for sweet potatoes say to leave them out in the sun on a screen for a day or two after you dig them so their skins can harden, and then let them sit at about 80*F for a few days to continue developing tough skins for storage. Yeah, right.  It started to rain as I forked over the last bits of the garden, so I dumped the buckets of spuds into the wheel barrow and rolled the whole thing into the covered back porch, where they have sat all week as it rained and barely reached 50*F - forget 80.

Still, this was a nice surprise.  I wonder if really big sweet potatoes are woody and awful, like big radishes, or if size doesn't matter with taste and texture.  I guess the only way to know will be to cook 'em and have a taste.  Until then, I've decided that sweet potatoes may not be so bad to plant in the garden here after all.  I wonder how I save slips for next year...

Late Season Gifts

Just when you think you won't have any more tomatoes, despite the many green ones still clinging to the tomato plants, you get a week of warm weather, and your row covers add a touch more warmth, and voila! you are swamped with ripening tomatoes!  (The apple is just there for scale.)

I don't recall which variety this tomato is, but many of the bright yellow fruits (I know, they look orange here, but they are really yellow) are quite large, and unlike Brandywines, they don't split!

I decided to pull a few more carrots, too, this weekend, not that I had time to actually process them or anything.

This one was so big, and had such a grip on the soil, that I had to use the spading fork to dig it out - it wasn't going to let go on its own.

Neither was this one...or is that two?  Possibly three?

Most of these carrots are still in the bowl on my kitchen counter, with a damp paper towel draped over them to keep them from going limp.  A few (including Brutus, two pics up) were diced into a pot of chicken soup I made later that day to combat the cold I've been fighting for about a week now.

And just to prove that miracles do happen, here's what I saw yesterday afternoon:

Yes, that's Pumpkin on the left, and Idefix on the right.  Sleeping.  Together.  Unbelieveable.  No fur flying, no claws swiping, no hissing or spitting or growling.  Amazing.

Of course, later that night things reverted to normal, but now there is a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, these two will eventually get along.

Colorful Carrots

A Good Day for Gardening

 Things are winding down in the garden.  Or maybe that's falling down!  With all the winds and rains we've had lately, the 12' tall sunflowers have about had it, taking out the remaining pole beans in their descent.

 Frost was in the forecast for last night (already!!!), so I took the afternoon off and spent it at home putting row covers over the tomatoes and sweet potatoes.

 While I was out there, I tackled the weeds in one of the unused plots (that I just didn't get around to preparing last spring).  Once it was weeded, I figured I might as well move the soil over - better now than wait until next spring.

Doesn't it look lovely?  Now that I have a load of compost (leaves from the streets of Jackson) to add to the horrid "topsoil" I got this spring, I'm hoping I will have better growth next year.  It certainly seems to be nutritious compost, for the weeds are phenomenal on the pile!  I weeded a section before mixing it with the "topsoil" (the pale pile on the right), but both are so full of roots that I suspect this isn't the last I'll see of the weeds.  One bed done, four to go...and then I can work on fixing the beds I did this year.

 While working in the garden, I saw this fellow snoozing in the corn:

...and another in the sweet potatoes:

I just love these little frogs.  They are grey tree frogs.  I know what you are thinking:  grey?  They're green!  But, grey tree frogs have the wonderful ability to change their color.  Gotta love 'em. 

Meanwhile, as I was yanking out weeds, I disturbed not only this worm, but the mother spider who's also in this photo.  See the white thing?  That's her egg sac, which apparently VERY recently hatched since she was still attached to it.  And on her back are all her little ones (except for the few that were scuttling around on the soil).  

 

And here's a sweet potato flower...just in case you ever wondered what one looked like.

The sunflowers are about exhausted.  Bees still visit, but most of the blooming is done and now the seeds need to ripen.

Watching someone weed and haul soil is not very exciting.