Moving to the Foreground

Last weekend, the weather was glorious in the DC area. Several days of sun and warmth rewarded us for surviving the snowiest winter our region had ever seen.

Of course, the gorgeous days called us to the garden. This year we've decided to expand our gardening space to the front yard. The backyard garden, which has produced much for us, has gotten shadier and shadier as the years go by.

We decided to construct raised beds the easy way.



After laying out a design, we went to the lumber store and purchased 2 boards 8 feet long and 2 boards 10 feet long. We asked the store to cut 3 1/2 foot lengths off each board.

Because we have absolutely no skills, we decided to buy decking L's. I don't know what these are actually called, but they make it possible to create perfect right angles by sliding boards into slots. It made laying out the beds quite easy. (You can see the metal L's at the base of each corner.) We then screwed the tops of the boards together.



After an afternoon of work, we had all four beds laid out. There is a large space in the middle so we can have picnics, play in the grass, and enjoy the sun. We might put a table in the center. If we feel a need for more gardening space at some point in the future, we might construct a 4x4 diamond or something in the center.

We then lined the beds with cardboard we'd been collecting all winter. Many of the large pieces came from the cool refrigerator we recently purchased.



David always appreciates photos that show him to such advantage:



Our son, old enough now to be a big help in construction projects like this, was wiped out after an afternoon of work. He was very pleased to find new beds exactly where he wanted them:



After his nap, our son soaked the cardboard down--using the leak in our hose as the main source of water distribution.



After filling the beds with cardboard and watering it in so well, we're really hoping to raise some full-sized boxes by the end of the season... (Do you know Edward Lear's nonsense botany? I think he could draw the box plants better than I ever could.)



Tomorrow, we're having 3 cubic yards of topsoil delivered. David plans to go with a friend to collect composted horse manure from a local stable to amend the dirt. And then soon, we will start planting spring seeds and then summer transplants. Here we are at the beginning of our own front-yard victory garden!

School Gardens and the Seeds of Change

Poster uploaded by Joan Thewlis


Have you seen the critique of school gardens published recently in The Atlantic?

Imagine that as a young and desperately poor Mexican man, you had made the dangerous and illegal journey to California to work in the fields with other migrants. There, you performed stoop labor, picking lettuce and bell peppers and table grapes; what made such an existence bearable was the dream of a better life. You met a woman and had a child with her, and because that child was born in the U.S., he was made a citizen of this great country. He will lead a life entirely different from yours; he will be educated. Now that child is about to begin middle school in the American city whose name is synonymous with higher learning, as it is the home of one of the greatest universities in the world: Berkeley. On the first day of sixth grade, the boy walks though the imposing double doors of his new school, stows his backpack, and then heads out to the field, where he stoops under a hot sun and begins to pick lettuce.

The author continues that schools should never be "a venue in which to advance a social agenda." They should not try to teach self-sufficiency in the growing and eating of healthy food. She suggests, although rates of diabetes and heart disease are astoundingly high among inner-city communities and others living in poverty, the "suicidal dietary choices of so many poor people are the result of a problem, not the problem itself." Instead of teaching students about gardening and cooking, "the solution lies in an education that will propel students into a higher economic class, where they will live better and therefore eat better." Therefore, the only question educators should consider is "What are you doing to prepare these kids for college?"

At a certain level, I agree with the author: poverty is the problem at the root of so many of our society's ills. And I also agree that the answer to addressing poverty goes way beyond school gardens.

But honestly, addressing poverty also goes way beyond trying to send all students to college.

Students raised in a family and community with less than they need often struggle in academic settings. Yes--college is absolutely a way out of poverty for exceptionally bright students who can fight against the odds. But poverty also prevents many just reasonably bright students from succeeding in academia, no matter how much their teachers drill them in test-taking skills or even teach them great literature. This is terribly wrong--but it is true none the less. Those of us who grew up middle class with educated parents often have an easy time in the classroom, even if we're NOT reasonably bright.   And honestly, not all students (and this has nothing to do with whether they are poor or rich) should be told that college is their only option for creating a productive life.

While school gardens might not solve the problems of poverty, I do believe that they begin to address far more than just the eating habits of students.

Berkeley's Edible Schoolyard is located at a school with a high number of brand new immigrants who speak little or no English yet. While learning English can happen in a classroom with a textbook, language also gets learned in real life when students of many cultures come together in a more relaxed place to grow, cook, and eat food together. They share their native plants, the recipes of their cultures, and their traditions of hospitality. This makes for a place where people can both appreciate each others' differences and see each others' similarities.

For those students who do struggle in the classrooms, the garden offers a place where learning happens in a different fashion--just as the art classroom and the music rooms can. Should these subjects be offered completely INSTEAD of teaching a skill that (as the author states) clearly "improves a child’s chances of doing well on the state tests that will determine his or her future"? No--but leaving these other subjects completely behind--and suggesting they are not at all valuable as real education--denigrates those who now create their lives in fields like these. And of course denigrating the growing of food means that that farmers will never be paid enough or respected enough. It is a vicious circle.

As our world moves rapidly into a time when we have to confront both climate change and severe resource depletion, it seems likely that farmers will be in great demand and treated with much more respect than they have been recently. All students--those who have grown up in families of farmers and those who have grown up thinking food comes from Wal-Mart, those who are living in poverty and those who are living in McMansions--need to know about how sustainable agriculture works.

Barbara Kingsolver approached these issues long before the author of the Atlantic article wrote her inflammatory attention-seeking piece:

The baby boom psyche embraces a powerful presumption that education is a key to moving away from manual labor, and dirt--two undeniable ingredients in farming.  It's good enough for us that somebody, somewhere, knows food production well enough to serve the rest of us with all we need to eat, each day of our lives.

It is our disconnect from growing food and our disrespect for the manual labor that sustains us that leads Americans to, as Kingsolver says, "consider the food industry to be a thing rather than a person. We obligingly give 85 cents of our every food dollar to that thing, too--the processors, marketers, and transporters." The corporatization of our food supply and the high degree of food processing have made farmers almost invisible. If we were more educated about the process of what farmers do to grow our food, perhaps we would "want to compensate or think about these hardworking people."

* * *

So my family plants a few seeds in our tiny garden--partly to produce a few treats here and there and partly to remind ourselves of the skills and labor of those who grow more. We have a CSA share and we meet the amazing growers who work there. We shop at the farmer's market in order to remind ourselves that the food we grow has been nurtured by human hands.

My homeschooled son jokes that this is our own school garden, our own edible schoolyard.

My Journey to Green, part 2

For my entire life, I have enjoyed gardening--especially growing herbs and vegetables. I'm sure I got the desire to grow my own food from Granny, and from my mother who carried on the tradition for many years. Growing up, I had cherry tomatoes growing outside my playhouse. In college, I kept a pot of mint on my windowsill for making tea. In grad school, a variety of herbs on a fire escape. And as soon as we bought a house, David and I began to plant vegetables in our back yard. There have been years when we've grown a lot and others when we've let the weeds get the better of the beds. I did not plant in order to be self-sufficient or for environmental reasons. I did it because it was a pleasure. As our son grew up, he got excited about what we were doing and enjoyed puttering around in the sunshine as we dug, planted, and weeded.

Every summer we spent days away from our garden at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. And in 2005 when our son had just turned 6yo, one of the themes was American Food Culture. I was excited to learn more about the variety of food traditions and tastes from all the cultures that make up this diverse country.

What I really did not expect is how world-expanding this summer festival would be for me. Rather than only celebrating the abundance of cooking creativity around the country, the festival focused on SOLE food--that is, sustainable, organic, local, and ethical food.

Slow Food was there, articulating the connection between the pleasure of community and the politics of our food practices. I loved their message and it resonated with not only my hedonist side but my old-fashioned plain side. They also talked about the need to celebrate and protect our native foods to keep them from being eradicated. This was an entirely new message for me.

I also learned much more about how organic farming methods not only were good for our bodies but good for both the workers on organic farms and the land itself. I learned how "corporate organic" was an inferior choice to sustainably-raised organic (even when it is not certified organic). And, due to lectures about naturally-raised meat and animals' role on a family farm, I even started to question some of my beliefs about vegetarianism and began to think about eating certain kinds of meat again. (This is a question that continues to rattle around in my head and one where my practice changes over time.)

Perhaps even more important to my increasing radicalization was the presence of Berkeley's Edible Schoolyard. They planted a garden on the national mall complete with an outdoor pizza oven to demonstrate and a shady gazebo-like structure to welcome visitors to sit together. My son and I went everyday for two weeks, listening to folks talk about everything from the how-to's of gardening to the goals of the schoolyard project. The organizers got to know my young son so well that they pulled him on to the front and handed him a microphone so he could explain the purposes of mulching to newbie gardeners.

The Edible Schoolyard combines lessons in organic growing, healthy food preparation, community celebration of that abundance, and even a chance to practice a new language. (The school where the Schoolyard is located is middle school which includes a high number of students new to the US.)

At the end of the festival, the head of the Edible Schoolyard told my son that if he was ever in California, he should stop by for a tour. As luck would have it, we happened to be going to a conference in San Francisco just two months later! So we had the great fortune to visit the real schoolyard with its little chicken tractor and beautiful plants--and also the cooking-and-eating facility and the seed saving room. My son held chickens in his lap, collected and saved amaranth seeds, and help fold tablecloths in the dining room.

I came home from the summer festival understanding that food--in both its growing and its cooking as well as its distribution--is a way of combining the fight against hunger, the fight against corporate power and globalism, the fight for workers' rights, the fight for better health, and the fight for the planet.

I stopped hesitating: at that moment, I knew I was an environmentalist.

(continued from yesterday)

Homegrown Mess

Our dinner came completely from our own garden.

To emphasize the DIY nature of the meal, we cooked it in our solar oven--making this almost a zero-carbon meal (except, of course, that fact that all the food was previously living and made of carbon).

We dug our very first little tiny pearls of new potatoes, then added our first-of-the-season tomato, a zucchini and a yellow squash, a few green beans, a chioggia beet, some yellow-stemmed chard, and a little basil.

It isn't the prettiest dish we've ever made, but I have never been prouder:

A Gardener's Dilemma

I killed my carrots. Every single one of them.

It is a principal of gardening that you scatter tiny vegetable seeds in the spring, watch to see how many germinate and come to life, and then...

...murder half of them.

It is only through thinning out half the seedlings that the others have room to live. Carrot seeds are so small that it is almost impossible to plant them individually. If I didn't just scatter the tiny seeds, I might not spend the effort to plant them at all, to bring them to life.

We can even eat all our thinnings. How different is that from bringing produce to adulthood just to nourish us? Facilitating life and managing death purely to nourish ourselves is what annual vegetable gardening is all about. I have absolutely no moral qualms about snuffing the life of produce.

Or do I? Those poor carrot seedlings, so dainty and so slow to germinate.... I left them too long without thinning them, hoping for them to become strong enough to make it to adulthood. I just could not thin them. "Thin" them--what a pathetic word to convey the taking of life prematurely. (Good grief. Taking the life MATURELY doesn't bother me.)

So the carrots strangled themselves, wrapping themselves in each other's roots, unable to spread out.

* * *

Today's lesson from the garden:

There are times we have to make choices in order to move forward.

When I was 18yo, everything seemed open to me.

Each step I made toward one future simultaneously closed the door to another.

Soon, I had limited my options. Things that had been possible before were no longer there.

It is exactly through those limitations that we move further into the light, into life.

Local Summer Eating

This week we made a delicious Cream of Purslane soup--made with the most abundant backyard weed vegetable in our garden. After steaming the greens, we pureed them with local cream (but you could use yogurt instead if you had some in the fridge), stock made from the week's vegetable peelings, and a little bit of salt and pepper, and garnished with backyard basil. We only discovered how much we love purslane a few years ago--and it serves a starring role in many a summer dish.



We continued the meal with zucchini (from our garden) cooked down in pureed tomatoes that we canned ourselves a few weeks ago. South Carolina rice, the grain that often anchors our homegrown vegetable dishes, served as the base.



For dessert we had a handful of blackberries. David and Son had gone for a bike ride to the adjoining neighborhood/town of Silver Spring right before dinner--and they passed the lovely little backyard farm of an older neighbor who sells fruits and veggies from his yard. The berries were tart and plump--my very favorite fruit and a marker of the height of summer.

Eating at Home

Preparing ourselves for the annual return of One Local Summer,
we had a fabulous local meal--actually, another one that went a little beyond just "local".



On the menu:

Salad all grown in our garden, with a dressing made from rice vinegar marinated with our own chive blossoms and a bit of non-local olive oil.

Potatoes from the farmer's market, dressed with sour cream from our dairy supplier.

Hamburgers made with local beef, flavored with some of the last of our home-dried tomatoes mixed in before cooking.

We served the hamburgers on homemade whole-wheat buns--from wheat we ground ourselves.



This was an intensely satisfying meal--one that fed us well in both body and spirit.

In the Sun

The weather this Memorial Day weekend has been glorious! We've spent almost all of it outside in the backyard, gardening and reading and celebrating.

On Saturday morning before we got to work finally putting in the tomato seedlings and the like, we heated up the solar oven...



...harvested some rapini...



and mixed up a crustless rapini quiche to have for lunch a couple of hours later. Using our own veggies as well as local eggs, milk, and cheese made this an exceptionally local lunch--one we cooked with only the sun's energy, and ate while basking in that same sun ourselves.




* * *

This is the first time I've ever grown potatoes--this time, just red new potatoes and yellow finn--and they are doing very well, at least on top of the ground:



We're also starting the grand experiment of a "three sisters" garden of corn, beans, and squash. We've chose to plant really interesting varieties: Mandan Bride corn which is edible fresh or dried and also makes a beautiful fall decoration, Delicata squash, and gorgeous Tiger's Eye beans meant for drying. I've never tried drying varieties of anything, and never grown corn at all. David created the mounds as part of his Mother's Day present (or at least he made them that day, which I took as a present). We planted the corn seeds a week or so later and now they are as high as a ... well, about as high as a squirrel's eye. By next week we should be able to plant the squash and beans.



* * *

Some garden treats don't require as much waiting as those crops do. We harvested a few radishes:



I love their color!

* * *

Although we've had sweet woodruff in a garden since we moved to this house ten years ago, we've never made May Wine until this year. We picked a few sprigs of the woodruff...



...and let it dry. We then soaked it in white wine overnight.

On Sunday evening, we lit the citronella candles and had our Earth Evening, and enjoyed our first taste. A strawberry crushed in a little sugar made a beautiful addition to the glass.



Even Son got to have a bit--his drink being May Tea instead of May Wine:



* * *

Today: off for a picnic at the farm of some friends!

Leaving the Narrow Place for the Open Fields

During Passover, Jews are asked to acknowledge the history of slavery. Not only should we "acknowledge" it: we should act as if we were personally enslaved and personally freed.

Many Jews ask what things in our selves and in our surroundings keep us enslaved now. Then we think about ways we might loosen those bonds and step away from our own Mitzrayim, our own narrow place--no matter how safe and cozy it might seem at any given moment. When we are able finally to make that first step, we will begin to see how constrained we have been. Only at that point is an end to freedom--and a start to independence--possible.

I spent a bit of my Passover thinking about how to become ready to make a change, how to be ready to abandon the things that hold us back even if they seem to put us in such a secure place right now.

Many parts of my own personal narrow place are internal personality traits--parts of my self that hold me (and those around me) back from where we could go. One is my sometimes-extreme shyness. Another is my fear of anger, whether it is in myself or in others (anger towards me or towards others). Yet another is my reluctance to do or say anything that could make me stand out too much. And a biggie: I think about big issues until they are fully dissected, get depressed (too often in a too serious way), and do nothing about whatever the issues are.

But here we are, my family, ready to make some big steps out of our narrow place.

* * *

One way out of our Mitzrayim seems to be increasing food security both for us and for our community.

For a long time, my family has sought to eat a diet (and live a life more generally) less dependent on corporate consumerism and more reliant on the local economy of small business and small farmers. We attempt to purchase mostly foods without labels. (Ah--wouldn't the nutrition police fall over dead? No label to read?! Surely that is not healthy....)

This year we've expanded our garden to grow more of our diet in the back yard--our very tiny "postage stamp of native soil" which will really just be a symbolic way to help us understand more about how food is produced. Some of the old pros who do this (on a much larger scale in an only slightly smaller yard) call it the "path to freedom." They've launched the 100 Foot Diet challenge to help us connect with other people doing the same thing. I've mentioned their challenge before.

We've also made a serious commitment to prepare now so we will be able to keep up our non-corporate eating during the winter and early spring. And for this, the brilliant Sharon issued her own challenge:



Sharon asks us to create "food independence" (and to a degree, independence from a fossil-fuel-led society more generally) by regularly trying to, as Sharon lays out:

1. Plant something.
...The idea that you should plant all week and all year is a good reminder to those of us who sometimes don’t get our fall gardens or our succession plantings done regularly. Remember, that beet you harvested left a space - maybe for the next one to get bigger, but maybe for a bit of arugula or a fall crop of peas, or a cover crop to enrich the soil. Independence is the bounty of a single seed that creates an abundance of zucchini, and enough seeds to plant your own garden and your neighbor’s.

2. Harvest something.
From the very first nettles and dandelions to the last leeks and parsnips I drag out of the frozen ground, harvest something from the garden or the wild every day you can. I can’t think of a better way to be aware of the bounty around you to realize that there’s something -- even if it is dandelions for tea or wild garlic for a salad -- to be had every single day. Independence is really appreciating and using the bounty that we have.

3. Preserve something.
Sometimes this will be a big project, but it doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t take long to slice a couple of tomatoes and set them on a screen in the sun, or to hang up a bunch of sage for winter. And it adds up fast. The time you spend now is time you don’t have to spend hauling to the store and cooking later. Independence is eating our own, and cutting the ties we have to agribusiness.

4. Prep something.
Hit a yard sale and pick up an extra blanket. Purchase some extra legumes and oatmeal. Sort out and inventory your pantry. Make a list of tools you need. Find a way to give what you don’t need to someone who does. Fix your bike. Fill that old soda bottle with water with a couple of drops of bleach in it. Plan for next year’s edible landscaping. Make back-road directions to your place and send it to family in case they ever need to come to you - or make ‘em for yourself for where you might have to go.... Independence is being ready for whatever comes.

5. Cook something. Try a new recipe, or an old one with a new ingredient. Sometimes it is hard to know what to do with all that stuff you are growing or making. So experiment now. Can you make a whole meal in your solar oven? How are stir-fried pea shoots? Stuffed squash blossoms? Wild morels in pasta? Independence is being able to eat and enjoy what is given to us.

6. Manage your reserves. Check those apples and take out the ones starting to go bad and make sauce with it. Label those cans. Clean out the freezer. Ration the pickles, so you’ll have enough to last to next season. Use up those lentils before you take the next ones out of the bag. Find some use for that can of whatever it is that’s been in the pantry forever. Sort out what you can donate, and give it to the food pantry. Make sure the squash are holding out. Independence means not wasting the bounty we have.

7. Work on local food systems. This could be as simple as buying something you don’t grow or make from a local grower, or finding a new local source. It could be as complex as starting a coop or a farmer’s market, creating a CSA or a bulk store. You might give seeds or plants or divisions to a neighbor, or solicit donations for your food pantry. Maybe you’ll start a guerilla garden or help a homeschool coop incubate some chicks. Maybe you’ll invite people over to your garden, or your neighbors in for a homegrown meal, or sing the praises of your local CSA. Maybe you can get your town to plant fruit or nut producing street trees or get a manual water pump or a garden put in at your local school. Whatever it is, our Independence days come when our neighbors and the people we love are food secure too.


Participants had lots of creative ideas for tweaking the rules--moving things out of one listing into their own categories in order to emphasize them more--or adding things entirely new. Some of my favorite additions:

8. Store something (edible) you'll need in the future so you won't have to go to the market as often.

9. Reduce waste, Compost.

10. Clean something, Mend something, Make do.

11. Learn a new skill, or practice one you are learning.


Coming soon: how we're taking our first steps along this new road.

Patterns and Growth

My family spent some of last two weekends in the garden constructing our potato bed and planting a few seeds. We have been using the spacing technique introduced to us in John Jeavons' How to Grow More Vegetables (And Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops) than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land than You Can Imagine.



The author suggests using a hexagonal template to help space crops. We cut them out of an old pizza box to the proper sizes for the particular veggies we were planting, then moved them along the bed as we poked our finger into the dirt at all the corners. Then we poked into the centers, dropped in the seeds, and watered them down.

What we did not do is cover the seedbeds with any kind of mesh--meaning I woke up this morning to see squirrels digging out our hard work.

Gardening lesson number one.

* * *

Those gardening layouts really got to me:

I dreamed of being an artist, a quilter, obsessed with laying out hexagons.

Check out this knitted hexagon quilt on the cover of this book:



* * *

A perfect post-garden dinner:

Local baby arugula salad topped with Keswick Creamery feta cheese...



...served with local (and uber-sweet) Catoctin Mer de Glace wine.

Growing Your Own--just a little...

Due to my long lingering case of croup, I have not done a whole lot of anything--blogging, cooking, knitting, gardening, even reading. But last night we ate the first fruits of this season's garden: a sprinkling of herbs (chives and parsley).



We wilted some baby spinach, sauteed some mild fish, and put together a light sauce from fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice boiled down with butter. The little home-grown herb garnish was just the right finishing touch.

And while the grapefruit juice was reducing, I took the highlighter to the seed catalog and dreamed of the last freeze date.

Dreaming of the Growing Sun

The wind chill is 5 degrees below O, but Spring has arrived on our kitchen table--at least that paper version of the season:



And with it, thoughts of our tiny backyard filled with purple okra, yard-long green beans, round yellow carrots, a hundred kinds of basil, and a thousand types of lettuces. And don't forget the myriad tomatoes....

And although my dreams are a bit over the top given our space, I'm still way behind many of the dreaming gardeners out there. Check out the Growing Challenge, the Victory Garden Drive, the 100 Foot Diet, and Kitchen Gardeners International. What inspiration (and what knowledgeable help) there is out there!

Real Dirt

Last night during our champagne and pizza, the three of us watched the DVD The Real Dirt on Farmer John. What a wonderful little movie!

The film talks about a fascinating farmer, John Peterson, who does everything a little bit differently--and ends up running an enormous CSA on an organic farm. He also wears boas around his neck while he rides his tractor and frolics through his fields in a bee costume with his girlfriend. Great fun--but also a piercing discussion of the difficulties of farming across the last few decades.

One of the best things about the film is the early footage. His mother ran her handheld movie camera from the time her children were quite small growing up on the farm that Farmer John now runs. He took up the filmmaking talent and recorded all his hippie college friends partying and celebrating in the barns and fields. A bit after college, he made a short documentary about his own difficulties and about the pressures on farmers in general at the time. He chronicles his own depression and its changing meanings over time. And from the beginning of the story until its current happy ending, it has all been chronicled on film. Pretty amazing to see.

John Peterson also has out a great cookbook celebrating his farm. Check it out!

Defining Local

So we can't do it very effectively yet, but we're working on it:




Check out Path to Freedom's 100 Foot Diet
Growing Closer to Home: A Lifelong Challenge™

As the PTF folks say,

It wasn’t that long ago (1940s) that people planted Victory Gardens when it became necessary for them, due to wartime shortages, to grow their own food. Now, it’s our turn! If you want to fight against peak oil, climate change and our consumerist culture, then join us and start a living protest right in your own back (front) yards. Be the change, live the solution! Use your yard (or balcony or porch steps) not only to grow food but also to cultivate a healthier and more fulfilling life.

There have been 100 mile diet and other eat local challenges. PTF’s homegrown revolutionaries are upping the ante by reducing the mileage to a few steps—to right outside your back or front door.

The challenge is simple. Beginning as soon as you can, prepare a meal at least once a week with only homegrown vegetables, fruit, herbs, eggs, dairy products or meat, using as few store bought ingredients as possible.

The purpose is plain—the waging of an all-out fight against the forces that keep you dependent on the system of petroleum fueled food. The degree to which you rely on today’s artificial corporate structure determines the extent of your vulnerability. Resolve to lessen your dependence on outside food sources.

The result is revolutionary. As you take back responsibility for your food supply, you’ll experience the empowerment and fulfillment that comes from learning the basic skills of providing for yourself and your family.

Let’s sow the seeds of victory and get our hands dirty to fill our plates!

Check out the site for the full details. Want to join me?