Food from the Garden

I harvested the fingerling potatoes because I suspected Late Blight. If they had had one more month, they would’ve made for a good yield. Now… not so much. Let’s just say that 2.5 lbs of seed potato went in and less came out.

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You do the math! And please don’t call them cute. Potatoes from my garden may be many things, but they’re not cute! But o my, were they yummy. So was the other dish, with homegrown onion tops and the first Swiss Chard – like butter, so smooth.

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That dish also had homegrown basil in it, though it made for scrawny pickins, as the slugs have been doing a number on them. But speaking of slugs, let’s not speak of them again, as the iron phosphate seems to have done the trick. Only my herbs are suffering, so I’ll apply the copper strips around the base of the shelves they’re on.

I also finally got round to saving the beans (Lima, Provider green beans and Maxibel haricots verts) from their prone position after the pounding rains – which, for now, have relented.

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I got the nylon trellis at the garden center (way too expensive) and stretched it around the 1/2 inch pvc pipes which I got at Home Depot (at about $3 a pop). The latter are just the right length, bend all the way round with enough tension to keep them there, though I added some brackets. These hoops will be great for Fall and Winter, when the crops need more protection: I’ll throw agricultural cloth over them – still to buy, any suggestions?

As reported earlier Amie and I spent several hours on Sunday potting up some flowers. I caved and bought them at 50% off at the local garden center – flowers were not my priority, and I was missing their colors. Now our front door and balcony look colorful, at least. Amie had a blast, and the morning after she could be found sitting among her flowers, waiting for the birds to come and eat some seeds out of her hand.

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Today was a great day. Sunny, not too hot, and I felt on the mend from that cold Amie brought home. I made a push for it and finally finished the last two beds (nos. 10 and 13), stuffing no. 10 with seeds. No. 13 will home to a bunch of compost crops.  I also resowed some Kale and filled in the gaps left by the unfortunate Banana fingerlings and the French green lentils (pulled them, they didn’t grow nearly fast enough). As always, you can see my updated garden plan with all the crops here, at Plangarden. {UPDATE: bummer, this no longer seems to work, will try to fix it soon} {UPDATE: yipee, it works again!}

The Artist is at Work

This is a long but uncomplicated and happy post ;)

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Yesterday Amie told me” “I want to see all the people and the cities and all the things in the whole world, and listen to all the music” [we were listening to a Mozart symphony]. “I want to be a music listener, and an artist, and a science too. And a drawing maker.”

She has been doing a lot of arts and crafts, especially while her artist grandmother was here. There were some collaborative pieces, some parallel work.

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One evening we all sat around the table and drew each other. So much fun! The first is Amie’s portrait of Dada (her grandfather) of that evening, the second she made later on. Notice the extra circumferences and lines:

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She made those same “extra” lines in this drawing of Piglet (from Pooh):

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Such emphasizing is also visible in this next one, which she is still working on: the Bog Monster!

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I love that piggy nose, those red, goggling eyes, and its humongous body all around it!

She is obviously experimenting with several techniques and “visions”. Sometimes there is a great attempt at naturalistic realism.  In the second picture, above, Thhaam was painting from this picture of a moth that I took in May, and Amie also drew it, and the stone it is “sitting on”. She got all its wing parts:

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Funny, how she is still drawing from a concept of an animal. Same here, in this drawing of a dinosaur from her book. She got those facial  plates and scales right,  but insisted on the human-shaped body:3669879763_2dbe05d0e0

Later on she wanted to paint a cat and we gently prodded her about that body shape. “How many arms does a cat have?” “None!” “How many legs?” “Four!” Are the legs underneath its body?” “Yes.” The result has been stolen (taken by her aunt, I suspect, before I could properly record it!), but I asked her to draw another cat (this time without making any suggestion) and she obliged:

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The small drawing in the bottom left corner is of a chair: a great experiment with dimension and perspective. Which brings me to this, the drawing of the ocean at Cape Cod (my apologies to the artist for the bad picture):

dscf5397That’s the sea, and the waves. When we were looking at a map of Cape Cod, I pointed out the land and the ocean. She asked: “But where is the sky?”

It must all look so different, in her head!

Lastly, here she is drawing with chalk on our driveway, hidden behind the flowers she and I spent two hours potting up yesterday (that’s another post):

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But, on the other hand, she brought home a little bug from summer camp (of which she missed the last two days and was heartbroken). The doctor nearly sent us to the ER (all the way into Boston!), but she made a great recovery right there – the threat of a shot helped. Then she passed the bug on to Baba and myself.

Thinking of Transition

What We Do button (c) Katrien Vander Straeten

Confluence:

1.

Derrick Jensen’s thought-provoking article in Orion Magazine, “Forget Short Showers” (July/August 2009):

The second problem [with wholly personal measures such as taking shorter showers, which Jensen finds “utterly insufficient”]—and this is another big one—is that it incorrectly assigns blame to the individual (and most especially to individuals who are particularly powerless) instead of to those who actually wield power in this system and to the system itself. Kirkpatrick Sale again: “The whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them.”

The third problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting, and, when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have the right to alter or abolish it.

2.

This article in Scientific American (via the red mullet) about Phosphorous depletion:

Land ecosystems use and reuse phosphorus in local cycles an average of 46 times. The mineral then, through weathering and runoff, makes its way into the ocean, where marine organisms may recycle it some 800 times before it passes into sediments. Over tens of millions of years tectonic uplift may return it to dry land.

Harvesting breaks up the cycle because it removes phosphorus from the land. In prescientific agriculture, when human and animal waste served as fertilizers, nutrients went back into the soil at roughly the rate they had been withdrawn. But our modern society separates food production and consumption, which limits our ability to return nutrients to the land. Instead we use them once and then flush them away.

3. The poll I posted many months back: “Why do/ don’t you simplify/reduce/prepare for a Peak Oil/Global Warming future?” The results (voters could vote for more than one option):

62 votes for “I do”

a) 11 (18%): because I think if we all do this, we could turn this thing around

b) 6 (10%): I don’t know if we can save the day, but I simplify to prepare, in case it’s bad

c.) 12 (19%): It’s going to get bad, so I simplify to prepare (e.g. to get used to living with less)

d) 25 (40%): I simplify out of principle (e.g., take only what you need), regardless of the future

e) 7 (11%): I simplify because it saves me money

f) 1 (2%): Other

1 vote for “I don’t”

1 (100%): The problem is real, and the future bad, but my simplifying won’t change that

4.

Jay Griffiths’ great article in the same Orion Magazine, about the Transition Initiative.

A WHILE AGO, I heard an American scientist address an audience in Oxford, England, about his work on the climate crisis. He was precise, unemotional, rigorous, and impersonal: all strengths of a scientist.

The next day, talking informally to a small group, he pulled out of his wallet a much-loved photo of his thirteen-year-old son. He spoke as carefully as he had before, but this time his voice was sad, worried, and fatherly. His son, he said, had become so frightened about climate change that he was debilitated, depressed, and disturbed. Some might have suggested therapy, Prozac, or baseball for the child. But in this group one voice said gently, “What about the Transition Initiative?”

[…] Many people feel that individual action on climate change is too trivial to be effective but that they are unable to influence anything at a national, governmental level. They find themselves paralyzed between the apparent futility of the small-scale and impotence in the large-scale. The Transition Initiative works right in the middle, at the scale of the community, where actions are significant, visible, and effective.

[…] Many people today experience a strange hollow in the psyche, a hole the size of a village.

5.

I recognize that child. When I was around the same age (12) I watched The Day After, a movie that will, unfortunately, haunt me forever (I wrote about it before). Oil (and phosphate and…) depletion, global warming, economic collapse, famine migrations: they are the new nuclear threat – worse, they are fact, not threat – on top of the old nuclear threat. The well-informed twelve-year-old and this particular 29-year-old fall into despair.

So why do I do what I do? Why do I grow my own vegetables, make compost, line-dry my laundry? Why do I take short showers, close waste and energy loops on my “homestead”? Why am I on the lookout for a wood stove, a solar battery charger, a high pressure canner? Why am I drawing up plans for a root cellar and a chicken coop, and skimming through catalogs for fruit trees and berry bushes? Why do I refuse to “go shopping”? And despairing of ever having those rain barrels installed?

Not because I think we (as in you and I, all of us individuals) can turn this thing around – I agree with Jensen on that. I do it out of principle – I am convinced that to take only what you need is good for the soul. And to prepare my family, my daughter especially. But that’s not enough. It will not be enough if it’s just me, and on the other hand I feel helpless on the national, even state level (the level where a million to millions of lives and lifestyles are at stake).

So there it is, for me too: the middle ground. Transition. I too have a hole in my heart, the size of a town. This town. Working on and living in a Transition Town is, I think, the only way for me to live somewhat peacefully with what is happening.

The Brumble/Gumble/Mumble Rule? (I forget)

A couple of days ago Amie and I were having some milk and coffee (respectively) in a coffee shop when she spotted the large lump on the back of the head of the man sitting right behind her. I had seen it long before she did and was hoping she wouldn’t turn around because I dreaded what I knew would follow:

– Mama! Look at that man’s head!

The poor man was sitting not two feet away, but he was chatting with someone else, and if he heard her he didn’t show it. My own reaction (freeze!) must not have been satisfactory for Amie because she was about to repeat it, but then I put my finger to my lips and she stopped.

Then I took her out of the cafe and sat her down somewhere and explained:

– Mieke, when you see someone who looks a strange, just different than you and me, someone with a strange face, or a different kind of body, you shouldn’t say anything about it, okay? It might hurt their feelings if you remark on it, or if you stare.

She thought on it a bit and agreed, and we decided to make that a rule, the Grumble Rule, or Bumble Rule, I forgot precisely its name, and it changes anyway.

Today at the Farmer’s Market we had a test run. A lady came hobbling by, very slowly, resting on a cane. Amie stared at her, then said:

– I guess she must be really old.

Oh, well. Sigh. At least she said it quietly, to herself. I immediately said:

– Grumble Rule!

And she understood, and nodded, and held her finger to her lips.

Of course this can’t be the end of her lesson on how to deal with differentness, what is different, and what is normal, and what that means. But it’s a start.

Rain and Slugs Slugs Slugs

It’s the middle of Summer and you wouldn’t say so. The Boston Globe reported that eastern Massachusetts may have had its “dimmest” June since recording began in 1885.  Through June 22, Boston and vicinity had received just 32% of the available sunshine. In an average June, the region gets 55% of the possible sunshine between dawn and dusk. Until now, only 1903 was dimmer, and we’re still waiting to see whether we yet made the record. It was also unseasonably cool, on average of 59.8 degrees, making this the fourth coldest June since 1885. Rain is also a half-inch above average, with some parts of New England receiving 3 times the normal rainfall for the same period…

In my garden that translates into leggy plants lying down in the mud underneath the onslaught of pounding rain, and hail. All the beans, now in flower, are lying down. They’re bush beans but I’ll have to find some way to shore them up – a horizontal mesh? The potatoes in the beds – the “blight” has not affected them further or any other plants -  are very leggy too and have also chosen the horizontal plane. Them I hope to harvest soon (they’ve been in for 90 days now).

And then there are the SLUGS. I mulched the tomato and eggplant beds with straw to keep the soil from splashing onto the leaves, but the wet straw might harbor more slugs. They’ve eaten half of the kale, and the radishes look just awful, their leaves in tatters. One night the slugs got to the  seedlings that were on the balcony. Many herbs suffered and only one lone broccoli plant survived. The slugs and the wet conditions did in all the new lettuces,  sorrel, purslane (love it in soups!) and carrots that I sowed in bed 4. I’m waiting for drier weather to sow again.

I spread the crushed eggshells that I’ve been saving for the last three months, but they don’t seem to help. I went on a slug hunt last week, and this was the result:

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That’s 83 slugs. Here they are again, from a different angle…

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… just to make sure you know how gross they were. And you should’ve seen the soup the day after! But I can’t go on a slug hunt every night. So I bought iron phosphate from the Garden Center and will apply it this evening. Let’s see if that helps.

And what with all this rain you’d think we have harvested lots of water. We purchased four rain barrels and got one from a friendly neighbor. But nope: we haven’t had a chance or a dry day to install them!

Now as for some good news. I despaired of the compost pile made of straw, leaves and coffee grounds from the local Starbucks. After winter it took a long time to even unfreeze. After checking often – while the other bins steamed and sputtered – I gave up on it, which was easy because it stood in a far corner of the property. I checked it out a couple of days ago and wow, that’s good stuff! Crawling with worms and the other larger decomposers, and smelling so good (that is, not at all). I’ll need to sift it as some of the straw hasn’t decomposed fully. I redistributed it to the other two bins and then moved the bin with some of its contents into the vegetable garden.

Three more trees were removed. They were too close to the house and one of them turned out to be rotten and hollow inside. So our wood pile has grown some more. I think we have wood for three (average) winters now. Now if only we could find an affordable wood stove!

Speaking of stoves, I haven’t checked our energy consumption and waste production in a while. I’ll do so soon and average it all out. I’ll have to figure in our many houseguests – now the co-houser and the family members have all left and it’s back to just the three of us. But I already know where I will find one weak spot. The wet weather has  also undermined one of the corner posts of our Riot (our energy thrifty lifestyle): there has been no line-drying for our clothes this summer. And line-drying them in the basement, which was unproblematic during winter and most of Spring, now makes them smell dreadfully musty and, well, basementy! So in the dryer they must go.

Please, let it be summer as of now on…

Sun on the Cape

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To forget blight trouble, and to expel the dreadful memory of my first nocturnal slug hunt (brrr), an account of our trip to the Cape (Cod), from which we returned (already) several days ago.

We drove out through a torrential downpour into brighter skies. On the Cape we had almost no rain and even some sun. The ocean was made more mysterious and powerful by the ever present fog, but quite bearable qua temperature (after some jumping and yelling – about 56F) and so much fun – I had forgotten how much fun!

It was Amie’s first exposure to the ocean, and she was fearless and careful. What a sensory feast she had, running in the spray, running from the waves, making sandcastles and seeing them demolished by the oncoming tide. Click for larger images.

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We drove back to Boston three days later, now a while ago, through another downpour – or it might have been the same one?

It stopped raining yesterday and the forecast looks more or less clear for the next couple of days. Okay, hey, I’m trying the power of wishful thinking here…

Oh no! BLIGHT! (?)

Via Skippy’s Vegetable Garden, which operates quite near to us, this news:

If you grow tomatoes or potatoes, take heed. This is shaping up to be one of the worst years for Late Blight, the fungal disease made famous as the cause of the Irish potato famine of the mid-1800’s…

Late blight is caused by the fungus called Phytophthora infestans, and it’s actually not uncommon in the Northeast, since it thrives in cool summer temperatures and frequent rains. But usually its occurrence is limited to later in the growing season and only certain areas of the region, typically in a few farm fields. This year, it has shown up early and is widespread. Worse, it’s been identified on tomato plants for sale at a number of home garden centers [*], suggesting that large numbers of home gardeners have purchased infected plants, which may serve as a source of inoculum (spores) that can spread the disease.

Late blight inoculum is easily carried long distances by wind currents, so anyone growing tomatoes or potatoes should be on the lookout for signs of the disease, even in the most remote areas in our region. Currently all varieties of tomato and potato plants grown in home gardens and in commercial fields are susceptible to late blight. If your plants have late blight, be prepared to destroy them in order to limit spread of the disease.

Well, I went out to see my garden – finally, after a couple of days of nonstop downpour – and there it was: sure signs of the blight on the banana fingerlings. What else could this be?

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The other potatoes seem fine, and I am hoping the earlies, the Keuka Golds and Red Norlands, will be harvestable soon enough. The tomato plants seem fine as well (there are some blossoms, no fruits as yet). But the Bananas are, I am afraid, a write-off. I dug some up to see if they are big enough, but no. They haven’t flowered yet, they’re after all mid-to late season. I will dig them up and dispose of them as soon as it stops raining again (tomorrow I am told).

[*] This seems typical of our times, yet another way in which our food is being threatened, and hitting particularly hard those who are trying to take food into their own hands.  I grew all my plants from seed and potato seed, but this stuff blows off in the wind…

As for the rest of the garden, in this constant rain and cloud cover nothing seems to grow. The eggplants have been stalled for weeks: no extra leaves, or inches. The tomatoes grow but slowly, droopily, leggily. What with the wet conditions slugs have been rampant, eating almost all of the kale and broccoli. They’ve proven unstoppable by my crushed eggshell ramparts, so I will have to switch to thin copper strips around the beds and a couple of evenings with flashlight and umbrella to cull the slugs already in the beds.

It’s a whole different game from the seedlings-in-the-basement and the planting-out times! Seasons…

Pictures of My Garden for my Grandfather

My grandfather passed away a few weeks ago, after a prolonged illness. Again I couldn’t be in Belgium for the funeral, nor could I fly over to see him during those three weeks that he was in the hospital. But I did call him at the hospital every other day. Usually the conversation was very brief, because he was short of breath, or tired, and because he dislikes the telephone.

But our last conversation, the day before he died, was longer. He asked how the garden went, and could I email pictures of it to my dad, who could then bring them on his laptop. My grandfather was a gardener too – the only gardener in my family , in fact, till I took up this crazy business, recently. He grew many vegetables, apple and pear and cherry trees, and a compost heap (I remember the hilarious experiments with worms).

I wanted so much for him to see how well all my vegetables and herbs are growing. I didn’t get to send the pictures – even if I had that moment, it would have been too late. Then it rained, and rained. But here they are, some pictures I took on a brighter day:

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The old cold frame (lights removed, fenced in with, yes, repurposed shelving) with cherry tomato, lettuce and chard, and day lilies, and path to the garden.

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Potato towers in forefront, more potatoes in beds in back.

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Beans on a gloomier day  no luck with the lentils, in front, they’re not growing. Notice the big pile of stones to the left: that’s not half the stones we dug out of the ground. In the background to the left you can see the scaffolding for the tomatoes. I have no close-up pictures of it, though, because… it started raining. Sigh.

{UPDATE} Aha! A couple of hours after posting this entry the clouds cleared and I could run out to take a picture of the tomato and eggplant beds:

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