Locally Made Spirits

Pennsylvania is blessed with local producers of all kinds - meat, dairy, fruits, vegetables, wine, and even potato vodka made with PA potatoes. A friend of mine introduced me to another unique and locally produced product -- ROOT. From the producers website, its the original root beer -- what root beer used to be before they took out the alcohol. I can't wait to try it 'cause as a kid, my aboslute favorite drink in the world was a root beer float. And yes, it's made completely from organic products. Be warned though --its $40 bucks a bottle. It's a fairly new product and not widely available, but spread the word and it will be!

Kale Sprouts! In February

About two weeks ago, we had a nice 50-degree day and I was messing around with my makeshift greenhouse and thought I'd throw a couple kale seeds in there to see what would happen. Today, I cleared off the snow and pulled up a window to see what was going on and low and behold, there were kale sprouts! I was shocked. They got a good drink and I'll just bet I'll be eating kale in about a month. Kale loves cold weather. The temp under the storm windows on a sunny day is about 50 -- perfect growing temps for kale. Fun stuff.

Sustainable Farming vs Agribusiness

Rodale recently issued an interesting article on the U.S. Farm Bureau Declaring War on Sustainable Farming calling advocates for sustainable farms "extremists." You gotta click on the link and read the article. Rodale makes excellent points and of course encourage you to continue shopping organic and local.

The Balancing Act for 2010

This year will be the year of balancing. Gardens, riding bike, kayaking with hubby, trail running, painting the front porch (its a Victorian gingerbread porch -- how stupid was that!), trail work on my local bike club trails, blogging (it's going to virtually disappear) and holding down that full-time job that takes two hours commute time out of the day. Last year was the year of the organic garden and it consumed the majority of my time, leaving the biking/paddling/running on the wayside and squeezed in when I wasn't planting/weeding/harvesting/cooking. This year, I want to try to balance them all. You've seen the reduction in blog posts - it may get even less. And the garden planning includes a reduction in what-to-grow to make more time for exercise. I have two guides for what to grow and what not to grow: what does hubby eat (or not eat); and what is least important to grow that I can get at a farmer's market that doesn't need to be organic. Onions are the first thing that is crossed off the list of things to grow. They typically are not sprayed and are the lowest in pesticides. And hubby never eats the tomatoes. So I'm drastically reducing the tomato crop. Maybe I'll only do a plant or two of heirlooms. Other things are getting crossed off the list too - green beans, potatoes, and maybe some of the greens. Balancing should be easy, right? I am a LIBRA aferall. I'll figure it out.

The Goods Getting Delivered

I feel like I'm the luckiest organic gardener in the entire world! To have fresh horse manure delivered to my door step is an incredibly happy time. My work recently had a motivational speaker talk about team building and a couple other things, one being getting stressed out and don't let it happen. He went around the room asking what de-stresses us. Of course I said exercise; but I really should have said is, "everyone here knows I ride bike, run, kayak and do a lot of things outdoors. What you guys DON'T know, is I love to play in horse shit and find IT to be very relaxing and enjoyable." Yup, horse shit is very high on my list of pleasures. What it does to the garden and the plants that grow in it is phenomenal. What it does to me physically when I start tossing it, turning it, and hauling it is also pretty darn cool. I couldn't live without horse manure. Even when dear-old dad ain't around any more, I plan to go get it myself at the local horse track where several horses are stalled. It's truly a gardeners gold.

Enjoying the Winter Break

There's not much going on garden-wise right now other than I'm planning to start some leeks in the next week or two. Hubby and I just spent the weekend in Canaan Valley, West Virginia enjoying their 30+ inches of snow on the ground. It was fabulous. Pennsylvania winters can't come remotely close to these guys. We ski at a cross-country destination, Whitegrass. It's the best.

2010 Seed List for Chili's Backyard

New Year's Day was perfect to sit back, peruse all the seed catalogs, take left-over seed inventory (ditch the hybrids and old seed), and decide what seeds to order and from what catalog. I narrowed the choices of catalogs down to Fedco (last year's winner), Seeds of Change, High Mowing Seeds and my newest catalog, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. My primary reason for these four was to focus on non GMO seeds. Yes, organic was initially a factor, but after seeing that certified organic seeds are more expensive and since I don't have a certified organic CFA or reason to make sure the seeds are organic (other than they must be non-GMO), I opted for non-organics and focus on non-GMO. Thus, Baker Creek Heirloom won the order. Every seed in their catalog is non-hybrid, non-GMO, non-treated and non-patented. They do not buy seed from Monsanto-owned Seminis. They boycott all gene-altering companies. In other words, I'm getting "pure" seed that I can save from year to year if I don't use the entire pack. Since I went over-board last year, the seed list was minimal this year since I could use most of my seeds from last year. So here's the order:

Broccoli - Waltham
Corn - Ture Gold Sweet
Eggplant - Pandora Striped
Melon (Cantaloupe) - Schoon's hardshell
Red Pepper - Quadrato D'asti Rosso
Radish - Saxa 2
Squash - Sweet Dumpling (single serving size - good for stuffing)
Red Tomato - Granny Cantrell German Red
Cherry Tomato - Fox Cherry

And Zinnias and Sunflowers to attract beneficial insects. I'll do a post on heirlooms in the future. Heirlooms are unique plants worthy of a post all their own. What's up next? Leeks. I'm starting those seeds in the next two weeks.

Takepart.com

Food, Inc., the movie, encourages viewers to "take part" in helping build a sustainable, healthy environment. They direct viewers to a website, called Take Part and oh what a website it is. It covers everything and anything related to our environment and provides a number of areas that you as a consumer, teacher, parent, advocate, business-owner -- whatever it is, -- can be a part of changing our world in an effort to prevent the environment from growing worse. You can even become an "eco-snoop" if you want. I clicked on the Issues button and went to food, which led me to organic vs local and a plethora of other subjects relating to organic food. There's a good article on buying local vs buying organic (bottom line - buy both and seek out local organics). I'll be reading for a couple weeks on this one. Very, very informative website. Many of the pages link to Treehugger.com and many of the organic articles come out of Rodale.

Still Harvesting Carrots and Spinach

Spinach, carrots, and radicchio along with numerous other crops were planted in August specifically for winter growing under glass. The plants grew as planned to maturity until the first official freeze about 6 weeks ago. About three weeks ago, I checked on things and thought for sure it was all gone. It was wilted and lying over. I mumbled to hubby that was a failed experiment. Last week, I thought I'd dig up some carrots to see what was there. Low and behold I harvested carrots. And today, I picked a beautiful batch of spinach and the last two heads of radicchio (small, but edible). I was thrilled to say the least. Root crops seem to fair the best, so that's the thought for next year... carrots, beets, turnips, and possibly a couple potatoes or sweet potatoes. It's obvious plants will "appear" dead in sub-freezing temps, but the varieties hardy to winter freezing like spinach and chard will bounce back. This is an interesting experiment I'm sure to attempt again next year.

Is Growing Dried Beans Worth It?

This is the first season I ever grew dried beans. My thought last winter was I wanted to grow as much of my own organic food as I could. It had to be enough that I could "survive" off of the food I grow and preserve from the back yard; thus, dried beans are a staple. I planted three rows of dried beans -- black, white cannelli, and tiger (like a kidney with a cute little stripe). I also had Kidney beans to plant, but ran out of space so they'll wait until next year (I won't waste the seed). Growing was easy -- all beans are easy to grow. Harvesting was questionable. I read that you can just leave the pods on the plant until they are dry. I clearly left them on too long because the tiger beans nearly all started to resprout (wet season) so I only got about a cup of tiger beans. The remainder I picked and left sit in a basket in their pods until this winter to start shelling. Thanksgiving weekend marked the first bean-pod shelling session. The cannelli beans were up first. After the sprouted seeds and rotted seeds were ditched, I ended up with about 5 cups of dried beans. The black beans were a little more tolerable of the wet conditions and didn't resprout as much. Nearly 8 cups was the final tally of the negros frigoles. I spent about 12 hours total shelling these 12 cups of beans. Each pack of seeds cost approx $1.50 for two ounces. It costs about $4.00 to buy a pound of organic dried beans. So. The final verdict -- are they worth growing? If you are looking strictly at cost. Yes - it's obvious my $1.50 investment paid for itself tenfold or more. Count in my time to shell the beans? Absolutely not. Factor in the energy consumption to soak and cook those dried beans (vs buying a can of already cooked organic beans?) not sure on that one. Hubby claims they aren't worth the electricity to cook them - let the cost of the electric come out of someone else's pockets (but ultimately, we'd pay more for canned beans). I think I'd have to do more analysis on that one. In the long run, I think the bottom line is cost savings for organics so YES, I believe it's worth it and I'm growing them again next year. I'll need to come up with a better way to cook them to save electricity consumption. If only I had a woodstove....