She Brings Me Water
An aeclectic look at the nearby worldArchive for Gardening
Mid-Summer, Litha or the Summer Solstice
Whatever you choose to call it, now is the time to celebrate the shortest night of the year, and the longest days, and the burgeoning fields and gardens. There are many, though, that at this time will not be celebrating, because of the destruction of their fields and gardens and homes through floods, drought, or some other catastrophe exacerbated by global warming, mono-culture agriculture, destruction of wetlands and flood plains, or Mother Nature just fighting back. So we might also take this time of year to reflect on our lives in relation to the world around us and what we can do about the problems we see.
Treehugger has posted a few suggestions for observing this time of year; which you can read about here. They also have suggestions on greening your life, as well as environmental news; I recommend them as well as Grist for great reads on being green. Mother Earth News, the “original guide for living wisely”, has a post here on how to help the Midwestern flood victims. At all of these and many other places online, not only can you learn about greening your life (and possibly life as we know it), you can also glean tips for saving money, becoming healthier, reducing waste and chemicals, and maybe score some great recipes into the bargain.
As I’ve talked about before, one of the major ways you can achieve all of the above-mentioned goodies is by cutting meat out of your diet, in particular red meat, or at least reducing it substantially. We have also cut out chicken and have changed our fish-eating habits based on evidence that some types of fish have been drastically over-fished and that the “farm-raised” ones are as full of chemicals and hormones as feedlot cows (salmon is an example of both of these categories; natural populations are dwindling and the farm-raised ones, just like feedlot cows, are being fed corn which is not their natural diet and so they must be fed antibiotics and hormones to help them stay alive until they are big enough to kill).
This brings us back to the celebration of the Summer Solstice, or Litha, the festival of enjoying the summer sun and warmth, and sharing the abundance of the fruits (and vegetables!) of our labors. So for my part, I’ll share with you a few meatless ways to partake of your garden’s produce (or your local farmer’s market, or even your grocery stores’)…
For Father’s Day, we were going to my dad’s for a covered dish/ barbeque and I decided to bring something based on what was available in our garden on the day of the gathering. The day before, I dug some red potatoes from the four hills we have of them, and cut a zucchini squash and a yellow squash. We have bunches of lemon balm pretty much all over the yard, so with all this mind (and in hand), I made a garden potato salad: first, I cut the potatoes into chunks and steamed them until just tender, then I cut the squash into chunks and steamed them till just tender along with some chopped onions. All of these I rinsed in cold water to stop them from cooking after they were done steaming. Then I combined them all together along with handfuls of chopped lemon balm, some lemon pepper seasoning, some chopped garlic and sour cream, and put it into the refirgerator to let the flavors “marry”. Later my husband added dry mustard, garlic powder and paprika. If we had been having this at home as a meal, I probably would have added some steamed greens as the “side” dish, and that would have been our entire meal.
Later in the week, I took more zucchini and yellow squash, steamed them and combined them with couscous, chopped roasted red peppers, some leftover alfredo sauce and parmesan cheese in a casserole, seasoned to taste with lemon pepper, garlic and coarse salt. This morning, our burgeoning basil plants needed cutting, so I cut a large basket full and made three batches of pesto (pine nuts, garlic, basil leaves, parmesan cheese, lemon pepper season and garlic powder) and tied two handfuls together to hang and dry. I don’t add olive oil to my pesto while I’m making it because it tends to “cook” in the food processor as you are whirring the ingredients around, and I think it keeps longer without it. I put my pesto into tight-lidded jars, label and date them, and keep them in the freezer till I’m ready to use them, except for one jar I keep in the fridge for quick access. I add the olive oil when I use the pesto; for example, when I put some on my salad, I pour a little olive oil over it and stir it around in my salad. Same with pasta: cook your pasta, drizzle olive oil on it, then sprinkle on the pesto. This is particularly good when making a primavera (spring) pasta: another chance to pick and choose whatever veggies you want in your dish, steam them separately or cook them right in with your pasta, drain, season with pesto and parmesan cheese and there’s a complete meal.
Now get out there and enjoy the Mid-Summer Litha and/or Solstice, whatever you choose to call it and however you choose to celebrate it.
Wish me Happy Anniversary and maybe score free Seeds!
May 28th is this blog’s one-year anniversary and to commemorate the event, I’m going to give away some seeds from our collection to one lucky person. What you need to do if you want to try for the seeds is write a 500 word essay on why we should all be planting our own gardens- no, just kidding. Just leave a comment on this post and 24 hours from now, I’ll throw all your names into a rotating compost bin, tumble you around for awhile, and then draw out one slightly dirty winner. Just kidding on that too, but I will choose someone in a random drawing.
Last year we had great success with our corn and lima beans and I saved some of the seeds from both of those crops so a selection of them will be included in the prize. Also some different varieties of flower seeds and other vegetables; if the winner will tell me where they live, we might be able to tailor the prize to their growing area. Sound good? Then get commenting and bonne chance!
Why Bother?
“But the act I want to talk about is growing some — even just a little — of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.”
The title of this post and the above quote are from an article in the New York Times (April 20, 2008 ) written by Michael Pollan (author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals) in which he talks about why one might want to plant a garden and why one should, if one can, and why one might have to whether one wants to or not. The “Problem We Face”, of course, is global warming. Did we plant our garden because of global warming? Not really, but other reasons that Michael gives for doing so do are, among others, ours as well. You can read the article here.
In a previous post I wrote about the blueberry plants we planted and how I was really hoping they would bear this year; well, one is trying to live up to my hopes. The picture is of our Legacy blueberry with clusters of small, green blueberries. There are still some strawberries in this patch of ground but our two resident foxes generally eat those. Speaking of the foxes (which I believe are gray foxes, because of their black-tipped tails), they are becoming more accustomed to our presence and trot by us unconcernedly as we work outside. One even came onto our porch one night (through the cat door) in search of popcorn.
There’s been more planting in the Native American garden: the Southwest quadrant is planted in Ruby Queen corn; after they have come up we’ll plant Mexican cucumbers (which are supposed to deter the raccoons), King of the Garden lima beans, and Golden Honeymoon and Tigger melons. I also planted nasturtium seeds on the sides of the zucchini and squash hills to keep away borers, and transplanted marigolds to the corners because of their ability to repel all sorts of pests. And speaking of pests, some sort of bug nibbled holes in the basil and tomato seedlings, so yesterday we whipped up a batch of soap spray and sprayed all the seedlings.
Today I sowed some radish seeds in the cucumber hills, as they are supposed to keep away the cucumber beetle. And I planted three mounds with Detroit Dark Red beets. Beet greens are good just steamed by themselves and seasoned with lemon pepper, garlic and butter or olive oil. The beets themselves I like to peel, slice and cook till tender, then add some hard-boiled eggs till the eggs turn a lovely red-purple. Then I use them to make a salad with chickpeas and feta or mozzarella cheese.
Since this garden post seems to be turning into an eating post, I should also mention that our asparagus is coming up thinly, so I bought some from Cullipher’s Farm Market to supplement it. Last night, I steamed them and seasoned them (lemon pepper, garlic, butter and olive oil), sauteed some mushrooms (a la Julia Child: slice some very dry mushrooms, put about half a stick of butter in a pan, heat pan but don’t add mushrooms until the butter foam has just begun to subside, add the mushrooms and brown on both sides, add as much red or white wine as you want, salt and pepper to taste), added some shrimp, combined this with the asparagus and feta cheese and served it all over couscous. There’s leftovers, if you get here quick, and don’t forget to go read Michael Pollan’s article.
Back in the Garden
Winter is on it’s way out, spring days come and go, on sunny days the causeway to the island is lined with turtles basking, piled up on each other like dominoes after the fall. The turtles are mostly sliders; I tried to photograph them last week but they were too wary of me, even though I pulled the truck over across the road from them. They all were sliding into the water before I even walked halfway across the road to where they had been. I did see a snapper walking through the mud alongside the causeway, there’s usually water there but sometimes the water is so low it’s nothing but mud in some places. So I took this snapper’s picture as he/she slogged along, leaving a trail behind and no place to go to escape me, but you can’t see the turtle well in the picture, so I decided not to post it. Here’s a picture of some of our irises instead:
Planning this year’s garden began with the decision to plant more of a variety of things instead of sticking to the traditional three sisters- corn, beans and squash. Last year, we had ears of corn coming out of our ears, more lima beans than we hardly knew what to do with, and no squash. So we pulled our seed packages out of the fridge, went through them all, drew up a new diagram of the garden, and began to plan. Outside, the garden needed digging and weeding and re-making of the mounds, plus the addition of compost and good soil into each mound. Inside, we started tomato, basil, green pepper and swiss chard seeds in peat pots, and because this garden gets full sun, we acquired (from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds- www.rareseeds.com) new seeds to try out there- Poona Kheera cucumbers from India, Mexican sour gherkin cucumbers, Tigger melons from Armenia, and Golden Honeymoon melons.
These are red potatoes coming up from eyes I cut from some potatoes just before we ate them (the potatoes, not the eyes):
Earlier, in our smaller gardens, some of which don’t get much sun, we planted spinach, lettuces, beets, turnips and okra; some of these seeds are old and didn’t come up too well last year, and aren’t doing all that well this year. Which is why we have bought new replacements for some of them. We store our seeds in the refrigerator year-round to keep them viable, but they eventually just get too old.
So this past weekend, I got all the seedlings planted in the garden formerly known as the Native American garden, now informerly known as the “big” garden (see the blog’s previous posts). On our diagram we laid out where everything was to go, consulting our copy of “Carrots Love Tomatoes“ by Louise Riotte so we’d know who likes to be next to whom and who doesn’t, also called companion planting. The weather people were promising (or threatening) days of rain coming up so I also got in as many seeds as I could, even planting some where they aren’t supposed to be, just to get them started. This was Rod’s suggestion, a good one I think; we can transplant them to their permanent places after they sprout.
Here’s a picture of one of the Tiny Tom Tomato seedlings with deer tracks around it- that was close!
Here’s a list of all the plants and seeds that are now in the big garden:
10 tomato (Tiny Tom, Delicious and Rutgers) seedlings, 18 Italian Sweet basil seedlings, 3 California Wonder green pepper seedlings, and 6 Fordhook swiss chard seedlings. I forgot to mention that there’s already three mounds of red potatoes coming up as well, and two swiss chards that over-wintered from last year:
Now the seeds: Fordhook zucchini, Emerald okra, Dixie yellow squash, Table Queen acorn squash, Early sweet sugar pie pumpkin, Kentucky Wonder pole beans, French filet bush beans, Cherokee wax bush beans, Poona Kheera cucumbers, and the Mexican sour gherkin cucumbers.
One-quarter of this garden will still be for corn, and with it we are planting the Tigger and Honeymoon melons and the Mexican cucumbers. They’ll be planted next, and we’ve also marked some places on the diagram for beets, and there are still some empty mounds! Any suggestions? And since today is Earth Day, how about telling us your plans for what you are doing today to celebrate our Mother’s Day for the Planet? Here are some links for inspiration:
http://www.thegoodhuman.com/2008/04/21/lets-make-this-earthday-a-real-earth-day/
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080418-pope-environmentalism.html
Since it has stopped raining, I’ll be out in the garden. See you outside.
A Taste of Spring
Today and for the past couple of days, we’ve had a taste of spring here on the island. The temperatures have been in the 70’s, the breeze has been southerly, and the sun has been shining (some occasional showers as well). Our double row of daffodils are coming up and have their buds on them. The narcissus are coming up, birds are clamoring at the feeders…I know it won’t last, there’s more winter on the way, but a little taste of spring is better than none.
Back in December 2007 we ordered and received six blueberry plants from Finch Blueberry Nursery. Each plant is a different variety and their names are Brightwell, Croatan, Legacy, Powder Blue, Tifblue, and Climax. They are three-year old plants and we have planted them where the strawberries that the foxes eat used to be. We were told they wouldn’t produce this year, that it would be next year before we’d get any blueberries, but I’m hoping that the little guys are so happy here that they’ll pop out a few this year. And I’m hoping that foxes don’t like blueberries as much as they like strawberries.
Somewhere earlier in this blog I said that I wanted to choose the seeds for the Native American Three Sister’s garden earlier than we did last year. Because we conceived and executed said garden so late in the planting season, we were limited to the seeds we could find locally. So here I am, looking earlier, and after researching heirloom seeds and Native American varities online, I have requested catalogs from Seeds of Change and Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.
We don’t really need any more seeds. Our refrigerator’s bottom shelf is half-covered with a basket, bags, and a covered container of all different types of seeds, many that we’ve harvested ourselves, including some of the Ruby Queen corn and King of the Garden limas and Kentucky Wonder pole beans from last year’s garden. But I would like to plant heirlooms, and “real” Native American varieties, and I also want pods to pick that aren’t green and therefore camoflauged in the corn stalks. Picking the green beans and limas last year was like being on an Easter egg hunt where the eggs are all green and are hidden in tall, green grass. Give me some color, please.
So, from the above-mentioned sources, I’m considering pole beans called Gold Marie Vining Bean, and Purple-podded Pole Bean. They should stand out in the crowd. And for the Native American choice, there’s Cherokee Trail of Tears Pole Bean. Green, but native. Also Lakota Winter Squash, Black Aztec Sweet Corn, and Rouge Vif d’Etampes. I threw that last one in to see if you were still paying attention. Actually, it’s a pumpkin that was a staple of the Paris markets, and like my husband says, I’m a sucker for anything Parisian.
Yellow Squash, Native Americans and Locavores
Want the good news first or the bad? Okay, bad news first: A night or two of freezing temps have killed the squash. It was a gamble from the start and we (or they) lost. The good news? Our survival doesn’t depend on the success of our squash crop.
The early English colonists to this country were dependent on their crops for their survival. When the pilgims in New England had a really good year, they decided to give thanks by having a big feast. They invited the locals, the natives who had helped them survive and taught them what was good to eat here and how to grow it. According to one of the only two period accounts that tell of that first “Thanksgiving”, the natives brought five deer. There were games as well, and a good time was had by all. That’s the good news. The bad news? Our United States government still refuses to grant some Native American tribes in Virginia sovereign Indian Nation status (read more about it here). So the descendents of some of the Native Americans who may have aided the colonists at Jamestown and other East Coast settlements, are not being recognized or assisted by the federal government that they helped make possible. Happy Thanksgiving, y’all.
Native Americans at a Powwow in Virginia Beach, Va.
I’m sorry I did not ask their names or their tribe.
And while we’re on the subject, we (husband and I) don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, but this year I cooked a meal for us that (almost) falls within the definition of the word that was just voted 2007’s Word of the Year by Oxford University Press: locavore. The word means someone who eats only food that has been grown or harvested within 100 miles of where they live (this 100-mile zone is known as your “foodshed”). Here’s what we had:
Swiss chard from our garden (chopped, steamed briefly and seasoned with lemon pepper, garlic powder and olive oil)
Sweet Potatoes from the neighbor’s garden (sliced in half, placed in a casserole with butter, cooked till tender)
Corn Pudding from our corn and using a recipe from Barbara Kingsolver’s new book called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (see recipe here)
Cranberries from the grocery store (organic in a bag, cooked with sugar and water)
I said almost locavore because the seasonings in all the dishes and the ingredients in the corn pudding (besides the corn) were not sourced locally. Kingsolver’s book is about the year her family went locavore; I recommend it to anyone looking to learn more about being a locavore or anyone who just wants to read a really fine writer. Or you could read my latest work called Proust was a Locavore. Just kidding.
Garden Update
It’s really beginning to be fall-ish here, the past couple of nights we’ve had temperatures in the mid-40’s and northerly winds…last Fiday and Saturday we even had a “northeaster”, very cold, high winds and low temps. So I thought it would be a good time to get an update on the Native American garden and see what’s still growing.
In the Three Sisters garden, the corn stalks are completely dried up and are only acting as supports now for the lima beans. It was a good crop of corn and we still have shucked ears in the freezer, waiting to be cooked, and there are still lots of lima beans on the vines, some drying but some still ripening and I’ve been picking and shelling them periodically. We’ve discovered that the best way to have them is in a soup, takes some of the bitterness out of them. I also discovered, through the magic of Google, that they were heirloom-type limas, called “King of the Garden”, a high yield variety introduced in 1883. Supposedly they will keep bearing until frost! I see a lot of bean-shelling ahead.
Also still producing in the garden are some volunteer cherry tomatoes, and the green beans we planted are still putting out a bean or two. We did get some yellow squash planted but not in this garden, we put four seedling plants in over on the west side of the yard. They have blossoms and small squashes on them right now but these past two cold nights have set them back and the northeaster injured their leaves; it’ll be a race with time to see if the plants can grow their fruit large enough before the cold kills them. But, no vine-borers (yet!) Probably too cold for the little dears.
Blog Action Day
On October 15th - Blog Action Day, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind.
In its inaugural year, Blog Action Day will be co-ordinating bloggers to tackle the issue of the environment.
What Each Blogger Will Do
Bloggers can participate on Blog Action Day in one of two ways:
- Publish a post on their blog which relates to an issue of their own choice pertaining to the environment.
The above is from the Blog Action day website (www.blogactionday.org) and this post is in response to the first way in which a blogger (that would be me) can participate. The second way is to donate the profits from your blog for this one day to an environmental charity, but since I don’t make any money here, I’ll just have to write instead.
So far, this blog has mostly been about the Native American garden that we planted this past summer. If you’ve been following along, you’ve probably gotten the idea that we try to live “small”, i.e. keeping our impact on the environment low and trying to be aware of that impact in all aspects of our life. For Blog Action Day, I’ll elaborate a bit on the other ways we try to live small
We live in an old house with no central heat or air conditioning, we use space heaters or window air conditioners only as needed and only in the rooms we need them in. We use a woodstove when it’s really cold. We drive well-maintained older, small cars that get good gas mileage, and only use our newer, small truck when a truck is called for. We use a clothesline instead of a dryer as much as possible, and usually only do two loads of laundry a week. We buy most of our clothes at the Salvation Army, and we try only to buy clothes that are needed. We are semi-vegetarians (we eat fish), we try to grow our own food, eat local when available and low on the food chain (which is also for our health’s sake as well as the enviro). We try to fix things when they get broken instead of throwing them out and buying new; we buy used things when something really needs to be replaced. We try to be aware of our energy useage to keep it low (which is somewhat helped along by the fact that this old house has a old fuse box, and the fuses blow if we turn on too many things at once!) We use flourescent light bulbs…
I know that some of these things aren’t choices that are available to everyone, so here’s a link to an article at Zen Habits that has many more options and choices: http://blog.blogactionday.com/environment/50-quick-painless-ways-you-can-help-the-environment-today/
In my humble opinion, and the opinion of Union of Concerned Scientists (http://www.ucsusa.org/, one of the biggest choices you can make to have the largest impact on the environment in a positive way is to go meatless. I quote from them: “Meat production can deplete environmental resources more than other food production, so consider a meatless main dish.” Not only would making this choice, even just a few times a week, help the environment, it would make you healthier and save you money, not to mention saving an animal’s life. That’s a lot of bang for a small buck.
If you need help making this choice, or just want to learn more about the food you are actually eating, I highly recommend Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. And in the coming days I’ll be adding more information about the way we eat here at home, and some recipes, so check out the All About Food page now, and drop by later for recipes and more. Enjoy (and participate if you can) Blog Action Day!
Changing Seasons?
I had this post all planned in my head. We’d had some cool days, lower humidity, and the evenings were coming earlier, all adding up to a change of seasons. Fall coming! So I was going to write about preparing to move indoors, books waiting to be read, recipes to try, artwork to do….about planting the fall garden, starting soups to simmer through the afternoon and evening, turning our thoughts inward just as our bodies are drawn inside…and then, back comes the heat, and even worse, the humidity, and even worse than that, we’re still not getting any rain. Despite watering our collard and turnip seeds, they aren’t sprouting. And who wants to think of preparing or eating a hot soup when being outside is like being in a hot soup? On the plus side, our cherry tomatoes are still bearing and some ripen everyday. Some squashes that I started in peat pots and that Rod transplanted outside are doing very well (so we’ll see if it’s true that if you treat them as a fall plant, they won’t be bothered by vine borers. A scientific experiment I know you’ll want to stay tuned for). And the biggest plus of all, for me at least: I don’t like cold and northern winds. I like the heat, although as I get older it affects me more. Fall will come, and then winter, and it’ll be cold enough, soon enough, too soon for me.
So, to get ready for fall when it does decide to arrive, and for Samhain (also known as Halloween), here is a night picture of the Native American garden, with the dead and dying corn stalks and the waning green bean harvest:
And a picture of the harvest moon from the night of September 26th, through the top of a corn stalk:
Harvest Home
I ended my last post with a reference to the autumnal equinox and the shortening of the days. This equinox, also known as Harvest Home or Mabon, on September 23 (beginning the evening before), marks the second time of the year (the first is the spring equinox) when day and night are of equal length. After the autumnal equinox, the days will continue to grow shorter and the night longer. Mabon, or Harvest Home, celebrates the “bringing home” of the summer’s crop, the time when harvest festivals (also known as state fairs) are held, and we can begin to relax a bit after the summer’s hard work. We can catch up on our reading, try out some new recipes, do a little painting…
The watercolors above are a set of four ATC’s, or Artist Trading Cards, that I painted for an ATC “swap”. The theme of this swap was pagan celebrations, and so I painted two cards with Ostara (Easter) symbols, one for Beltane, and one for Mabon, in the lower right-hand corner. It’s a representation of the Mayan maize god, depicted as an ear of corn.
Here’s a recipe I made up recently using some sweet potatoes our next-door farmer/neighbor gave us and some of our corn (steamed and scraped off the cobs):
Sweet potatoes, black beans and corn
Peel and cube sweet potatoes, cook in microwave with a little water and butter until tender. Add 1 can of black beans (drained), some fake crab (chopped), cooked corn kernels, shredded cheese (cheddar, colby, or jalapeno jack). Season with cumin, seasoned pepper, lemon pepper, garlic powder to taste. Microwave until hot.
As you can see, this recipe was made entirely in the microwave. We’ve decided not to fix our stove, for various reasons: it uses lots of electricity, not good for our aging fuse box or the environment. We really don’t need it, because of having the microwave, toaster oven, camp stove (on the porch). Most of my cooking involves steaming or sauteeing vegetables, and maybe cooking some rice or couscous, for which I only need a burner or two. To supply this need without having to go out on the porch to use the camp stove in the dark and cold of approaching winter, we are going to purchase a small propane camp stove to set on top of the not-functioning oven. We’re also going to start using our crock pot again, which we’ve discovered uses surprisingly little electricity. In the winter we eat lots of soups and stews, and the crock pot is perfect for that. I also discovered that you can make bread in one; I’ll let you know how that turns out.
