Where does your food come from...reflecting on my goals

My only day off work this week, aside from the one filled with preschool parent duties and dance class, I was hoping to get out of the house and do a little exploring with the girls.  And this time, the weather cooperated.  I knew a few local farmers markets had opened for business last week, so I did a little research and found one in the next county over was open this afternoon.  Knowing that we had a small drive ahead of us, I looked to see what else might be in the area that we could enjoy and found a store with mostly local goodies and the farm where we get our milk and yogurt were all within a few minutes drive.  We ate a quick lunch and hopped in the car on our adventure.
I set a goal last summer to visit any of the farms where we get our meat, dairy, and produce.  My goals are not just to check out the conditions for the farmers and animals, but to get to know the people that we get our food from.  I want my children to know that their favorite yogurt comes from milk, which comes from a cow...not a picture of a cow, but that cow...that one, right over there!   I want them to see that their creamy potato soup comes from ingredients found in a local dairy, early spring gardens nearby, and ham from a pig farm just around the corner.  I want my girls to be aware of their surroundings and not take food for granted.
As I was reflecting this winter on what I actually wanted to get out of simplifying my life and living local, I came to a few conclusions.  I want to be as self sufficient as I can be.  If I were cut off from all supermarkets one day, I want to know that I would survive without difficulty.  I want to know that I have friends that can provide me with the meats and dairy that I can't produce myself.  I want to have the skills needed to grow and utilize fresh produce.  I want to be able to both mend and create.  I want to focus more on my family and less on what we think we need.
When presented with the challenge of buying local foods in upstate NY, which doesn't provide a lot of fresh produce for the winter months, I decided on what was most important to me.  After wrestling with the lack of fresh tomatoes on my salads and what to do when my girls asked for bananas and grapes for snacks, I set myself a goal.  Anything that is found locally at ANY point where I live will be purchased when it is locally grown and in season.  I splurge on bananas, citrus fruits, and a few other treats that do not grow regionally.  But, I do try to buy these when they are naturally at the peak of their season in the nearest place they can be grown.  What I found, in the end, is that there are plenty of other goodies to add to the winter salad greens (grown in greenhouses regionally), such as stored walnuts, beets, local cheeses, and now in early spring I'm adding overwintered carrots and onions.  I found that an apple tastes better in fall when it is fresh from th orchard.  I found that I never knew what asparagus really tasted like until I tasted it fresh picked from a nearby farm in spring.  Bland, mealy tomatoes are not missed one bit.
My other goal is to learn more about the processes that get my food to the table.  Most farms that we have visited have let us walk through the pastures and meet the animals, peer in at baby chicks just born, or steal a glance at the way yogurt is made.
Back to today.  The farmers market, as you might imagine, was limited.  Very few vendors headed out after this cold week, but we met with each one and found some gems to bring home.  At one stand we got golf ball size yellow onions for only a quarter.  We scored big on fresh processed bacon at another.  One local farmer brought seedlings, which were great to see after my disasters of late.  I bought a cinnamon basil to pot on the porch.
We then headed to Gems Along the Mohawk and grabbed up some locally produced peanut butter, cinnamon apple BBQ sauce, and mustard.  I made a mental note of all the other goodies there for future visits.
Our experience at Maple Hill Creamery was great, too.  In spite of the "road closed" sign, we barreled through and found the farm with no trouble.  We learned about the processing of the dairy products and what some of the future plans are for the family farm.  We were able to drive just to where the cows were out to pasture near the dairy barn and got a glimpse of the farmer on his tractor.  The girls yelled "thank you" to the cows out the window as we drove slowly by.
I don't claim to be a fully converted localvore, but I have found my goals to be easily attainable, and enjoyable.  Most of the farmers who supply us with our food recognize us and many know us by name.  No one should be detached from food.  It sustains us.  We should learn where it comes from, what happens to it as it travels its path to our plates.  We just need to be more aware.
If you got this far through my post...I just have one question for you...

"If our current food system were to collapse and the supermarkets no longer were able to ship in the foods that they typically carry, would you know what to do for food?  Would you know where to go?  Would you be able to survive on your own?  Would you survive?"

The potato experiment

New to my garden this year is potatoes.  Only, I don't have a lot of space or a lot of sunshine to offer them.  So, I purchased three black grow bags from my favorite garden supply company and set them up.  Not quite a pot and not quite a bag, these are made of durable fabric and were super easy to set up and fill.  Just add about 4 inches of compost and potting soil, set the seed potatoes on top and add about 3 more inches on top.  And then, wait.  Most of my seed potatoes had already sprouted before I planted them today, so I am hopeful that sometime late summer or early fall, I will have loads of yummy fingerling and gourmet potatoes to dig up and eat.  I know potatoes are cheap to buy, and this probably isn't saving me money this year, but if you've ever had a freshly dug potato fried in a little olive oil...heaven!  

In other parts of the garden, salad greens are growing faster now.  I have several wonderful looking heads of lettuce that will be turning into a salad early next week!  The newly planted greens have a bit of time left, but I just can't wait to sample some fresh picked greens.  Most of my root crops are sending up delicate shoots, and I will be thinning radishes this weekend.  Spinach, both baby leaf and large savoy are planted in pots.  They sprouted in only 3 days!  

Sadly, I've lost a few more tomato seedlings to damping off.  I have used an organic treatment to try and save the rest, and one tray is healthy and strong.  But, the extra tomatoes are dropping off one by one.  This weekend's challenge is to take the affected tray and pot up the remaining seedlings and separate them.  Hopefully we will have a few extras to share after all.  

All my peppers and eggplants are going strong for now, and broccoli and cauliflower are ready to thin.  I have a few paper egg cartons saved to start up my warm weather crops of squash and melon so I can plant them, egg cup and all right in the garden at the end of May.  

This year has had more difficulty getting off the ground than last year, but I am still looking forward to a great garden summer!

My beautiful garbage

I garden by the moon.  Not that I know that it really helps, but it helps me stay organized.  I know which days I am planting green leafy veggies, which days are designated for root veggies, and which days are not set for planting.  Notice I didn't designate any day for "rest."  There are plenty of other garden chores that need to be done.  On the days that aren't on my calendar for planting, I dig new beds, plan for upcoming garden chores, and ready the ingredients for nourishing my new plants.
This weekend was on the calendar for enlarging my backyard garden (110 more square feet to be exact).  I spent most of my time digging out the sod, hauling the compost up the hill, and digging it into the earth.  Luckily, I had at least one nice sunny, but relatively cool day to work with.  Just as I dug in the last square of rich compost, and wiped my brow, my neighbor leaned over the fence to offer up his tiller...if I ever needed it.  Uh, geez...I just spent about 10 hours digging by hand, but thanks!
So, today, one of my least favorite, but  also quite fascinating chores.  I turned my compost.  I have a big black plastic compost bin in the backyard that we toss in all sorts of goodies that would have otherwise ended up in a trash heap.  My compost style is toss it and forget it.  At least until one of the 3 times a year come up that I turn it.  Most of the time, I literally toss in our food scraps, eggshells, and plant clippings.  I add in a scoop of shredded leaves to cover the food and make sure it gets water and air.  Otherwise, I wait until the bin is near full and then I get to work.  It only takes about an hour.  I lift the bottomless bin off the whole mess and move it to a new spot.  Then, I move all the non-rotted materials back into the moved bin.  About halfway down, things change from well recognized pieces of vegetables and bread to a mushy mass of half-broken down sludge (not my favorite part!).  Then, miraculously, I get to a rich, dark brown layer that is crumbly and earthy.  Black gold.  All those mashed up scraps that would have otherwise just added to our family's trash have been turned into something wonderful for my garden.  I am always amazed at just how much black gold I find at the bottom.  As I stir it and crumble it between my fingers, I add it into a trash bin set aside for carrying finished compost.  Today, I filled the bin almost all the way full again and still had a whole trash bin full of the good finished stuff.  Enough to cover the old half of my veggie garden!  I let it sit for another week or two until the last of the bits are consumed by the worms that I leave in the bin and then it goes right into the earth again.

And if my beautiful trash isn't enough to interest you, here is what else is happening in my garden.  Almost all my salad blends are now out and growing, along with several frost hardy romaines.  By next week, tough love will have me out there thinning and leaving my lots of yummy micro greens to add to my salad.  I had radishes, carrots, beets, and salad turnips sprouting this morning that weren't there last night.  My onion plants appear to have transplanted well...although I may be moving them to a more side location of the garden next week.  No more sprouts in the basement have dampened off...a light layer of cornmeal sprinkled over the seed mix to protect it.  All my broccoli and cauliflower have sprouted, along with a few more eggplants I had almost given up on.

Next up...getting potato grow bags ready and planting a few more root veggies.  I have a couple of tomatoes to "restart" after the damping off disappointment of last week, and a bit of the rows of salad blends that a pesky digger disturbed.  Then, it's planning where all the vines and bush veggies of summer will go to allow for sunlight to reach all of them equally.  Never a dull moment when the season starts!

Every Day is Earth Day

For the past several years, I've celebrated Earth Day by adding a new environmentally sound venture to my life.  It all started with clearing out the chemicals and cleaning with only non-toxic products.  I slowly added growing my own food, reducing energy use in the home, adding local foods to our diet, and reducing our carbon footprint as we travel.  I really felt like I was making a huge difference in the treatment of our planet and in the way our family views our responsibilities.  I've done my research and I've shared what I can with others.  What next?
Yesterday was Earth Day 2010.  My goal for last year was to take on buying local any foods and products that I can...and we are still in the progress of this goal.  So, what to do for 2010?  In spite of my "smart consumer" efforts, I felt something was still not right.  Over the past winter, I began to really look around me.  Literally.  My house is FULL of stuff.  More stuff that we need.  More stuff than I WANT!  I made a plan to start simplifying our stuff.  We've been going through it, weeding out the fluff and getting it ready to give away or sell.  And somehow, I still didn't quite get it.
I'm don't remember when the real epiphany came.  But, when it did, it was one of the biggest revelations I've had.  And it truly was DUH moment.  How in the world could I not have seen how much I was still feeding into the destruction of all that I'm trying to heal.  I was a consumer of non-essential goods.  So, I set about to make a change.  I started to really think about every purchase before it was made.  Do I need this?  Where will it go when I am done with it?  Is it just going to live a short life and then become part of a landfill in a once beautiful land?  And also, how much is it really worth to me to have it?
My husband asked me this week if I had spent a lot of money on my garden expansion.  I defended my purchase, just as I always do, by reminding him how much less I was really buying these days.  And then I wondered...am I really buying less than I used to?  How am I really doing?  Luckily, I have a very simple budgeting account (mint.com for anyone who is curious) that lays all my purchases and income out in one place.  I pulled up the account, and was pleasantly surprised to find that I've actually worked a small miracle in my spending habits.  There were a couple of books that I purchased: one on sewing and one on homemaking, two charges for gardening supplies and seeds that I ordered back in late winter, and the mulch/compost haul from my questioned purchase.  Most of my grocery spending was in local markets and my weekly spending at the foodshed.  Of course, I'm not perfect. I also found a $15 charge at Target that I can't trace back in my memory.  There were also the $20 training wheels for the $10 bicycle that we bought for Kira off of Craig's List.  But, for the most part, I am simply trying not to buy.  And, if it is something I really feel would benefit our life, I try to buy used.  It has only been a few weeks since I declared a war on all things consumed.  I challenged myself to only buy things I could not make or produce on my own.  What I found wasn't just that I could make or produce many things, but that we really never needed many of those things to begin with.
Just as an organic treat is still a treat, an organic purchase is still a purchase.  If I don't need a new shirt, why do I need to buy a 100% organic cotton shirt?  If I have a stack of unread magazines, do I really need to add to that stack?  Just because a product can be recycled when I'm done with it doesn't justify its purchase if I never needed it to begin with.
What to see more ideas on where my thoughts are coming from?  Check out the video I watched online about the problems with consumerism as it is now...
http://www.storyofstuff.com/
Happy Earth Day!

You can never have too much garden

One of the first nice sunny days that I had off work and I headed out to the back garden to see what I could do.  Last year, I discovered that, while it was large enough to hold all my plants, things were too crowded to be spectacular.  So, when my neighbor took down a tree last fall that had formerly shaded the left side of the yard, I decided that I would expand.  Maybe it's hard to tell, but the right side you see in the photo is the old garden covered with a layer of shredded leaves.  There are still a dew plants growing in there, but mostly it's ready for new plantings.  The left side, full of rich, brown, crumbly dirt, is new.  I spent all afternoon outside in the warm sunshine digging out the sod by hand.  A back breaking job, but I love it even still.
All in a day's work, and then I headed out to get some compost.  After loading it up (along with 2 bags of sand for the girls' sandbox, I realized I was going to have to push all 710 pounds of it to the register and load it in the car.  Oh, well...one of those "superwoman" moments.  Yes, I did it...by myself.  Never say I can't get the job done!
So, the next task is to spread out the compost and dig it in.  I typically choose to do it by hand, feeling that this keeps the natural components of the soil more intact.  And then, the waiting until time to plant, which, in my area is still 6 weeks away.
On a disappointing note...a few of my precious tomato seedlings appear to have succumbed to the dreaded damping off fungal disease.  I had no problems with this last year, but I checked on my seedlings just now to find three of them bent over at soil level and one dead.  I have two flats of tomato seedlings growing and lots of other goodies, too.  I don't even know how to prevent the spread at this point.  I keep my seedlings in good air circulation and never overwater, but I still see the signs of trouble.  Ugh.  I'm just praying now that the whole tray won't go down...and especially that it won't spread to other trays nearby.  I have a lot invested in those babies!
Even with this sad moment in my day, my spirits are soaring as I have had a full day of sunshine and lots of dirt under my nails...a sure sign of success in my book!

Spring Rains Bring...

What's growing in my upstate NY garden right now?  My pea shoots have really taken off and I had to install the trellis earlier this week!  I have lots of lettuce and salad greens showing up...I'd say another 10 days and I'll have fresh baby spring greens!  Yum!  None of my new carrot or onion seeds are sprouting, but I have overwintered carrots galore...and I just planted a 20 foot row of onion plants given to me by a gardener at our church!  Yay!  My cherry belle radishes sprouted a nice green row overnight last night.  I love these picked when the size of a marble and tossed in my salad...sweet and crunchy and not bitter at all!  I planted some hanging baskets with Tom Thumb peas, but not sure if they get enough sun...this is new for me this year.

What's new in the seedlings?  All my peppers and tomatoes are growing well.  I did half my peppers in a standard organic seedling mix and half in peat moss free mix.  The ones in the peat moss free mix are twice as big and I planted them a week later!  I'll be transfering half of them tonight to make room in my seed starters for broccoli and cauliflower seeds.  Tough love time for most tomatoes and peppers, too.  I plant 4 seeds to a cell and only the one strongest gets to remain.  The others are snipped to keep the main one healthier.  My eggplants seem to be 50-50.  Although last year my survival rate was worse.  They just seem to be a challenge to grow.  I can give them plenty of heat or plenty of light, but not enough of both at the same time.  More research may be needed.

Otherwise, I am busy splitting seed packets for other gardening friends.  In order to keep supplying my indecisive nature, I split seed packets with others to keep my cost down while trying all sorts of new things.  If you are interested in buying any starter seeds from me, let me know!!

Paying it down...

I just finished a wonderful book Your Money or Your Life by Vicky Robin and Joe Dominguez and was amazed by the interesting viewpoints on money and spending habits presented there.  It isn't your basic "work really hard and sell all your belongings to get out of debt" book.  Nor was is a book about "the latte factor."  More a restructuring of your views on how much your habits are actually costing you in terms of both money and time.  It actually stresses the importance of thinking through how your habits might actually be forcing you to work more.  It encourages people to spend less on material goods and have more free time.
One of the steps in this book is making a list of every penny that leaves your hands.  Since I signed up for mint.com (an excellent money tracker, by the way!), I had access to most of my payments over the past several months.  Of course, this doesn't exclude me from making a cash flow list, but it did open my eyes to a few things.  First of all, I had several "subscriptions" that I not only do not need, but do not want.  I spent the first hour and a half of my day calling and cancelling several things.  My eye shadow club from BE?  I have a stockpile of great looking colors from them already!  My dropshots profile?  Haven't used it in 2 years.  Monthly credit check?  A year ago I signed all my bills up on auto pay and I keep very close tabs on my accounts with mint.com.  My subscription to the local paper?  I only read it on Sunday, and all it does is make me want to buy more products from the sale ads.  All together?  I just dropped almost $40 a month.  I just gained almost $480 a year.  Wow.  A few low cost items can really add up.  But, not just in money.  I would have to work about a week just to earn enough to pay off the yearly total.  So, I just freed up a week of my life's work.
I figured while I was at it, I might as well check on my credit cards and why most of my balances don't appear to be dropping.  My balance has been more or less the same since I graduated from college over 10 years ago!  And it's a pretty darn big balance at that.  Frugal has not always been my goal.  I learned that the card I am most loyal to has now given me a 28.9% interest rate!  I'd pay it off in about 36 years according to my statement.  Incredible!  Appalling!  I also researched other card websites and learned that one of my cards (that had a very low balance) was offering me a great promo rate less than 5.9% interest for 18 months.  Transfer done.  This could save me several thousand dollars and releases a lot of stress!  Sheesh!
Don't get me wrong, I don't think that this alone is going to rescue me from debt.  The next step is to find a plan to pay this down and get it set up on auto pay so I don't even have to think about it.  And, of course, not to add anything else to my debt.  Almost every year we have a crisis.  This year was a few thousand dollars in vet bills for our elderly dog.  Last year, it was the death of my beloved Saturn and the gain of a new CRV.  Sometimes it's a burst water line, and sometimes it is the loss of income.  But, every year, we are unprepared.  And that had to change.
Living simply doesn't mean living unprepared.  To me, it means having the means to pay for what comes our way.  Not being stressed about the unknown.  But, at the same time, not living with more that we need.
Current financial difficulties taken care of today.  Next on my list?  Preparing for our sell-it-all garage sale.