But...I have to tell you, this meat ain't cheap!

I bought 3 packs of pork sausages, 1.4 kg (about 2.5 lbs) and it cost $30. If I just grilled them up it would take the whole lot to feed our family of four. However, I like to make my ethical meat stretch farther and pork sausage makes a fabulous addition to rice and beans. Unfortunately the kids won't eat that so they get a whole grilled sausage each. Thus, with this amount of sausage I will be able to get: 1 kids meal of grilled sausage (feeds 2 kids) and 2 meals of rice and beans which will feed the adults for two meals each. So, for $30 I got 5 meals. Not bad!

The pork chops were more expensive. Each kid will eat at least one chop, sometimes 1.5. I can eat one or two chops and Husband can easily eat 2. I bought six chops totalling about 1 kg in weight. That will make 1 complete family meal with maybe a small amount leftover, and the cost was $22. 

My meal plan for the month of October calls for two batches of rice and beans (with pork sausage), and two days of leftover rice and beans with sausage (the kids will have their one night of grilled whole sausages. One day of pork chops, ditto with the ethical chicken I bought from another farmer's market vendor a couple of months ago (that will be our thanksgiving meal with my mother). We are having (another!) thanksgiving dinner with friends (we're getting our families together to do an "all local" thanksgiving dinner, this time with turkey). We are having one other meat meal this month using up some chicken thighs I had (not ethical, but it's the last pack and I might as well use it up). And that's it for meat consumption this month (oh, we will also have 2 or 3 tuna-based meals this month). 

So, I spent $52 today on a month's worth of pork. The chicken was $25 (and of course there will be leftovers and bones for soup stock), our share of the local mega-turkey will work out to around $30. So that's basically around $100 for meat this month which, really, for a family of four is not that bad! 

And so while I confess I did suffer a moment of sticker shock at the store today, my shock was based on years of experience buying cheap, crappy food and adopting our cultural expectation that food should be as cheap as possible. Instead, I now feel like I have spent my money wisely, obtained a good quality product that I can stand behind in terms of production, and I have consequently lowered my meat consumption to adjust to the higher price.  

It feels good!

* I was reading a blurb on a "free range chicken" producer's website that actually claimed putting chickens outdoors was cruel because they would just run around and be frightened. Does one really have to stop and consider that sentence for very long before concluding that our attitudes about food animals are seriously f*cked up?

I have written here extensively about my own personal Food Revolution this past summer. Eating locally, supporting sustainable farming practices, and choosing healthy, whole foods for my family have become incorporated into my own system of personal values. They are important to me. In his latest book, In Defense of Food, author Michael Pollan points out that the average family used to spend about 15 - 18% of their income on food, and about half that on health care. These days the average family spends less than 9% of their income on food and double that on health care. Regardless of whether you believe the inverse relationship between these numbers is causal in nature, the fact that people used to spend more money (and got better quality food, as fifty years of nutritional analyses have shown), really struck me. 

Most people, when going out to purchase an electronic device (computer, big screen TV, camera), do not buy the cheapest model on the floor. There is an ingrained belief with these products that "you get what you pay for". And yet how many of us, when purchasing a block of cheese, carefully price check each brand and compare between stores to find the lowest price we can get?

Guilty as charged.

Back when we started The Dream and The Plan the grocery budget was the first thing we slashed. And even though I have now come to appreciate the value of quality, local food I confess that my shopping habits did not completely reflect that. 

I do buy organic eggs, based largely on revelations about how battery hens are treated. I also get local eggs whenever I can. I buy organic yogurt for the kids, organic apples (I hate the wax they put on conventional apples), and sometimes organic produce (when I'm not buying it at the farmer's market). I have switched to fair trade tea (especially after watching the movie Black Gold and figuring it likely applies to tea growers as well). I buy only ethical meat (grass fed beef and pork, free range, non-medicated, local)...but I buy conventional cow's milk and the cheapest cheese I can get. What was my reasoning for this?

Really it was about price - we don't eat much yogurt so choosing organic doesn't cost me much extra per month. We're used to not eating much meat, so splurging on a $25 roasting hen when we only eat one a month didn't seem so hard. On the other hand, my kids drink a lot of milk. I use it for baking, I have it in my tea and my cereal/oatmeal every morning. Our family easily goes through 12 L of milk per week, and that adds up to a lot of money. I can get 4L of conventional milk in a plastic jug for less than $4 at my local supersized grocery store. Local, organic milk in returnable glass bottles is $3 per L. Thus, in one month, conventional milk will cost us about $50 whereas organic milk will cost us $140. That's a pretty big price difference. 

Recently the subject has come up in a couple of different places in my life and I finally had to acknowledge to myself that my "system" didn't make sense. Cheese is easily the largest source of protein for my children, so why on earth am I buying the cheapest crap I can find? If my children are drinking tons of milk, shouldn't it be good, quality stuff? Wanting to save money is admirable, but doing so at the cost of my family's nutrition and health is not the answer. I thank my friends for finally making me realize that there was no logic to what I was doing. And I thank myself for finally recognizing that this is about staying true to my own values. By choosing local, organic food I am making a statement while at the same time taking my money away from the industrial agro-businesses that monopolize and jeopardize our food industry. And so...

...I am joining an organic buying club and will be purchasing organic cheese by the case (my friend swears that the shrink-wrapped portions will keep for weeks). I have signed up for a local organic delivery service that will deliver my 12 glass bottles of local, organic milk each week and take them back the following week. 

I feel better already, and I haven't even drunk the stuff yet.

My tomatoes survived the first bout of summer rains, but sadly they succumbed to a second one last month. The dreaded blight struck before I'd harvested more than a handful of sweet SunGold tomatoes and, as they all said it would, once it was there I could only watch helplessly as my huge stock of green tomatoes slowly rotted and fell off the vines. It was very sad, but on the other hand this WAS an experiment year and I was pretty happy with how well the plants grew and the huge number of tomatoes that I had before they died. Next year I'll choose my planting area more carefully and make it easy to cover in times of heavy rain. 

Removing the thick forest of tomato vines from the trellis at least gave some room to my long beans. I harvested this batch today...though I'm still not exactly sure what to do with them. They have a thick, fuzzy, almost sticky coating and I don't know how palatable that will be. They look impressive though! The coloured ones are Dragon's Tongue bush beans, which I don't have much of - think I needed to plant more seeds than I did. 

My buttercup squash plant is doing well - it too received a boon in real estate when I cut down the sugar snap peas. They succumbed to powdery mildew, but not before we'd enjoyed several weeks of sweet, delicious snacks. So I considered that experiment rather successful. The squash in this photo is about the size of a baseball, and there are several more showing on the vine, as well as some flowers still blooming. 

Finally, my good ol' Swiss Chard is growing like crazy, and rather neglected as I haven't harvested any in well over a month. I'm curious to see how long these plants will produce through the winter as they seem pretty hardy. 

I haven't done any planting for fall or winter...life has just been so busy. But I will have an opportunity to extend my gardening experiment through the cold season: a friend in the business has given me a hydroponic system that I will attempt to use for growing such things as lettuce and tomatoes through the winter. I'll post more details when it arrives and I have it set up, but I'm curious as to how this will go...I admit to being a little dubious about food grown in no soil and with no real sunlight, but my friend assures me that with proper organic nutrient products (derived from natural sources such as seaweeds, etc) I'll have a quality harvest. 

I also scored a sprouting box complete with shelves and flourescent lights for next year's seed starting. Yes, next year I will take on the task of starting my own seeds, something that seemed just a tad overwhelming this past season, my first. 

So, that's what is going on in my garden these days! Thanks for stopping by and being patient with my slow posting schedule...

The smell of those tomato plants is heavenly. That combined with wet, rich earth was so incredibly soothing. It constantly amazes me what joy a garden can bring. It is an excuse to step outside, and when I do I always come back in with my soul feeling refreshed. Regardless of how much food I harvest, having that garden has brought much into my life. 

Here is what's happening in my little garden these days:

I saw my first display of colour on the tomato plants. This is a SunGold tomato. I was so excited to find it! And then to my delight I spied these hiding deep in the bushes:

Oh Goddess of the Gardens please spare my little babies from the Blight!

Here is a Purple Russian:

I can't wait to see how these turn out. 

The sugar snap peas are a tangled mass as they've seriously outgrown their 5' trellis. They remind me of a giant section of matted hair!

But while I'm still getting a decent harvest of peas, there are signs that not all is well with my sugar snaps. First, there is a dusty white mold on several of the leaves:

And some of the other parts of the plants are appearing to bleach:

Most of the plants are still a healthy green, but sections are a very pale yellow. I don't know what's going on, but I'm still getting peas, lots of flowers, and even if the whole thing should die tomorrow I'll at least feel like I got a good bunch of peas out of the harvest. Still, if anybody knows what it is I suppose it would be helpful for next year. I will be giving the peas much more room next year, as well as a much taller trellis! 

The saddest member of my garden has to be the cucumber. It has barely grown since I planted it several weeks ago. Some of the leaves look curled up and diseased, and yet the plant hasn't actually died and the damage doesn't seem to have spread.

And today I noticed this little baby growing underneath. Perhaps there's some hope, or perhaps it will be one, lone, tiny little cucumber. 

I'm not a big cucumber fan so if this plant doesn't make it I'll probably dispense with them next year.

On a happier note, my buttercup squash plant is spreading nicely, and has two flowers! One seems to have gotten beaten by the rain, but the other one looks healthy.

I also have Dragon Tongue Beans! I don't think they are ready yet, they are very thin. Or maybe they are supposed to be like that. You'd think I'd look these things up, huh? It just seems more fun to wait and see - all the more surprises when you are ignorant, lol. 

This photo doesn't really capture the purpleness. The pole beans are climbing like crazy and are full of lovely red flowers, but I don't have a good photo of them (they've gotten lost in the tomato plants).

The chard is still going strong, and I hear it does well in the cold, too. That will be nice, to have them around for a while:

Isn't the colour lovely? Rainbow chard is definitely a beautiful (and healthy!) addition to any veggie garden. 

Finally, my onions tops are definitely looking brown, but they're still pretty small and there are green stalks standing (I hacked most of them down last week as they were falling over and crushing other plants). I think I'm supposed to leave them in the ground until the tops have totally died off. Hopefully they are busy right now adding sugar and substance to the bulbs so I can have some nice fat onions later!

So that's the way it's growing these days. Despite the fact that I'm currently harvesting sugar snap peas, carrots, and chard there is a lot of empty space in my garden beds. I really need to get to the garden centre and buy some stuff to plant for late summer/fall. Or maybe I'll head to the farmer's market instead and buy some starts. 

I'll leave you with this last photo. This is a single harvest one day last week. The broccoli was a little late but tasted delicious nevertheless. And the onions really aren't ready, although sadly I didn't get to taste them because I accidentally burnt them (!). Still, I was amazed at what I was able to get from such a paltry little garden. I mean, after the salad was done I seriously wondered what the heck else there was going to be to eat. Oh me of little faith! 

Oh, and you know another blissful aspect of summer gardening? Smelling tomato plants on my hands long after I come inside. Sigh!

I didn't make the buns this time, they are from a local bakery called Uprising Breads. The corn and yellow and gold zucchini came from the farmer's market. Once again I could have used a slice of cheese melted on top but I didn't have any (other than the generic marble cheddar the kids eat by the pound; not what I had in mind). Simple. Local. Yummy. 

Seven months ago when Husband and I came up with The Dream and The Plan we knew we had to get serious with our budget. We wanted to maximize the amount of money we put towards our goal each month, and so we began to pare down our expenses. The two biggest categories after rent were groceries and miscellaneous spending (everything other than rent, bills, food, and gas). 

Slowing down on spending was pretty easy. I'm not much of a shopper to start with, and after educating myself about consumerism via books such as Affluenza and films such as Maxed Out on Debt and The Story of Stuff it was easy to get into a No-Spend frame of mind. I fell in love with our local thrift stores and began to take full advantage of an excellent library system. 

The grocery budget also seemed an easy target for trimming. We'd recently moved from a neighbourhood where the nearest grocery store was a Whole Foods market, to a where it was a Big Box supermarket. We cut out the expensive foods and I stopped eating organic (The Omnivore's Dilemma left me feeling jaded about industrial organic) and went for low cost items instead. We managed to cut our food budget almost in half, but my journey to learn more about our food would soon lead me to feel that we were paying for this in ways other than that measured by money.

Over the last few months I have educated myself about modern industrial food production and have found it seriously lacking in both value and morality. The costs the Earth is paying for our methods of cheap, mass food production are too high, the poor quality of the product and its interdependence with the processed food industry is compromising our health, and the suffering of meat animals is too much for my comfort zone. I have come to appreciate the value of eating locally and seasonally. I stopped buying unethical meat, and now seek out suppliers whose animals are allowed to live as they are designed to live (thank you, Joel Salatin). I planted a vegetable garden. 

As this summer of local eating progresses I am falling into a new mindset. Each visit to the farmer's market reveals the next stage of this cycle of growth, yield, and harvest. Yesterday I discovered boxes bursting with zucchinis green and gold, nugget potatoes of all colours and sizes, sweet local corn!, broccoli and beans. Who needs salad now?

The ethical fowl lady finally had chickens and I spent $26 on a 3 pound roaster. I'd waited weeks for this bird, and the value it holds for me is significant. This will be roasted for a family Sunday dinner, leftovers eaten in sandwiches and reheated for the next day's meal. We'll pick it clean and then the bones will make a large pot of stock. Nothing will be wasted, and maximum value will be gleaned from it's carcass. That is what happens when you spend money on quality items and appreciate how much has gone into it. I have never, ever felt that way after buying a Family Pack of boneless, skinless mass-produced chicken breasts.

And so yesterday Husband and I reviewed our food budget. Now that we are sharing household duties, he's been doing more of the grocery shopping and I haven't been too happy with what he's bringing home. For me, the priority has shifted. It's no longer about eating as cheaply as possible. In his latest book, In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan notes that North Americans used to spend almost twice as much on food, as a percentage of income, as we do now. Even despite the current "food crisis" and soaring prices. Over the same period of time, spending on health care (at least in the US where it is not universal)  has more than doubled. Yes, I want to save money. But not at the cost of our health and my own moral values. I simply cannot in good conscience continue to support an industry that I feel is so destructive.

To my relief, Husband agreed: reduce consumption of processed foods (hot dogs are now reserved solely for camping trips and special occasions), buy only ethical meat and seafood, eat meat or seafood only twice a week at max. I'll continue to top up the harvest from my meagre garden with produce from the Farmer's Market. We'll do this for one month, keep track of our spending, and determine how much this way of eating will cost. I know it will be more than the 8% of our monthly income it was in the original budget, but I'm certain it will be less than 12-15%. The price, as far as I'm concerned, will be well worth it.

Homemade bread (with locally milled, organic unbleached flour), home-grown carrots (rainbow variety, two colours of which are shown here), and a bowl of salad greens from the garden. 

The week 8 meal was much better. It was an exciting meal because it contained several kinds of vegetable, all harvested from my garden:

Local new potatoes (bought from the supermarket but grown in Delta, BC). Broccoli, carrots, and sugar snap peas from the garden (I accidentally burnt the onions so they were left out!). Tossed with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and salt. Very tasty. And I discovered that stir-fried sugar snap peas taste AMAZING!

They are Sun Gold tomatoes, a variety that is positively thriving in my garden right now and will produce golden cherry tomatoes when ripe. 

But some days I go out there just intending to "munch and peek" and end up getting my hands dirty. Last week I took out all the lettuce plants as they had bolted and our last salad was definitely on the bitter side of fresh. I also removed the gai lan, which I'd not pruned and had therefore missed harvesting. The flowers were pretty but as they turned to little seed pods I realized it was just a giant plant taking up space and crowding out other things. 

Today was another such day. My compost bin was finally filled to the top after the last visit from the lawnmowing guys (hired by our landlord), who started putting the clippings in my bin at my request. I decided that, ready or not, it was time to start harvesting my compost. So I opened up the lid, stuck in a trowel, and pulled out some Black Gold.

I actually wasn't sure what to expect, or how to know it was ready. But I figured after almost 8 months of adding things to this bin I had to have *something*. I had sort of imagined it would look like potting soil - rich, dark, crumbly. It wasn't quite like that. It was dark...it was also lumpy and I could see egg shells throughout. It didn't smell like garbage, which I thought was a good sign. And it was clearly different from the grass clippings added more recently so I dug out some more and hoped for the best.

 I closed the door, mixed up the compost, and gained a fair bit of room at the top again. Then I grabbed my bucket and spade and went to the garden.

I recalled Mel saying in the Square Foot Gardening book that one should add a scoop of compost after harvesting a plot to replenish the soil. I began doing this and slowly gained confidence in my compost as I dumped shovelfuls onto the dry soil of the garden. Using my hand rake I blended it until it resembled "normal soil", but with a darker hue (in fact, it looked alot like what I started with back in February). As I worked the earth I imagined all that had gone into the compost: organic local eggshells, tons of veggie and fruit bits, tea bags and coffee grinds, grass clippings and dry leaves...all these things going back into my garden just seemed so...right. Like a circle had been closed.

I ended up putting a little bit of compost in every empty plot and even put a bit around my chard and pole beans. I know I'm going to have to sit down very soon and decide what crops to plant for the next season. At least the soil is ready!

The meal came together in a most delightful way after a visit to the farmer's market. My favorite tomato grower was out of yummy cherry and grape varieties, but had a couple of scrumptious-looking beefsteak varieties. We grabbed two of those and decided to have stuffed mushrooms. The local mushroom grower picked out some smaller criminis for me and voila, a meal was born.

Here are the ingredients:

Beefsteak tomatoes from Gipaanda Greenhouses, Surrey, BC.

Mushrooms from Richmond Specialty Mushrooms, Aldergrove, BC

Herbs from our garden.

Buns from the local bakery.

Salad from the garden. 

I confess there was a bit of shredded parmigiano reggiano, which is definitely not local, in the tomato stuffing. It was a pretty yummy dinner except I forgot to place a wedge of Little Qualicum Cheeseworks brie on the top to melt before serving!

We have some friends in the hydroponics business (seriously, it's a legitimate business). They are crunchy organic types and I've been picking their brains lately about the environmental benefits of hydroponics technology. Yesterday one of them showed me this. It's an article in New York magazine about a future technology called SkyFarming that, according to the inventors, could be ready to go in about 10 years.

I admit there is much to love about this type of farming. Water is recycled and contained in closed systems. Power is provide by solar panels and wind spires. There is no loss of topsoil or depletion of the nutrient content of soil...in fact, there isn't any soil involved at all. 

And that's where I start to feel a little strange about the whole thing. There's something about digging in the earth that just feels so good. It's hard to imagine gardening in the absence of dirt. But while folks like Joel Salatin have shown that one can produce large quantities of food from a relatively small operation and still treat the animals humanely, avoid pesticides and fertilizers, and maintain a healthy local ecosystem...with the world's population growing exponentially, and urban populations swelling the most, I think it is inevitable that eventually we'll have to come up with an alternative to land-based agriculture. 

The other issue I have is one of nutrient composition. We know that food grown industrially is deficient in nutrient content compared to food grown fifty years ago, i.e. before the development of modern industrial agriculture (see The End of Food; reviewed in my Book List). I've written before about the idea that an individual fruit or vegetable is nothing more or less than the sum of the ingredients that went into it. When those ingredients come from rich, organic, nutrient-dense soil you end up with a very healthy snack. When the soil has been depleted by overuse and artificial fertilizers are providing the main source of nutrients you end up with something that may look the same (though with industrial practices being what they are, likely not) but which contains far less in terms of nutritional value. 

With hydroponics, given that there is no soil, all nutrients must be provided artificially. How complete are these formulas? Can they provide all the macro- and micronutrients that a particular region of soil contains for that particular local edible plant? Michael Pollan pointed out the fallacy of nutritionism when it comes to the food we eat. So....can hydroponic fertilizers compare to good, old fashioned, compost-rich soil?

According to my friend there are amazing advances being made in this area. The fertilizers her company sells are made from such ingredients as kelp and other plants. Other ingredients are bioengineered by fungus and other micro-organisms that can provide usable, organic nitrogen from waste materials without the need for petroleum byproducts (see here; scroll down to "ET Products"). Still, I can't help but wonder just how well we can duplicate Mother Nature. Will a tomato grown in a SkyFarm be the same nutritionally compared to one grown in good, healthy soil? 

Despite my beliefs that, even should SkyFarming become the major source of food production in the future, there will always be a core group that holds out for "the real thing" (the APLS of the future?)...I do think that there are enough great ideas in this system (recycling wastewater, capturing water moisture from the plants) that it represents a positive option for feeding our hungry planet in a sustainable way. What do you think of this idea?

This weekend our family headed up to Lake Country in the Okanagan region of BC to do a little camping and a little exploration of the area (it's one of our choices for the future homestead). It was our first real camping trip of the summer (as in, we slept in a tent and cooked on a portable grill).

When I was growing up, my father took us camping and hiking in the backcountry. No sissy car camping for us kids; we hauled in our food and water and stayed for several days. Dairy was out, as was anything else perishable. A can of condensed milk was available for tea or coffee (I hated the stuff), and dinner was often dehydrated meals from the camping supply store. The lack of fresh choices in my childhood camping experiences may explain why I have to think hard about packing anything other than convenience foods when we embark on our travels. Despite the healthy eating going on at home, when it comes to packing for a camping trip my brain seems to shut off and revert to old (bad) habits. Hot dogs and marshmallows are de rigeur, the car ride almost always involves at least one drive-thru experience, snacks are obtained from the gas station...you get the drift. 

This last trip was mostly an on-the-fly affair when it came to planning, and I was working the day previous. Since I am the one in our family who plans and packs (Husband is the driver) I was really unprepared this time. My attitude towards food has changed considerably over the last several months, and while I did make a few pit stops at fruit stands along the way (the Okanagan region is bursting with orchards) we still ate way too much junk food. The only thing local at our camp table (besides some fruit) was the beer. Oh the shame!

We're planning another trip in a couple of weeks and I'm challenging myself to provide better fare this time. We have a big honkin' cooler and we're never far from a bag of ice so there really is no excuse not to provide fresh, wholesome snacks and food for my family. Even on the road. A bag packed with sandwiches, fresh fruit, and some homemade granola bars is far better than anything you can get by talking into a speaker while the car is running. Meals can be planned ahead of time, condiments and essential seasonings (like olive oil) can come along for the ride. And of course there's all the fresh fruit and produce at the roadside stands. We have a Coleman stove and a portable grill so really, I have no excuse. I hereby pledge to ditch the junk food on our next road trip before my children decide that "travel" is synonymous with "Happy Meal".

Instead of a roundish clump of lettuce the plant begins to grow upwards on a thick stalk so that it becomes more conical in shape, like a Christmas tree. 

With this image in mind I headed out to the garden and found one plant that definitely fit the bill, another that was pretty close. It is kind of sad because there is just so much lettuce growing in my garden right now, all different kinds of greens. I can't possibly eat it all and some of it is not that tasty anymore. But I know it will all go into the composter and thus contribute to the next crop of food. It's not a waste (yet one more wonderful thing about organic gardening). 

So what's up next? Well, I started harvesting carrots. These are a rainbow variety and they sure look pretty on the plate, don't they?

And these aren't even the nicest - the next batch (for which I sadly do not have a photo) had some really dark purple ones. They aren't very big - a limitation of having only 6" of soil in which to grow. Some of them were tasty, a few were rather woody. I can't say the flavour was all that impressive, but I prefer my carrots sweet. Of course, I savoured each one thinking about what went into getting them here on the table, and how long I'd waited for them. I think next year I'll plant carrots in either a deeper box or perhaps I'll try a regular flower bed (i.e. not a container). Or I might try the short, thick variety.

Those bulbs in the photo above are my red onions. The tops have browned and fallen over but they aren't much bigger than when I planted them (that plate is not a dinner plate, it's a dessert plate). They aren't really usable, but I left a few in the ground to see if they get any bigger. Meanwhile my multiplier onions are very tall and have burst out of their 'capsules' to produce tiny flowers. Some have already started to brown and fall over, and they are bursting up out of the soil. I won't really know until I dig them up but they are looking more promising than the reds.

The greatest joy, however, has come from the Sugar Snap Peas. I plucked my first few pods off the VERY tall vines (my trellis was just under 6 feet and the plants are easily getting close to 8!) and I swear, I am not just exaggerating because they are my plants: they were hands down the BEST sugar snap peas I have ever had! Everybody who has sampled them has commented on how sweet they are. They are fat and crisp and delicious!! I could snack on them all day. Next year I am going to build a bigger trellis with smaller holes in the mesh* and plant a ton of these suckers! Does anybody know what I can do to preserve some of this harvest? Should I shell them and freeze them? Or just enjoy them while I can?

So I'm bidding farewell to the salad days of spring, and hello to the sweet crunchy goodness of a sugar snap pea summer!

In my next post we'll talk about plans for fall and winter plantings (yes, apparently it's that time already).

* you may recall the efforts I went through to find the trellis netting that Mel specified in his book. Well, my peas obviously would have preferred more to grab onto in the growing stages - they got tangled around each other alot as the curly feelers reached out and didn't find anything except a neighbouring stalk

Here we have lettuce from the garden, local organic eggs (Rabbit River Farms; Richmond, BC) and tomatoes (Delta, BC). Canned tuna is from Iron Maiden Seafoods (Sooke, BC). The fingerling potatoes are the one "iffy" ingredient in this meal - the guy at the supermarket was "pretty sure" that they were from Washington State (which I consider local in terms of geography if not nationality), but the label simply said "Product of the USA". The dressing was made with herbs from our garden. And the wine is from a local u-brew place, Beyond the Grape, (we make a big batch every year) although I'm not sure if the grapes in this particular blend are all local.

One comment I want to make is about the tuna. Opening this can, it looked quite different from your usual canned tuna. This tuna was more like a thick chunk of cooked fish with lots of yummy broth-like liquid around it. It wasn't evenly distributed throughout the can, nor molded to precisely fit the can. It actually looked like real food, and it was the tastiest canned tuna I have ever eaten. At $5/can it is definitely more expensive than the store-bought variety, but as I often say if you simply eat it half as often as you regularly consume canned tuna then it doesn't cost you anything more AND you get the benefit of local, ethically-caught, sustainably-fished, delicious canned tuna! That one can was enough to feed Husband and I (sadly, my kids won't eat fish) along with the eggs and other yummies in the salad, so it ends up being a pretty inexpensive meal.

As part of our desire for a more sustainable diet we don't eat much meat. We'll have it about once a week. I have switched to buying only ethical meat and while we have a lot of ethical beef in the freezer (we buy a half-cow from a local farm each year and share it with my mother) it is not easy to find ethically raised chicken and pork. I've been getting the occasional Cornish Hen from Goldwing but they haven't had any chicken yet. I have found pork sausage from Pasture-to-Plate but so far no pork chops.

I actually love that these items are hard to find because it adds even more to the sense of value. It's a treat when I get my hands on some sausages and you can best believe I'm going to make them last. Meat should be considered a treat, a Sunday-dinner type of meal, and not an everyday staple. I've noticed that the atmosphere of the Supermarket - anything you want any time of year, in abundance - is beginning to appear excessive to me in the context of the farmer's market atmosphere where you need to come early to snap up the fresh local organic eggs, or the first batches of crisp rhubarb. There's something about the latter that makes me truly cherish the products I buy.

Fish has become another way of including animal protein into our diet and we are lucky to have a wonderful local business that fishes sustainably and ethically. I purchase one salmon fillet whenever I go to the farmer's market. It's well under $10 and provides two large portions for me and Husband (the kids won't eat fish unless it is battered and deep-friend and passed off as chicken nuggets; oh the Shame!!). This week's meal is one way of preparing the fish; we have also used it roasted and shredded as a hearty addition to a bowl of salad.

The salmon dish pictured above is easy to prepare and very tasty. The salmon came from Iron Maiden Seafoods, hook-and-line caught and frozen-at-sea in local waters. It was cooked by spreading Dijon Mustard (not local) on the fillet and then topped with a mixture of bread crumbs and fresh herbs from our garden. It was served with tossed salad greens from our garden and a glass of homemade wine (we use a local on-premise winemaking company). The lemons were roasted with the fish and are not local, but as a garnish I'm hoping that's okay. 

sincerely, the Happy Omnivore

I have to start off by saying that I did not take this photo. My local meal this week was so yummy that I forgot to take a picture before I gobbled it all up. We had roasted portobello mushroom sandwiches with roasted red peppers and melted Raclette cheese on toasted homemade wheat bread. The mushrooms looked just like those in the above picture though!

Funny thing about this week's meal: I actually just realized yesterday that another week had gone by and I hadn't planned out my local meal. Then thinking back on the past few dinners I realized that we'd actually had an all-local meal without me  having done so deliberately! I think this is definitely a sign of progress, don't you?

Ingredients: 

portobello mushrooms from Richmond Specialty Mushroom Growers

red peppers from BC Hothouse

Raclette cheese from Little Qualicum Cheeseworks

bread homemade using locally milled organic whole wheat and unbleached white flour

And, in a definite improvement from the first week of this challenge, I have already made and consumed (and photographed) my submission for next week. Stay tuned!

I've been enjoying salads and chard for several weeks now. And as the plants grow bigger I have begun to notice that I'm not the only one reaping the benefits of this convenient food source. Last week while rinsing chard leaves I noticed clusters of small, oval shaped white eggs about 1 mm long. They rinsed off easily and I was reassured by the fact that I'd be sauteeing these greens - a little cooked protein wouldn't hurt me.

More recently I've noticed holes in some of my lettuce greens. I don't mind them. Green Bean wrote that perhaps it would be nice if we could lessen our standards of perfection when it comes to our food. I heartily agree. Raised on a diet of perfectly symmetrical tomatoes, uniformly coloured apples, and pristine pre-washed packaged greens it might be disconcerting to find that some little critter has snacked on your snack before you get to it. Surprisingly, I haven't minded at all. I think a big part of that is due to the effort - both physical and emotional - I've put into my garden. Waste a perfectly good salad leaf because of a 0.5 cm hole? No way! OTOH, I think if I'd bought the lettuce at the store I would be a bit peeved to find holes in the leaves. Yet still, the leaf from my garden tasted far sweeter than any bought elsewhere!

Here's how things are looking these days in my garden. The Gai Lan plant is amazing me with its height - watching it grow is a true adventure because I have never seen a Gai Lan plant, I have no idea what to expect of it (the white flowers are a nice surprise) and I don't even know when I'm supposed to harvest it (I'll have to Google that one soon).

At least I know broccoli when I see it so the Gai Lan plant's neighbour (behind it in the photo above), while also impressive in its spread, is still obviously in the pre-harvest stage. The sugar snap peas are reaching new heights, overgrowing the trellis but showing signs of flowering that I'm guessing means we'll have fruit there eventually.

I'm still waiting for the carrots (centre right plot in the photo above), but the onion tops (centre left) are developing bulbous...things...(flower?) on their tops and I understand that this is the last stage before they begin to topple over and die (meaning the onions will be ready to harvest).

Mostly, I'm just enjoying the lush greens of my garden. I can't even describe how satisfying it all is, how mystifying (all this from a handful of tiny seeds?), how rewarding it is to grow one's own food. This little garden of mine is just an experiment, a wonderful addition to our table but not yet a significant source of food for us. I want to learn as much as I can, expand the operation next year, and move towards eventually providing some serious stores of food for our family. In the meantime, Green is my favorite colour.

I am sitting here with a very full belly and feeling very proud of myself right now, having just consumed my first meal for the One Local Summer challenge. I had missed the first week and was certain that the second week would go by before I could get my hands on enough local food to prepare a meal. Either that or I was going to submit "lettuce and tomatoes, no dressing".

And then I discovered the Big Bag 'O Lentils shoved in the back of my pantry, all but forgotten. These were bought from Anita's Organic Mill, a local establishment. I'm not actually sure whether they were grown here, but they were definitely "processed" here and I figure how much processing is required to put lentils in an eco-friendly, brown paper bag? With that amazing feat of reasoning I decided they must be local (and if they aren't, I don't want to know this today).

And then I remembered a recipe for Lentil Burgers in one of my Martha Stewart Everyday Food magazines (thank you, Martha!) with a yogurt dressing. And just GUESS what I successfully made at home a couple of days ago?...yup, yogurt! Ladies and gentlemen, we had a plan.

An unexpected benefit of eating seasonally and locally is having to find new recipes, which is contributing immensely to my growing confidence as a cook. With a basic idea in mind I then considered side dishes. The final meal was as shown above: Lentil burgers with yogurt-mint sauce and butter lettuce with red potato salad and grape tomatoes.

The burgers are made with French lentils (Anita's Organic Mill, Chilliwack, BC), scallions and mint (from my garden), and one egg (note: at the farmer's market today they were out of eggs by the time I got there so I'm afraid I had to settle for an organic egg whose origin is unknown).

I made the buns myself, and I'd like to say that this is the first time I have ever made buns. Ever! I used my breadmaker for the dough part and baked them in the oven as per the manual that came with the machine. Here are some of them fresh out of the oven.

They were made from mostly unbleached white flour (with a bit of whole wheat flour thrown in) from Anita's Organic Mill. (Rhonda, are you proud?)

The yogurt-mint sauce was made with homemade yogurt (local milk, though the culture came from the New England Cheesemaking Co.) and homegrown mint.

The butter lettuce was also straight from my garden.

The tomatoes were bought today at the farmer's market from Celyddon Farm in Surrey, BC (I also used up a few store-bought, but local, tomatoes from a farm in Delta, BC). I topped them with the yogurt-mint sauce.

Finally, we had potato salad. I have to confess that I bought the potatoes a while ago at the supermarket but I'm pretty sure they are from Washington...? The sauce was a dijon-vinaigrette and definitely not local(!). I know I didn't have to include that in my submission but hey, it was part of the meal.

My very first local dish. Predictably, my kids ate only the buns and had hot dogs. As I sat staring at the wonderful spread and enjoying my fresh food I could only hope that when they get older and their taste buds mature this will be their idea of Normal food.

Between that trip and a busy weekend before it, I have ended up missing the last two farmer's markets. Which brings me to my second excuse, this one regarding the One Local Summer challenge. The first week of June has come and gone and I have no local meal to write about. This week wasn't looking too good either until I found some local grape tomatoes (greenhouse grown) at the supermarket. I'm sure the flavour of these little gems won't be quite as wonderful as those from the farmer's market but I think they will go quite nicely with some salad from my garden.

And now for the good news: I finally made cheese! I ordered the Gourmet Home Dairy kit from The Cheese Queen (those of you who have read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle might remember that name). I made a big batch of Fromage Blanc from 4 litres of local, organic milk. It looks like this and tastes a bit like cream cheese:

I mixed up a bit with some pesto and crushed walnuts and it was lovely on crackers.

Right now I'm enjoying another little batch mixed up with raspberry jam which is VERY yummy.

The stuff was super easy to make, but I will warn you that if you buy this particular kit there is a misleading bit of information: the kit comes with a Yogotherm which you can use to make all sorts of cheeses and yogurty stuff but you can NOT make Fromage Blanc in there because the container does not hold an entire gallon of milk! The instruction booklet actually tells you to pour it in there, but you will find out - like I did in a total panic - that it doesn't fit. I did manage to salvage the situation and ended up with yummy cheese, so all is well. And I wrote the company and warned them that they need to correct the info in the booklet. But I am very pleased with my cheese and looking forward to making more of it.

Finally, a cheese tip for my local readers: my dear friend's wonderful partner has opened up a cheese shop in Vancouver that stocks only Canadian cheeses (almost 200 varieties!). They just opened a couple of weeks ago at Cambie and 17th and I got to sample some of their stock - absolutely wonderful stuff! There are many local cheeses there, even some raw milk cheeses. It was hard to choose which ones to bring home with me. They also sell locally made crackers and jellies. So if any of you are looking for a place to get some good, quality local cheeses (and a whole bunch of yummy not-so-local but still Canadian cheeses) I highly recommend you visit the Mount Pleasant Cheese Shop (right next door to the Park Theatre).

There is a mystery afoot, however. A while back I planted six rainbow chard plants. They were all from the same local supplier and all planted on the same day. I put four plants in one square foot plot, and two in the other along with two butter leaf lettuce. Well, the group of four have been growing at a faster rate than the group of two. Here they are, photos taken at the same time:

These photos were taken a few weeks ago now, and the group on the top has since grown to wonderful heights and been harvested at least three times. Of the two chard plants in the bottom photo, only the one on the right has just reached harvestable height. The two other plants in the bottom photo (butter leaf lettuce) are also growing more slowly than their counterparts in the other SFG box (these were all planted from seed on the same day).

Finally, yesterday I harvested my third batch of radishes and wound up with these puny little morsels.

Now you might be noticing a pattern here: all the stunted veggies come from the same box. And, in fact, both the radishes and the chard/lettuce are in the same row. The two other plots in that row are empty, however one was where I made my very first harvest, with pretty decent-sized radishes. And in the row behind this row there is a plot thick with onions. In the back row of this box are thriving sugar snap peas and a buttercup squash that has sprouted from seed in just a couple of weeks and looking good. On the other hand, the small stuff is in the same row as the garlic that rotted. I did root through the soil before planting the radishes and I couldn't see any signs of rot or mildew in there; the soil looked and smelled good.

The interesting thing about my stunted veggies is that they look very healthy, they're just small. In fact the radish leaves were no smaller than those of the two previous batches. Even the smallest chard plant looks green and healthy, with no sign of rot or infestation. It's just not really growing.

I don't understand what is happening.

At the last farmer's market there was a table set up by a local gardening club with a sign saying "Ask a Gardener". So I told them my Tale of Two Chards and they were stumped. The only guess they could make was that the first box had been filled with soil for weeks during a rather cold spring, whereas I mixed up the soil for the second box right before I planted in there. Perhaps the soil was much colder in the first box and "shocked" the plants. However, that doesn't explain the radishes - which were planted later than the chard. Also, the warm weather around planting time did not last, meaning the soil in the second box couldn't have stayed warm for long.

If anybody has any suggestions as to how to explain this, please let me know! In the meantime, I'm still getting great greens! I would just like to figure out what I did wrong.

See, I've been trying to lose 10 lbs since Christmas when I foolishly allowed myself to overindulge in sweets, not realizing that what everybody says is true: after age 40 it is hard to lose weight! I'm not going on a diet, but I am cutting out most of the sweet stuff. I'm also trying to stay away from processed foods as much as possible and to fill my plate with veggies. In other words, instead of dieting I am trying to just eat well, and not so much in the Canada Food Guide sense of the word, but in the In Defense of Food sense. I'm not going low-fat either, instead I'm going to do with dairy what I do with meat: enjoy the real thing but do so less frequently (stay tuned for a post about homemade yogurt and cheesemaking - I ordered this last weekend!).

In the meantime, the task of eating "mostly plants" is made so much easier by having them growing fresh in the garden. There is something extremely satisfying about heading outside with a bowl and a pair of scissors, washing the greens, and then eating food that just an hour or so ago was still growing. And yes, it is true what they say, the stuff does taste better and brings an extra amount of pleasure due to the fact that we watched the entire process from seed to plate.

The photo above is my first harvest of Rainbow Swiss Chard, which was part of dinner this past Wednesday. I started eating chard last year and enjoyed it, but I confess that the bitterness was an acquired taste...and I acquired it because I thought it was so darned healthy! But Husband resisted. Well, the chard from my garden had not a trace of bitterness in it, I swear! Even Husband proclaimed that he would actually eat this stuff on a regular basis, it was that good.

Now part of enjoying this wonderful food is knowing how to prepare it and there, I confess, is where I have a weakness. I'm not much of a cook and I have a pretty small repertoire of recipes I'm familiar with. I've never really enjoyed it all that much either, much preferring to bake instead of cook dinner. But now that I'm determined to improve our eating habits (not that they were all that bad to start with) and utilize the fruits of our labour in the garden, I'm more eager to learn. And here I have to tip my hat to another, though more unlikely, hero - Martha Stewart. This past Christmas my stepmother gave me a subscription to Martha's Everyday Food magazine. The recipes are easy and I love the way they organize them so it is really easy to find a side dish or entree. The meals are healthy and there is a focus on seasonal ingredients, too. Using the three magazines I've received so far I was able to make the following delicious dinners:

Sauteed scallops with roasted new potatoes on a bed of tossed salad with chive vinaigrette. The potatoes were from the farmers market and the greens were from our garden. The dressing was made with chives from my herb garden. The original recipe called for dill, which I have in abundance (it's growing like a weed) but I confess I actually can't stand dill so I substituted chives. The recipe also called for salmon but it was too expensive (and I didn't want to buy the farmed stuff, which is all they had at the supermarket) so I went with scallops instead (I'm afraid I don't know where they came from but hey, baby steps...right?).

Salmon fillets with white wine and chive reduction, steamed red potatoes with thyme butter, sauteed rainbow chard with lemon, and fresh tomatoes with parsley vinaigrette. The Pink Salmon was from Iron Maiden Seafoods (one of the 100 Mile Diet suppliers) and a very reasonable price I thought ($6.50 for a piece that gave both Husband and I each a generous portion). I overcooked it somewhat (a common mistake with me and fish), but it was still yummy. The tomatoes were from the farmer's market, the parsley and thyme and chives were from my herb garden. The potatoes were a last minute grab from the supermarket and were, I have to say, pretty bland.

Pork and beans on rice with garden salad. Okay, this recipe wasn't from Martha, but it's an example of how I think we should eat meat (if one does choose to eat meat). The greens were from our garden, and I mixed them with cherry tomatoes from the farmer's market. The pork sausage was from Pasture to Plate and was lovely and peppery (and not bright pink, due to not having any nitrates in it). I paid $10 for one pound which gave me four huge sausages. The kids each ate one and the other two were pulled out of their casings and sauteed with beans and diced tomatoes in sauce, and chopped green onions fresh from the garden. So while the pork was pricey by supermarket standards (though given the difference between pasture-fed and pasture-raised pigs and the sorry lot in life of factory-farmed pigs, one can hardly argue about price) the secret to enjoying such luxuries (and that's what we should consider meat) is to make it go farther. Adding beans is a great way to do so, and it yields a hearty meal that fed both Husband and I with another bowl leftover for the next day.

Eating this way is getting addictive. I am now committed to buying and eating local as much as I possibly can, getting rid of as much processed food as I can (though I confess to a weakness for Cheerios in the morning), and preparing meals that are heavy on the veggies. There is always room for dessert, however. And I've decided that I might just turn Sundays into "dessert day" given the lip-smacking success of my first attempt at Miranda's Rhubarb Crumble recipe.

I know it's going to take some time to get there, but we're on our way to better eating and it feels great!

The first was Slow Food Nation by Carlo Petrini. I was looking forward to reading the story about how this movement started, a movement that many credit as the first big stand against modern industrial food production. Alas, I confess that I found it mostly to be a dry read. I'm not sure if this is because I've already run ahead of the topic with Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, both great storytellers. Or because the book just focussed a bit too much on the definition of "gastronome" for my liking. I enjoyed the little "diary stories" scattered throughout - the rest seemed like an exercise in semantics (though I do get that, back then, alot of what he was proposing was newer than it seems now).

The second book I've read is Stuffed and Starved: markets, power, and the hidden battle for the world's food system by Raj Patel. This is a heavy read, but fascinating. Patel seems to pick up where Pollan left off in The Omnivore's Dilemma, taking the issue of modern industrial food production to its historical (and largely political) roots. I was stunned, for example, to realize that Food Aid - which on the surface seems like the ultimate altruistic endeavour - is actually as politically motivated as campaigns like "free" infant formula for mothers in the third world, or disposable pads for school girls in Africa. Turns out that dumping vast amounts of wheat, corn, and soy (a product of government subsidies and policies that encourage overproduction) into countries that had not historically relied on them for staples creates an almost instant consumer base. Local staples cannot compete with the influx of ultra-cheap goods in the form of "aid", but when the aid is gone the locals are now dependent on the "Global North" (aka: the developed nations) for food. World hunger and the current food crisis, as it turns out, have little to do with scarcity of food, but with the politics of its distribution and trade. This book is an important read for anybody wishing to truly Know Their Food, a meaty read full of facts that will make you shake your head in despair at times (but it does end on a positive note).

Finally, I whizzed through Michael Pollan's latest offer, In Defense of Food. This is for folks who read books like The Omnivore's Dilemma or Stuffed and Starved and are left wondering "what the heck can I do about this?". But it's not just full of advice like "eat local" or "shop at farmer's markets". Pollan also uses the opportunity to expose the pseudoscience that is nutritionism. Not that nutritionism is necessarly faulty science, but its application to the question of "what should we eat" is just totally inappropriate. And it has provided fuel for the processed food industry, not to mention clouded our collective common sense with a bunch of techno-speak that really doesn't make any sense when you stop and think about it. Pollan's writing style kept me turning pages and enjoying the experience. A great, simple, but important read.

While we were walking we got in an interesting conversation with a couple of people in the group about hunting and conservation. One man posed the question, "What gives someone else the right to hunt my animals? If they are on public land they are, by right, part mine. So what gives other people the right to hunt them?" With Mr. A working as a game and non-game biologist, this is a relevant issue for him and a question he not only wants, but needs to have an answer to.

Mr. A's first and probably most obvious response was "Yes, but as public land it belongs to all of us." Public lands are held in trust for the American people by the federal government and were set aside with multiple use mandates. There is no one public opinion and therefore no single public use of these pieces of land. Many public lands are set aside as wilderness areas, and the values and uses of these areas are outlined in the Wilderness Act passed in 1964 (I could digress and examine the language in this one document alone. It makes for an interesting analysis, but maybe another day).

Management agencies like the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park's Service, and federal and state fish and wildlife departments have a responsibility to maintain the health of these lands, particularly wilderness areas, and hunting selected species is often one tool used to keep populations under control. So, for the sake of argument, let's say that the man mentioned earlier (I'll call him Bob) is right. The public does not have a right to hunt animals that have been trusted to the rest of the general public. How then do federal and state managers control populations? Bob was speaking specifically of deer hunting so I'll use that as my primary example. Mr. A and I figured there are a couple options.

Option 1: Reintroduce native predators like wolves. Problem: Deer specifically tend to wander through populated areas. There are enough problems with wolf reintroduction in uninhabited areas. Wolves wandering through the suburbs creates a whole new set of problems.

Option 2: Managing agencies could thin the populations based on need themselves. Problem: Transparency. If a state agency, or any agency for that matter, were to harvest animals there is too much potential for abuse by the members of that agency. There would be public outcry over the whole process. Best solution to this problem? Let the public harvest the animals whose populations need to be controlled. You see the circularity of the problem.

Option 3: Don't hunt. Problem: Starvation, disease, habitat degredation, general unsanitary conditions from dead deer carcarases littering the countryside.

These arguments seem pretty obvious to me and I've heard them numerous times before (though it does help in thinking through the problem.) The best explanation that Mr. A and I settled on boils down to a question of biology.

We are mammals and omnivores. For better or worse, we eat meat. There are several ways we can obtain the meat we consume. One is through commercial farms and dairies (and these range from the local organic farm to the mega-corporation that have crowded and sometimes inhumane conditions). Another is through hunting.

With more and more people becoming conscious of what they eat, both for health and environmental reasons, there has been a growing interest in organic and locally-grown food. While preganant and since the birth of Crazy Towhead, Mr. A and I have begun to learn more about our food and where it comes from. A large source of our learning has come from our involvement with a CSA (community-supported agriculture) while we were living in the Great Basin. This program delivers a weekly basket of organic and locally-grown vegetables and fruits to people who live in town. The subscribers are connected to the farmers via a newsletter and an end-of-the-season "day at the farm." The "think global, eat local" concept, also popularized as the Slow Food movement, has been explained eloquently and persuasively by Gary Paul Nabhan in his book Coming Home to Eatand in Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, MIracle. The underlying idea in all of this is to know where your food comes from, how it was grown/processed, and to lessen the distance it travels to get to your table. In this way consumers can eat healthier food, support local economies and small-scale agriculture, reduce their carbon footprint, and it encourages people to be more concerned about the health of their own ecosystem since that directly affects what they eat.

Whether people approve of hunting or not, there is no better way to know your own food and where it comes from than to go out and harvest it yourself. When fruit comes from Chile or Mexico we don't think twice about it but what do we know about the water supply in that area? The vast majority of people eat meat but a small fraction of those know where that meat came from, what that animal was fed, and thus know very little about what they're eating. Most don't want to know. And that's OK. There are parts of biology and anatomy that are not all that appetizing. But as Mr. A said, "The only person who I think has a right to object to me, or anyone, hunting is a vegetarian." And we do have a number of vegetarian friends. Ironically a large number of them will eat game meat. We've jokingly dubbed them "gametarians." Perhaps this is because most of the vegetarians we know don't eat meat because they object to the way meat is raised and processed in this country. But most of them don't object when they know the animal lived a life in the wild, who shot it and how it was processed.

 Given the consumption rate of first world countries, the US in particular, it seems to me that we have an ethical responsibility to choose (when possible) what we eat and how that food is produced. Whether they exist on public or private land, isn't hunting selectively better than eating meat from a corporate farm that potentially abuses the animal, or kills it an inhumane way, and pollutes the surrounding environment by the concentration of animals it packs into a smaller space (ie feces concentration in the local water supply)?

So Bob, the answer Mr. A and I came up with is this: It is more than anything else a question of biology - we eat other organisms to survive.  If we are concerned about our environment and the species that co-exist with us then we should be more concerned about where our food comes from and how we harvest it. And if that's the case the main ethical question should not be whose land it's on or whether we should kill other organisms in the first place, but how do we better connect with what we eat. How do we change our habits so that our bodies, our deer, and our ecosytem beneft from a necessary biological exchange?

First and foremost, organization appears to be key. Problem is, it's hard to plan when you really don't know what you are doing. This, my first year, is my experiment year and I'm hoping I'll learn enough to plan it right next year. For example, yesterday I went to the garden centre. I bought pole beans, bush beans, zucchini, two kinds of winter squash, and corn. Back at home I discovered that zucchini requires a 3'x3' section of my 4'x4' Square Foot Gardening box - basically almost a whole box! I didn't have that kind of space. The squashes required 2 plots each so I only had room to plant the buttercup squash. I can't plant the corn yet because the soil needs a few days to warm up, but as I was reading the instructions on the packet about needing to plant a whole bunch and making sure they get pollinated my head started spinning. You mean I can't just plant 4 in a plot and see what happens? And since when did I have to concern myself with pollination? I've ended up with a garden shed full of seeds and onion starters, more than I've planted in my gardens. I hope I can use them next year - and I'm definitely going to need more garden plots!

And this brings me to my second gripe - and perhaps I'm still raw because I don't spend much money anymore and when I do it hurts - but this SFG method is not as cheap as I thought it was going to be. It has already cost me about $100 to make enough soil for two boxes. Then yesterday I bought the materials to make the trellises. Three 10-foot 1/2" steel electrical conduit pipes (which I had to cut myself with a hacksaw - so much for service at the hardware store); fine, they were about 5 bucks each. Rebar was also cheap at $2.50 apiece. But the elbow joints were $7.50 apiece - I paid $60 for the frames for two trellises!

Then there was the netting. Mel says to use "tomato trellis netting" which is made of nylon that won't cut into the plants, is strong enough to hold up squashes, and has large 7" holes. I phoned every garden store in town and nobody had anything other than "sweet pea and bean mesh". Nobody even knew what I was talking about. I ended up going back to the hardware store to get some - its 5" squares were the largest I'd found anywhere and it was apparently made of nylon (it looks like fishing line). But I'm finding it hard to believe this stuff is going to hold up heavy produce...still, I had no choice. My sugar snap peas were desperately in need of something to climb and had wound around each other and were threatening to wrap around my onions!

Back at the garden centre I was hoping to find seedlings to plant (especially tomatoes). They had lots of tomato plants but I wanted to know where they came from and how they were grown. There were no organic starters and the guy in the veggie section actually looked at me like that was the strangest question he'd ever heard. Now THAT was a bizarre feeling, living as I do in the crunchy capital of Canada! Looking at the labels on the plants got me nowhere. Oh sure, they listed the fancy names of the varieties. Some did say "hybrid" and others said "heirloom". None said "open pollinated" and not a one of them said whether fertilizers or pesticides had been used to grow these little seedlings. Most of the tags said to use fertilizer at various times during the growth period. What, nobody can raise seedlings without fertilizers? Am I missing something here? So I came away with no plants and am hoping that I will see Albert at this weekend's Farmers Market and that he will have some tomato plants (having already supplied me with chard, broccoli, and gai lan).

I wish I could find a good organic gardening book for total beginners (if any of you dear readers know of one, please tell me!). Every book I read is intimidating, except for SFG, but that book simply doesn't have enough room to describe the needs of every plant in detail. There's just too much information out there and I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all. I guess it's a good thing that I'm not expecting much from my garden this year. I just hope I can figure it out before it is time to start planning next year's garden!

But so as not to sound whiny, I will end on a positive note. I've harvested a few salads now (and learned that I could eat even more; note: plant more greens next year!) and some more radishes, green onions, and herbs from my Aerogarden (which I transplanted into a container filled with leftover Mel's Mix). It's a pretty cool feeling to get ready to start dinner by grabbing a bowl and some scissors and heading out into the garden.

It was one of a few that were poking up from the soil a bit. After I picked this one I dug around gently and found more that seemed ready to pick:

Then I decided that I would harvest the whole plot so I could replant something else in there. Turns out some of them were a bit...well, stunted:

I'm not sure if this is just seed variability or what...Anyways, here is the whole gang of 16; 11 were of edible size:

I couldn't resist having a taste right there in the garden, so I plucked off the top and bottom of my first picked radish, rinsed it in a bucket of water I'd poured for watering, and ate it. It was....well, it tasted like a radish!

Seriously though, having read so much about how amazing home-grown food is, how much brighter and bolder the taste is compared to grocery-store fare, I suppose I was expecting something big. In fact, if anything I'd say the radish tasted a bit mild and watery, though with the characteristic "kick" at the end. Later I read that the faster the radish grows, the sweeter and more flavourful it is. With our late, cold spring these guys were in the ground twice as long as they should have been. So I planted a new plot of radishes. I didn't put them in the same plot as the one I'd just harvested - the idea with SFG is to rotate crops - instead I planted them in the old garlic plot (which I saw had not been growing at all after my attempts at salvaging them).

I also plucked my very first and only weed thus far:

Seems Mel was right about SFG requiring very little weeding!

On to the onions...I admit I didn't search too long on the 'Net because dinner was in the works, but I wanted to harvest a green onion and I tried to find out how. See, the Internet said that you just pluck the whole thing from the ground, but that's assuming you've got little spring onion bulbs in there. I don't. I have "multiplier onions". My bunches of scallions all appear to be attached to the same big onion bulb (I dug around gently to check). So I decided to just wing it - I took a pair of sharp scissors and cut off one at the stem. Unfortunately I don't have a photo, but it just looked like your basic green onion and I have to say I did enjoy the flavour. I'm curious to see what will happen with the cut part - will it grow back? Will the remaining stalks have to feed the growing onion bulb themselves? (in which case I'd better be careful not to harvest too many from any one bulb) And I'm still not clear on how I'm going to get more than one onion from the one bulb I planted in each spot. So far underneath the lush green tops all I'm seeing is a single bulb.

I have a feeling there's going to be a lot more learning to come!

The other day I added two new residents to my veggie garden, purchased from the farmer's market and grown locally:

That's Gai Lan on the left and broccoli on the right. While checking on the other residents I noticed that some earth had been brushed aside from one of my radish plants and there was a bright, round, radish-red THING in the soil! And my multiplier onions are looking like....like scallions! Here they are:

And it made me wonder....how do I know when these things are ready? The radish leaves are still rather small, and they don't look anything like the radishes I buy in the store with their long leaves and big bunches....And my salad isn't ready to harvest quite yet, so what am I going to do with all these radishes? It was yet another example of how ignorant a city-girl can be when it comes to her food. I had to consult a book to figure out how to proceed here.

According to my Square Foot Gardening book (full of great information for us beginners!), radishes are ready for harvest about 4 weeks after planting. I planted my first batch of radishes on February 28. It has been fairly cold up until recently, but even so that was nine weeks ago. So I guess it's no surpise that my first batch may be ready. It also suggests you plant them every few weeks to get a continuous harvest. Swiss chard and lettuce are also harvestable only 4 weeks after planting. Already it's starting to look like salad in there, so that's encouraging!

Carrots take much longer, about 10 weeks, so that explains why I'm only just now seeing tiny shoots coming up.

With regard to my onions, they are "multiplier onions" which means I'm supposed to get both scallions (green onions) from them AND onions. This website says that scallions can be harvested when they look ready. Well, mine look ready! And those I don't harvest will apparently continue to grow into onions.

So, this afternoon I am going to dig up one radish plant and one spring onion plant! This is going to be a momentous occasion and I will definitely take lots of pictures. Stay tuned!!