Design

A rainy June A quick trip back to the Piedmont to take care of some garden things -- getting a dead white pine removed and mowing the grass -- as well as taking Woody to see our vet, found lush growth in the garden. OK, it's good news that it's been rainy, and I was glad not to find a bunch of crispy plants. It was a bit daunting, however, to see HOW much pokeweed, Oxalis , Digitaria , Abutilon , and other weeds had popped up and grown in the vegetable beds in just a couple of weeks, not to mention volunteer redbud, sassafras, and black cherry seedlings elsewhere in the landscape.  The front meadow is ridiculously exuberant, too;  the common milkweed, planted for monarch caterpillars, has thrived and is falling onto the driveway, and all of the other meadow plants ( Solidago , Thermopsis , Helianthus hirsutus , Indian grass, etc. are huge). Eggplant in container (surrounded by crabgrass!) The Campsis radicans   on the trellises in front of the garage are thriving.  T...

I'm itching to get back out into the garden. It's time. I've been at meetings two days in a row where local food has been a subject. One was a city environmental committee and the other was an information meeting about our Clemson University Student Organic Farm. Local food (and sustainability, however defined) are growing interests, even here in a relatively small, reasonably conservative, college town in the Southern U.S. This is a good thing. Our town is quite progressive, actually, and we're often a model for other small communities in our region. Growing food isn't easy. It takes time and effort. And growing sustainably and organic means taking care of the soil, balancing energy inputs and outputs, and replenishing nutrients that are harvested (and consumed). My friends who are permaculture fans are on the right track, to be sure. We have LOTS of land in our cities and suburban areas that's 'wasted' on grass or on ornamental trees and shrub...

Our food system in the U.S. is complex. It's burdened with subsidies for production of foods that are perfectly good in their 'whole' state (corn, soybeans, wheat, etc.) but are increasingly difficult to justify in their refined and remixed versions, in the plethora of processed foods available in the average American supermarket. Lots of folks have been trying to redirect this; the last Farm Bill authorization saw a big push to refocus encouragement of industrial agricultural production to at least some support to more locally-focused agriculture. I went to a meeting of a local chapter of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association this afternoon. It was impressive because of the number of folks who showed up (at least 75 of them): local growers, local eaters, people interested in fresh food, people interested in delicious food, people interested in encouraging kids to eat nutritious food instead of junk, and folks interested in good, fresh food, period. We met in a loca...

The closest thing to local is from your own garden -- there's obviously nothing fresher than harvesting just before lunch or dinner. But in the flurry of interest in local food, my home state of South Carolina has recently launched a Palmettovore program (we're the 'Palmetto' state), encouraging purchase of SC-grown produce (fresh fruits, vegetables, and other state-made products), to accompany last-year's certified SC grown campaign. This is a quite nice idea, but the farms of Western North Carolina (a hotbed of small, locally-oriented farmers) are within two hours of Clemson, compared to the 4-5 hrs down to the coastal plain fields that support tomatoes, soybeans, and increasingly many more crops. I'm a member of something called Upstate SC Locally Grown Market , and dutifully try to get fresh eggs and cheese from them, along with freshly roasted coffee (uh, not locally grown). They're a new network, and are trying to connect Upstate local farmers with bu...

A blogging friend in England mentioned that storing food is a bit of a lost art ; I'm certainly guilty about not thinking (and doing) more about food security and self-sufficiency. I've been promoting vegetable gardening as a fun, creative activity in my work; laudable, to be sure, but maybe there's more that I should focus on. My two vegetable garden areas produce enough fresh vegetables for us to eat for six months of the year, but I'm also buying things at the supermarket, now in winter. There are greens to be harvested, to be sure, so that's good. But I'm buying potatoes, lettuce, spinach, and broccoli. But I avoid any (long-traveled, or excessively fossil-fuel enriched) tomatoes or peppers, but I get demerits because my gardening companions loves bananas, and I buy them for him (and eat a few myself).

I went to a Upstate Locavore meeting this evening -- the topic was a spring event to encourage people to try growing some of their own vegetables. What's encouraging to me is that many of the folks interested in this are quite new to vegetable and herb gardening (and maybe gardening in general) and, in addition, there's a thread of food security running through the conversation. I'm all for encouraging interest and supporting individual efforts. The RHS gardens in the UK have an expansive program called 'Growing your own veg' accompanied by all sorts of useful information for beginning gardeners. A developing New Victory Garden movement includes Kitchen Garden International's Eat The View campaign and this garden planted as part of the Slow Food convention in San Francisco, CA this fall; these represent just a 'tip' of the explosion of interest in growing food, promoting local food, and supporting local farmers and sustainable agriculture. And whethe...

Michael Pollan had an excellent piece in last Sunday's NY Times Magazine, an issue focused on food. He wrote a letter to our next president (here in the U.S., coming soon) which outlines what he needs to think about and act on. Our 'food system' in the U.S. is definitely in need of reform, and I'm tremendously pleased to see a resurgence of interest in local food, home vegetable gardens, and 'growing your own.' There's a wonderful initiative (that Pollan comments on) to transform one of the White House lawns to an organic food garden, just like Eleanor Roosevelt did with a Victory Garden push. My gardening companion and I have an acre and a half of land in our (semi)-rural small college town. In these challenging times, why shouldn't I expand my vegetable garden (with rotations) and consider having 'city' chickens, even if they might have to be in a 'chicken tractor'.

More than fifty varieties of bananas grown in Mto Wa Mbu, Tanzania I went to a meeting today of a newly formed local foods group. What fun and how refreshing for folks in a conservative state (and formerly largely agricultural) in the Southern U.S. to think about how to encourage locally-grown foods. As our (previously farm and pasture land) is being gobbled up for subdivisions and development sprawl, it's a welcome trend to try to encourage promoting local producers and growers, providing an incentive to grow vegetables and fruits for local markets. Schoolteacher carrying bananas in Amani, Tanzania I love to 'grow my own,' of course, but I'm reluctant (so far) to get on the freezing and canning track, and my gardening companion LOVES his daily banana with cereal. I don't have the heart to explain to him about the global cost of banana production, the exposure of some farmworkers to pesticides, the risks of a single major banana variety, etc. Oh, dear, I probab...

My dad's parents lived in the northern end of California's Central Valley, a productive farming area for fruits, nuts, rice, and other crops. Summer peaches always remind me of our childhood visits, and my grandmother saying that 'she was going to fix some peaches' for dessert. This meant peaches from an orchard in nearby Red Bluff, large rosy peaches picked at their peak, carefully peeled and sliced, served with a bit of sugar and cream. I had a perfect peach for breakfast this morning. I bought some at our local farmer's market yesterday afternoon from an older couple. This was an extraordinary peach -- perfectly ripe, sweet, and delicious. It bore limited resemblance to the 'local peaches' that I've bought at the grocery recently. still life with peaches... I had bought some red-fleshed plums from them several weeks ago that were (almost) as good, and wanted to ask what kind they were -- the answer was 'oh, we just call them purple plums.'

I love the idea of local food (and growing my own) -- the benefits were clear in our dinner tonight, a lovely squash medley with garlic, a fresh tomato, basil, garlic and onion sauce (all homegrown) for some homemade semolina pasta, and some baked chicken. Our regional Carolina Farm Stewardship Association (North and South Carolina, USA) has issued an eating local challenge for the coming week (July 7-13) -- for folks to try to eat locally as much as possible (more challenging here in the Southeast than in some parts of the U.S.) The chicken was probably from somewhere regional (there are lots of chicken farms in the Carolinas), but it wasn't organic or free-range, the eggs in the pasta were from regional free-range chickens, but the wheat flour was from a midwestern source (King Arthur flour). The tarragon and thyme that flavored the chicken was homegrown. But the black pepper came from the other side of the world, and the coffee I had this morning came from South or Central Am...