Monthly Archives: February 2010

Never too early

Think gardening only happens a few months out of the year?  Think again!  We (and by “we,” I mean my husband) planted seeds starting at the beginning of January.  That timing means that we had, at most, two months without garden-related activities (assuming you don’t count eating garden produce).  We now have little seedlings sprouting and growing under the grow lights in our kitchen.  These include the usual cool weather crops, such as broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower, as well as spinach and onions.

In addition to providing moral support, I contributed by reading part of a book on bio-intensive gardening.  Ecology Action developed this high-yield, environmentally sound method, and it sounds pretty cool.  Consistent with last year, I wish that the garden could be in our backyard — that would increase my excitement level considerably.  Some day, right?

Days like this

I retrofitted one of our trunk bike racks, engaged in extensive planning, drove on a day I was scheduled to be a passenger in the carpool . . . all so that I could do some bike scouting for work yesterday.  All of this effort, and I arrived at the location, parked the car, and realized that my bike key?  That thing I needed to unlock my U-lock and free my bike from the bike rack?  I left it in my office, twenty miles away.

Oh, was I upset!  Thinking, “I won’t need my regular set of keys since I’ll be driving a department car, instead of my car,” I oh so cleverly left behind that one little thing that would have made all my planning and preparation fruitful.

To make matters worse, since I had planned to do my assessment by BIKE, I wore my bike shoes, which are not particularly conducive to walking.  Instead of spending my afternoon cruising around on my bike, getting a bike-level perspective of the surroundings, I spent the afternoon cruising around in a car — blah!

I recovered from this frustrating setback remarkably well, if I do say so myself, and managed to make it a productive afternoon.

My resilient attitude may have been due in part to anticipating our dinner date at Pi.  We visited their new location in the CWE for some delicious veggie pizza, a nice salad, and a great dining experience.  We don’t eat out often, but Pi — with their commitment to the environment, smoke-free policy, and great food — ranks up there with our favorites.  Day saved!

Locavore in winter

It’s been awhile since I’ve written about food, but have no fear — we’re still eating!  All of the work cleaning, cutting, blanching, and packaging vegetables and fruit really pays off during the winter.  We have frozen fruit and basil (oh, the basil!) to last until late spring (and we’re still getting local apples!).  We’re rapidly eating our way through the frozen vegetables (we knew we would not have enough to get us through the winter), but we still have a lot of butternut squash.

I highly recommend the butternut squash because it requires approximately zero effort to store — just hang it in mesh bags in the basement (to reduce the bruising that would occur if you just placed it on a shelf), and you’re good to go!  Locally grown dried beans, local eggs, and our canned pasta sauce round out the stock piles.  Oh, and the potatoes, I almost forgot the potatoes.  We have made a big dent in the 200 pounds of potatoes we harvested, but we still have some left.  At this point, we’ll be able to plant some of them as seed potatoes for this year’s crop.

Obviously, we’re not eating everything local.  I shop at the regular old grocery store for grain (including flours, pasta, etc.) and soy milk.  We finished our local onions, so those are a grocery store purchase, also.  We’re looking into a source for local, organic, pastured cow’s milk.

We continue to enjoy the monthly winter farmers’ markets.  At the January markets, we found unexpected windfalls of fresh spinach (thanks to tunnels, hoop houses, or something of the sort) — this has to be some of the best spinach ever!  Anything fresh, green, and local in the middle of January qualifies as special — bring on the salad!

Foiled

I spent a good bit of the weekend preparing to have worms.  Two weekends ago, I finished my homework (reading Worms Eat my Garbage), and this past weekend was action time.  Finding newspaper without colored ink proved to be the biggest challenge.  I thought black ink would predominate in newspapers, because colored ink is more expensive, and newspapers are struggling financially, right?  Think again!  I hunted through a lot of newspaper to get 4-5 pounds of black and white pages.  After wasting some time, and diminishing the life of my scissors, by cutting the paper into strips, I brilliantly discovered that newspaper easily tears into nice, uniform strips.

When I looked into buying worms, the prices surprised me, and not in a good way.  The best price I found was $27/pound through an online supplier.  I feared that ordering them in the dead of winter would result in a pound of worms that were, well, dead (and crunchy), so I pursued a closer to home option — getting a start from someone’s worm bin.  I was skeptical that the coffee can or bucket of “stuff” they offered would contain a sufficient number of worms, but hey, the price was right (free), so I decided to give it a try.

By late Sunday afternoon, the worm home I lovingly prepared was ready to go, and I biked over to pick up my new friends . . . only to be greeted by a worm bin that improperly maintained.  I wanted to yell, “You’re doing it all wrong!” because it was obvious that they hadn’t read The Book.  Now, I was getting these worms from complete strangers that I met through a neighborhood listserv, so I politely accepted a small-ish container of the “contents” of their bin and mentioned that I read the book Worms Eat my Garbage, which I found quite helpful.  I returned home with a smelly container — vermicomposting done correctly should be odor free, or nearly so — with perhaps five worms, or about 0.5% of the worms I wanted to start my project.

So, I return to the drawing board as far as acquiring my starter worms.  Meanwhile, I hope that all of those soggy newspaper strips will dry so that I don’t have to start that process from scratch!