MamaStories

It’s one of my potatoes!

From the summary: “hytophthora infestans is a fungus-like eukaryote and the most destructive pathogen of potato, with current annual worldwide potato crop losses due to late blight estimated at $6.7 billion.”

Life is sweet.

In the mornings when Amie is at preschool I rewrite my book. It’s rather good, if I may say so myself, at least, I like it… In the afternoons Amie and I play, read and make art. We do our chores: filling the buckets with rain water, tending to the garden, canning, general cleanup, laundry and the like, and cooking dinner. Next week my pottery class is back in session, and this time around I plan to be a little more focused, maybe even on making some things that I could sell.

The Whole Mama is satisfied.

Let’s just say that everything is peachy. At yesterday’s Farmers Market I bought half a bushel (24 lbs.) of peaches, on sale ($25). They were almost ripe, so I can process each batch that ripens, day by day. Today I made peach salsa, tomorrow I’ll make peach butter, the day after peach preserves, then peach jelly. I think there will be enough for peaches in syrup and some more of that peach salsa, it smelled so good.

I also bought a couple of large jute bags that coffee beans come in – a local coffee roaster donated them to the local food pantry. I might make something out of those, maybe also for selling later on. I am keen on  exploring the local, handmade, added-value market, and earning a little extra.

As for the garden, yesterday I harvested and fried up two Applegreen eggplants, with some oil, pepper and salt. They were just sumptuous, so much better than the tasteless mush from the supermarket. Each of my two large eggplants will have given me only 3 fruits, though. The six plants that I put in slightly later but that are much smaller have only just started fruiting, and I don’t think those will make it before the first frost. It just hasn’t been a season for warm-weather vegetables. I’ve got only two tiny green peppers…

At the moment I’m cooking this recipe with homegrown carrots, tomatoes (the last), onion (tiny, but very sharp), celery (thin stalks, but also very tasty), parsley, basil, oregano, and thyme. I added some homegrown kale and spinach as well. The house would smell even better if I were also baking some bread…

All that heat from cooking is welcome now. It’s getting nippy. I’m wearing socks, a sweater and a scarf. This evening DH and I will put our first log into the new wood stove. Neither of us has ever tended a fire, whether in a stove, a fireplace, or a fire pit. Time to experiment, before it really gets cold. I’m liking the prospect of winter…

Amie draws worms and a little girl watering the grass with the complete and barely-used artists set found at the landfill. Mm, something else seems to have come along from the landfill (click to enlarge) (*)

Warning: there’s a lot of “didn’t do” this week – it’s been a bit of a down-week…

Plant: Amie and I planted peas and favas in pots – they’ll be moved into the hoop house. I’m still waiting for the Fall seedlings to reach a good size before setting them out into the rain-burst and slug-eaten world, or more safely into the hoop house if things speed up on that front. I planted the Bountiful Harvest compost crop (fava, vetch, wheat and rye) in the largest terrace up front.

Harvest: New on the menu are peas and lima beans – so sweet straight out of the pod, they never make it to the pot! A few cherry tomatoes are still coming in, but not many: they too are eaten out of hand. The kale is really liking the chillier weather, and the chard is liking the absence of those huge cherry tomato plants looming over them. More tiny carrots and some nice, chunky radishes, and parsley. And the usual: green beans, the last dry beans, cucumbers and eggplants. I rummaged in the Salem part of the potato bins and was not pleased – maybe Salems, being med-season potatoes, weren’t the right kind for the bins. I hope the late-season Bintjes will have performed better.

Preserve: Gave the canner a rest this week, mostly due to the paucity of produce at the farmer’s market (tomorrow’s Farmers Market promises half bushels of peaches at reduced prices, and pears). But have been “minding the store”: checking the seals on the jars, stirring the blueberry/basil vinegar.

Waste not: The Starbucks coffee grounds have filled up all our compost bins – must make more (bins) because more (grounds) will be coming in. At the landfill I picked up bags and bags of perfectly fine board games, Mecano sets, a kid’s artist set, and, as you saw, a fat cockroach (*), as well as a small satellite dish that DH wants to turn into a solar oven. I got some more gardening tools through Freecycling. We’re continuing with all our usual stuff.

Want not: Bought a large bag of sugar for the stores.

Build community food systems: Unfortunately I wasn’t feeling well enough to execute the brilliant plan for our crazy-popular block party on Sunday. It  was to leach the tannins from the acorns Amie and I picked and to make muffins out of them (Straker from Doomstead Diary pointed me to a great EatTheWeeds video about acorns). Imagine everybody’s surprise at the accompanying card: “These muffins are made from acorns foraged right here.” Next year, or earlier, of we do some food related event before then. Did get to chat with lots of neighbors about our garden and our plans for next year. Made contact with a beekeeping couple in my town, and they offered to help me set up a hive in Spring. They’re also interested in the Transition Initiative I am trying to get going here!

Eat the food: We emptied a jar of the home-grown basil pesto I froze some weeks ago – yum on pasta and spread on bread! As usual ate a lot straight from the garden (see harvest), as well as some of the frozen burgers and sausages – there’s some room in the freezer again. We have a great freezer-system: a sheet stuck to the side of the fridge with four columns: the date something was “entered”, the food stuff, the packaging it’s in. I can see what we have and what is getting old at a glance.

(*) Geen zorgen, Oma, ‘t is maar nen plastieken kakkerlak!

(*) No worries, Oma, it’s only a plastic roach!

Here’s another TO-DO list, of sorts. Keeps me organized and accountable. Ahum…

What I didn’t have this spring and summer and want next summer

• broccoli (was too late on this one)
• peas (ditto)
• green and red peppers (ditto)
• some hot peppers
• onions (tried but failed: all rotted in the wet)
• squash (tried but failed: lots of blossoms, no fruits)
• herbs herbs herbs: I had some in pots, but want them in the ground this time: their beds are almost ready.
• strawberries
• rhubarb (am planting it this week) – DONE
• garlic (am planting it this week)
• flowers! Need to establish flowers for the bees I hope to have one day.

What I had this summer and want more of

• cucumber (for pickling)
• beans
• tomato
• eggplant
• potatoes, but so far I’ve only dug in the Salem potato bin and the pickings are pathetic – but then the Salem, being a mid-season potato, might not be the right kind for this kind of growing – we’ll see when I explore the two Bintjes bins… So I’m not sure whether we’ll repeat the potato bin experiment.
• oh well, everything basically, except radishes and beets (we’re not fans)

This all means I need to start digging again, at least 8 more beds, some in the veg garden closer to the house and in the buckwheat field (all these will be in the shade), some in the backyard (sunny), one more up front (sunny).

I need to slash the buckwheat in the herb and berry beds to-be up front and sow compost crop (fava, vetch, wheat and rye). {UPDATE} Did so for the largest terrace bed.

I also have to build at least one more compost bin for the Starbucks coffee grounds, the Fall leaves, and the “orphan” pumpkins that will come our way after Halloween, and the horse manure.

We have to design and build the pvc-pipe hoop house in which we hope to experiment with a winter harvest. It will straddle a block of two or (if we’re ambitious) four 4×8 beds (2 feet apart).

The entire lower front yard also needs to be designed. It’s over the septic leach field, so that’s where the bee flowers will go, with a little pond to the side fed by a wetland system for the rain water overflow from our big roof.

So most of the harvest is in, but the hard work is really just beginning again.

Amie’s school finally starts tomorrow, so I will have time in the mornings to work on my novel (one last push). She lets me do manual labor – clean, cook, can, garden – but the moment I pick up a book or the laptop:

No, Mama, that’s not work!

The painting in the banner was made by my MIL – you can read about her exploits in art (and about Amie as well) in her blog: Journey Through Art. The painting was based on the original banner picture:

Isn’t it beautiful? I’ll write about my artistic family soon. Amie is of course artist number one around here, but there is also my Mom who draws, my sister who is into computer graphics, my dad who does photography, and my grandfather who was an accomplished water-colorist. DH is also quite good, and on his side there’s his mom, a Mesho (uncle) who sketches, and a Mami (aunt) who makes movies and Mamu (Uncle) who plays the violin, and their kids in turn who are painters, musicians, actors…  I just realized the danger of making such a list: imagine I forgot someone!

Plant: Still waiting for the “Fall planting” seedlings (lettuce, spinach, chard, etc.) to graduate to planting-out size. “Unplanted” most of the tomato plants (one chilly day and night and they succumbed fully to the blight). Also planted sustainable lawn seed on our erosion-prone slope: curious about the result!

Harvest: Finally harvested the first carrots (which as you can see are tiny, even after being in the ground for 4 months) and the first edible  radish (they are supposed to be the easiest to grow, but my first batch produced only diminutive maggot-eaten and awfully bitter knots). Also more yummy green beans, dry beans, extra sweet peas, kale, chard, cucumber, eggplant, more cherry tomatoes from potted plants, which are still successful against the blight.

Preserve: After the frenzy of the last two weeks and because we arrived late at the Farmers Market, I bought only green beans to supplement our own beans and pressure-canned all those, making 7 quarts. Brewed up some blueberry-basil vinaigrette. Bought meat and fish on sale at the grocery store and froze it.

Waste not: More freecycling of cardboard boxes. Scored several wooden pallets they were throwing away at the local elementary school, and two water tanks (don’t yet know what to do with those). Still picking up Starbucks coffee grounds and collecting acorns. Today also chatted with the neighbor who owns the horse and she will start using our property to get to the conservation land behind us. This means the horse manure is now for the taking. Now I need to find a way of transporting the manure and assign an area for its composting (those pallets could come in handy for that). It would be good to get some finished or going at least before it starts freezing (in about a month and a half), or maybe we could stick it, fresh, in the new beds for next Spring.

Want not: Anything more and we’ll have to start the small (freecycled) chest freezer downstairs. Washed and stored away extra blankets. Organized our firewood, stacking some in a manner that’s better for drying.

Build community food systems: Had a great chat with a local inventor/entrepreneur who is building a 95% sustainable house right here in my town and gives sustainability classes. He’s keen on joining our Transition effort. Also making local-food-related plans for our immensely popular neighborhood block party next weekend.

Eat the Food: Ate everything out of the garden, and some of the canned apple sauce and jam, and we didn’t croak.

Our latest adventures…

That’s the second person intimating to me that my home canning might not be safe. Usually the question comes quietly: “Are you sure the jars are okay?”

Though it riles me, I’ve come to expect the attitude. It’s like with eggs. When I tell people about wanting chickens for their eggs, half the time the reaction is: “But what about bird flu?”

The prevalent philosophy is that factory food must be safer: it’s more measured and controlled, and the processing is done by machines, and machines don’t make mistakes, and also, they preclude human contaminants.

That last one, I think, is what matters a lot to many people: they find the idea of human hands touching the food, or anyone breathing on it, icky. And the average home kitchen does not stack up against the scrubbed concrete tile and stainless steel scoopers and mashers and stirrers. The latter are self-cleaning, preferably.

And of course the food manufacturers will do their best by their consumers. They won’t make mistakes. They’ll clean their equipment judiciously. And use only the best ingredients. There have been no sickness or deaths with factory-processed foods. Right?

But consider factory-canned foods and bisphenol A, the stuff that got banned from baby bottles. One of my favorite watchdogs, the Environmental Working Group, determined that almost all factory-canned foods and beverages have bisphenol A in them, simply because most cans are lined with bisphenol A epoxy resin as a sealant (here). That not just in the can, but in the food.

Infants and young children are at greater risk because of their small size and developing bodies. Studies of laboratory animals or cultured human cells have shown exposure to bisphenol A can cause neural and behavioral changes, precancerous growths in breast and prostate tissues, early onset puberty and other effects at very low doses. In addition, bisphenol A crosses the placenta and has been found in amniotic fluid and umbilical cord tissue, showing that there is no prenatal protection from a mother’s exposure. (here)

Recent reports from the National Institute for Environmental Health conclude that there is concern for neural and behavioral effects in fetuses, infants, and children at current levels of exposure to BPA. Presently, there are no recommended minimum exposure limits for infants or children. More research is also needed to understand all the health effects that may be associated with exposure to Bisphenol A. (here)

But we’ve been consuming it since the ’30s.

Listen, my hands and my kitchen are clean when I prepare the food, and I follow the recipe to the letter, as well as the canning instructions. Come winter we’ll be eating our own garden-grown or Farmers Market (locally) grown food, and nothing extra.

{UPDATE} Nice discussion beginning in the comments.

Canned Bell Peppers (from Farmers Market)

Amie and I just ate our first three peas from the garden: delicious! She also ate seven green beans (from the garden) and four carrots (disks, that is, not the whole thing) (from the Farmers Market). She loves the beans especially. She also promised that when the time comes to break it out of the freezer, she’ll eat the pesto for which she harvested and trimmed the basil.

A grasshopper was hiding out in the basil and luckily jumped out before I put the batch in the food processor. We caught it and let it outside, where it sat on Amie’s finger for a long time, then gave her a fright when it jumped.

Later on a Ladybug came to visit and Amie fed it a blueberry.

I do love those still-pudgy hands…

This month there were no shifts in the household: just the three of us, which makes the reckoning much easier.

Amie feeds the compost tea some molasses

Gasoline: 27%

This stayed the same as last month. The school year hasn’t started yet, so DH is spending more time working from home and Amie isn’t daily being driven to school and back, all of which save on gas:

33.9/3 gallons of gasoline = 27% of the US National Average

Electricity: 8%

306 KWH = 8% of the US National Average

We’re now routinely careful with lights and appliances and we’re inching down (from 10% last month), but honestly I doubt we can get it any lower without investing in some expensive solar battery-charging equipment. But then again DH is looking into building a deluxe solar oven, which will save some more electricity, especially as the temperatures drop and stews and soups come back on the menu – though we hope to use the woodstove cook top for those. Anyway, right now it’s just chipping away.

I’ve been canning a lot, and getting that 23 quart canner up to 10 lbs of pressure really puts my electric range to work. That will show up in next month’s Riot, though.

What strikes me now about this number is how easy it was to get our usage down to within 10% . We run our laptops all the time, and we’re not ruining our eyes to candlelight at night. I run my dishwasher every other day, and my washer once a week (never my dryer)… That is, we’re not deprived of electricity at all. With a little bit of effort everyone in the States could quite easily get down to, say, 20% of what they’re using right now. All it takes is some vigilance.

Heating oil and Warm Water: 22%

13.6 gallons of oil = 22% of the US National Average

This is down from last month but warm water is still our Achilles heel. We still haven’t insulated the boiler and the pipes – one thing after another happens and distracts us from such simple measures. No excuses: it will happen this month!

Trash: 4% or 493%?

The big bill finally came in: we had rented a dumpster for the trash generated by our remodeling project that we weren’t able to recycle.  We don’t know how much it weighed after we were done with it, only that it was under 2 tons. 2 tons, that’s 4000 lbs! I can’t  believe it was anywhere near that, so I estimate it was about a ton, but I really have no idea.  So let’s say a ton, the dumpster plus our usual household garbage, which came in at 5 lbs per person per month.

666 lbs of garbage per person this month = a whopping 493% of the US National Average

Ouch. Does the US National Average include construction debris, dumped cars, etc? If not, then I can write:

5 lbs per person per month (= 4% of the US National Average)

But it’s only fair to count it. Most of it ended up in the landfill, after all.

Water: 17%

During our brief dry spell I watered only with rain water, and all our compost tea was made with rain water (as it should: the chlorine in the drinking water kills the benificials). And at the beginning of this month we installed our new flushing method, which paid off: we lowered our water consumption even more (from 20% last month), to

506 gallons of water per person = 17% of the US National Average

Consumer Goods: 10% ?

Stuff we bought but that I won’t count,  because they are for purposes in accordance with the Riot: canning rings and lids and some canning jars – though most I got through Freecycle and Craig’s List – and the canner itself, of course; a substantial investment in our new wood burning stove,  one of the most efficient stoves on the market and to be used judiciously;  the (poorly designed and useless) solar lamp we purchased  from – and will return to – IKEA.

Most of the furnishing in the renovated room are either stuff we had or things we got from the landfill (a nice desk and a chair). But we did have to buy some tools and lot of building materials for it. We also replaced our beaten up old porch roof with a new roof – which necessitated a surprising amount of caulk. Sigh. I hadn’t so far, but now that I am counting the renovation waste, I’m thinking I might have to count these costs as well… And then we’re talking several thousands – sometimes things are so necessary that you just stop keeping count.

If I’m not counting these, then I could write $80, spent on books for Mama, DH and Amie:

10% of the US National Average

Food

It’s been a while since I visited this category. It still boggles the mind how to calculate it, but I can at least say that we’re eating a lot out of the garden. I am canning a lot, so that will lessen our impact during the months to come. (See the last Independence Days)

But our garden failed to produce onions,garlic, peppers, lettuce… Those I buy at the Farmer’s Market, along with the honey: all local. I have many plans for improving the garden next Spring.

It all feels good, but we can do so much more. For instance, buy bulk wheat berries and grind our own flour, or the least I could do is bake my own bread. Get chickens so we can make our own pasta. Get a chain of homemade yogurt going, with local milk. Start mushrooming. Find a good storage place for the many potatoes we hope to harvest, and for apples from a local orchard…

So many more steps to ween ourselves off the supermarket, which is increasingly more expensive. Only last week I bought a gallon of organic milk: $6.99! But if we had a couple of goats…