Continue reading »]]> I spent about two days of my time off of work planning next year’s vegetable garden. Yes, I realize it’s early January, but I like to start seeds beginning in February, which means I need to get my seed orders in now! That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s too late for you to get started on your vegetable gardens for this-coming year. In fact, the perfect time to start planning is right now, and I’m going to give you some tips that will help you get started.

First, What Went Wrong Last Year

Last year, a couple of things went wrong with my vegetable gardening plans. First, I tried to go in on a giant seed order with all of my gardening friends. Although I think we saved some money on shipping, and had some fun getting together over the garden catalogs, we placed our order later than I like, it took us forever to divide up the seeds (we split single packets of seed among as many as six of us, which was kind of nightmarish!), and I bought way more seed than I needed because I wanted to try a few plants of everything my friends were trying.

The second major disaster was that one of my friends and I decided to try our hand at larger-scale gardening and rented a 50×50 foot plot from a friend here in town. That’s a lot of space. In fact, that’s about five times as much space as I have in my home garden. And I was not prepared. Again, we got things planted late, had many weed and deer disasters, and in the end, spent more time out there working than the resulting produce warranted.

Tip #1:If you gardened last year, and it didn’t go as well as you’d hoped, spend some time up-front thinking about what went wrong and what you can do about it. It’s easier to address watering issues, weeds, space, and varieties in January before anything’s in the ground than it is in July when you’ve already repeated your mistakes from last year.

How I’m Going to do Better This Year
So this year, I’m going to cut back on garden space by nearly 800 square feet. This means both renting a smaller plot (I’m going for two 10x20s at the community garden this year, I hope!), and creating some more space here at home so that it’s easier to just walk out back and care for things. I’m taking an odd triangle of space that we have in the very back of our yard and turning one section of it into a bed for cutting flowers and the rest of it into a squash/pumpkin/melon patch. It’s a good 150 square feet, so I think it will work well for this purpose and it currently completely unused space in our yard.

Moving the cut flowers to the back patch means I’m going to be able to reclaim one of my raised beds, which has had cut flowers in it the past two seasons, for vegetables. Most of the deer attracting veggies can therefore live here at our house, where hopefully the proximity of other houses and our “guard dog” will keep the deer away (we have had deer tracks in our yard since the fence went up, so this is not a complete guarantee, but it will definitely be more deer proof than the community garden).

Step One – How much space do you have?

Figuring out how much space you have is a two-fold process. Obviously, there are limitations to what you can grow on your own property based not only on the size of your yard, but on how much shade you get, whether animals will be a problem, etc. We have about 800 square feet of garden space in our yard, supplemented by a very large container garden on our patio. As I mentioned, I also supplement this space with a plot at a community garden, which may or may not be an option for you.

So step one is figuring out how much space you have at your home. If you’re new at gardening, definitely start small and build up. There’s nothing more disheartening–and I speak from experience here–than to bite off too much and watch weeds and lack of care eat up all of your hard work. Even if you have an apartment, you can have a small container garden and successfully grown everything from greens and herbs to tomatoes, beans, peppers, and strawberries.

Step two is figuring out if you can handle a bit more space. Do you have an extra bit of grass you can reclaim for a veggie bed? A sandbox that isn’t being used any more? A spot on the patio for a few good-sized pots? If so, measure out that space and figure out an approximate area by multiplying the width by the length. This is easy if the space is square, less so if you’re figuring out the area of round pots or an odd-shaped bed like my new pumpkin patch, which is going to end up being a sort of trapezoid. You don’t have to be exact here, just get a ballpark on the space you have.

If you have the option to add more garden space, a good rule of thumb is 400 square feet of gardening space for a family of four to eat from during the season, or 800 square feet if you’re hoping to preserve some for winter eating. Here’s a link to more information on figuring out how much space you need. The time to sign up for a community garden plot is now, so take a look online and see what your community has to offer.

To give you an idea of space, 800 square feet would be a 20×40 foot vegetable bed, or a combination of smaller beds. As I said, I have about 800 square feet at my house, but quite a bit is taken up with perennial food crops like raspberries, strawberries, herbs, horseradish, and asparagus. So I’m adding the additional 400 square feet at the community plot in an attempt to grow enough food for our family of four, plus enough to put by for the winter.

Tip 2: Spend some time up-front figuring out how much gardening you have time for, and how much you think your family needs. Then check in later in the week for step 2: figuring out how much of each type of vegetable you need.

Continue reading »]]> A friend on mine recently asked me for some advice on eating a low sodium diet because she was recently diagnosed with high blood pressure. I realized as I typed up all my tips that a heart-healthy diet looks a whole lot like an Earth-friendly one. Just another reason to think about the foods we eat and to choose carefully in ways that will likely vary from the typical Western diet.

My husband’s father has high blood pressure, and my Dad did too, so because there is a genetic factor, I’ve been watching our salt intake since before I learned  that what I eat makes such a huge impact on my carbon footprint. Here’s what I do:

Use Less Salt

This first one doesn’t have an environmental impact that I’m aware of, but it definitely has a health impact: I don’t salt anything until it’s at the end of the cooking time. A teaspoon of salt at the end of a dish will make it taste saltier than a teaspoon added at the beginning for some inexplicable reason, so you can add less total salt without compromising flavor if you add it toward the end of the cooking time. This is also helpful if it feels good to you to add salt at the table. My Dad would put salt on his dinner no matter how much salt we’d put in while we were cooking it, so we ended up just not salting things much during cooking so that he didn’t add too much salt at the table!

I try to add lots of other herbs and spices to make up for less salt. We use lots of fresh-ground black pepper, garlic, and Italian herbs (parsley, oregano, sage, rosemary, thyme, basil). Salt is a primary ingredient in a lot of rubs & sauces for meats, but you can add a lot less if you ramp up the other spices and it will still taste great. I almost always double the other herbs in everything I cook (especially garlic!) except rosemary and sage, which tend to have a pretty strong taste.

The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet is really similar to a sustainable diet, especially if you choose local and organic for all those great fruits and veggies. Take a look at an introduction to the DASH diet, as well as some more in-depth information, and recipes.

Avoid Packaged Foods

Here’s where the advice for a heart-healthy diet starts to look very much like the recommendations for a more sustainable one: Avoid packaged food where possible. Packaged foods are notoriously high in salt (even the kids’ organic Annie’s Mac N Cheese has most of a whole day’s worth of salt in it!), so you can probably cut your intake the most by avoiding them where you can. In addition to having the highest salt and fat content, packaged foods also have the most processing, which takes energy. Often these foods are also transported huge distances to get to your local grocery store as well, which also uses fossil fuels. They’re also the foods most likely to be wrapped in tons of plastic packaging, much of which is made from petroleum products and difficult or impossible to recycle.

This piece of advice is the hardest to swallow, I know. So if you’re looking to eat a healthier diet, or to eat easier on the Earth, but feel overwhelmed and discouraged by the prospect of making every single food item from scratch, try making one change per month. That’s essentially what we have done over the last two years or so and now we barely have any processed foods in our house. We started with avoiding canned foods due to the BPA used in the lining of the cans. I bought a crock pot and started making my own beans and soups, which were the two main things I bought in canned form. Next to go was canned/jarred tomato products. I started canning and freezing my own tomato sauce, and it tastes so much better than store-bought that this was a fairly easy change to make.

Another suggestion would be to start buying whole grains. The fiber is good for your heart and digestive track, and whole grain flour is generally less processed (I know there are exceptions) than white flour. Avoiding grain products with High-Fructose Corn Syrup (yep, some whole-grain products definitely still contain HFCS) is another step both toward heart health and a more sustainable, less processed diet.

Eat Less Meat

The research demonstrating that eating less (or no!) meat, and eating meat the is lower in saturated fats such as grass fed meats, can reduce high blood pressure and heart disease is fairly overwhelming. New studies demonstrate that this diet is also easier on the Earth, especially if the meat and dairy that you do consume is sustainably-raised. Sierra Club has some good information on their Food Consumption Fact Sheet.

Get Some Exercise

And I’m not talking about Wii Fit, folks. Getting outside and going for a walk, bike ride, or run, is obviously good for your health, but it also prevents you from doing something else requires fossil fuels (like trolling Facebook, playing Wii, driving someplace you could walk or bike to, etc.). As I’ve mentioned before, I hadn’t exercised one bit pretty much since I got pregnant with Gabriel six years ago, and I started in January with just taking the dog out for 15 minutes a couple of times per week. I built up REALLY slowly and now, 10 months later, I’m running 2-3 times per week and biking and doing yoga too! You don’t need to exercise that much to make a difference–even walking 30 minutes 3 times per week is supposed to be enough to get all the benefits. So if you can walk to the Post Office, or to a friend’s house, or to the park instead of driving, do it!

When Your Heart, and the Earth, Are Healthy, Anything is Possible…

I’m beginning to believe that all things are related and that things we think are disparate like wanting peace, health, or happiness, and wanting to live easy on the Earth, in harmony with your community, or in prosperity are really all one the same thing, part of one unified effort. This is just another example. Heart disease now affects nearly a billion people world-wide. No one wants to die from heart disease or lose a loved-one to it. No one really wants to destroy the Earth, even if we can’t all agree on the best course of action. What if solving both problems was as easy as making one change per month? What if making those changes also helped you become part of your local community because you’re vising with local farmers and artisans, getting outside more to enjoy your neighbors, and supporting those people closest to you with your hard-earned dollars?  Food for thought, to be sure…

Continue reading »]]> A few weeks back, I was interviewed for an article in the Boulder Daily Camera called Preserving Your Roots about home root cellaring. I got quite a few questions from friends about one particular part of the article: storing carrots. Since I harvested a full 5-gallon bucket’s worth of carrots this week from our community garden patch, I had the opportunity this weekend to document the process of preparing these carrots for a winter of storage and thought I’d share it here.

Although I have often peeled, chopped (or grated), blanched, and frozen carrots in the past, by April, I’m desperate for something with a bit of crunch. Two years ago, I tried taking the last of the late fall carrots from the farmer’s market, sealing them tight in zip-top bags, and storing them in our extra fridge. They lasted until March, but took up a ton of space that I might have used on another scarce commodity in Colorado winters–good fruit!

So last year, I purchased Eliot Coleman’s Four Season Harvest and read about his recommendation: storing carrots in buckets of damp sand. Carrots need a high amount of humidity to keep their crunch, so the idea behind the wet sand is that it will both help keep the carrots cool and hold in moisture. Here’s what you do.

First, cut the greens and the stringy roots off of the carrots. I’ve seen a variety of recommendations with regards to whether to keep up to an inch of greenery on the top of the carrots, but I never do this and mine typically keep quite well. Then wash the carrots and pull out any that have insect or shovel damage. These will be the first to spoil and should not be put in with the rest. Either grate & freeze these, or store them in the fridge and use them within a week.

I store my carrots in a 5-gallon food-grade plastic bucket (I have quite a few of these on hand for bulk flour, beans, and grains) with a tight-fitting lid and use play sand purchased from the local hardware store. I use a 1-cup measuring cup to scoop an inch or so of sand into the bottom of the bucket and then start laying the carrots in with additional sand. I need to warn you here that if you don’t have someone with some pretty serious muscles to carry the full bucket to where you intend to store it for the winter (a garage that doesn’t get below freezing or an unheated basement, attic, or crawl space would all work), you might want to consider filling the bucket in its final location–ours was over 50 pounds when it was full!

If the sand is not already damp (mine sat out in the rain for two days between the time I bought it and when we finally filled the bucket this afternoon), add water until it’s thoroughly damp, but not dripping. Standing water in the bucket would lead to rot, but the carrots need enough moisture in the sand to keep from going limp.

Keep alternating sand and carrots until the bucket is full, put the lid on it, and that’s it. Checking for moisture and adding a cup of water here or there throughout the season may be necessary depending on how dry it is in the room where the carrots are stored. Other root vegetables like celery root, kohlrabi, and beets, can also be stored this way. I also have a friend who uses damp wood shavings instead of sand (make sure the saw dust is from untreated lumber!!), and I’ve even read that you can use dirt or straw, although it seems like insect and rodent problems might be more likely with those materials.

With two weeks to go until the last Boulder County Farmer’s Market, there’s still time to stock up on root veggies, winter squash, onions, and garlic before winter. Doing so now will make sure you have fresh local veggies to enjoy all winter long.

Continue reading »]]> If you read the Boulder Daily Camera, you might have seen a familiar face on today’s front cover. Actually, three familiar faces: myself, Gabriel & Lily. I was interviewed last week about my efforts to cellar onions, garlic, squash, and potatoes over the winter using a system of shelving and lidded bins. Little did I know that I’d get a blurb on the front page pointing to a pretty cool story a few pages later! Take a look to learn more about building your own root cellar. And check out another great article on how to figure out what you need to store for the winter.

Continue reading »]]> If there’s one thing tomato-growers in colder climates fear, it’s early frost that strikes with lots of green fruit still on the vine. According to the Purdue Cooperative Extension, optimal ripening temperature is between 68-77, and it hasn’t been getting nearly that warm here this last week, and the nighttime temperatures just keep on dropping, meaning frost will be here soon.

Here in Zone 5, I face this every single September, so this year I went looking for tips on what to do. I had two goals: ripen as many tomatoes as I can and find things to do with the rest of the green ones. After searching the ‘net, talking to friends, and tweeting on the topic, here are a few tips that I’m going to try. Lucky for you, I have enough tomato plants to try just about every one of these methods and report back!

When to start thinking about ripening green fruit

According to the Colorado State Cooperative Extension, even temperatures of 40 degrees can damage a green tomato, as well as the leaves of the plant, which is bad news for those green tomatoes because the leaves are required to produce the energy to ripen the fruit! They recommend pruning any new growth from the plant to help focus the plant on fruit-ripening. It may be too late here in Colorado to prune new growth, but that’s something I can try for next year.

If you know in advance that an early frost is coming, there are a few things you can do to temporarily ward off one or two cool nights. Take a look at my post on what to do when frost threatens.

How to assess which tomatoes are best for ripening off the vine

Tomatoes that are mature, but still green, have a chance of ripening and developing flavor. Fruit that has not reached mature size and has not even started to turn lighter green/white or orange is more likely to rot and taste like cardboard, so don’t even try to ripen these.

Ripening tomatoes

Tomatoes will not ripen in the fridge–it’s too cold–but will ripen in anywhere from 14-28 days at temperatures of 55-70 degrees. So the various cooperative extensions recommend putting them in a well-ventilated area, like an open-topped box, and waiting for them to ripen. For me, that’s a lot of floor space taken up by boxes of tomatoes and, since my kids tend to keep me busy, I’m very likely to end up with a big moldy box of fruit.

So I went looking for other options. An old friend recommended dipping the tomatoes in a 10% bleach solution to kill fungus/bacteria, wrapping them in newspaper, and storing in a cooler. She swears she has tomatoes until Thanksgiving every year because of this method, so I think I’m going to have to give it a try (although I’ll likely use hydrogen peroxide instead of bleach).

I have tried pulling entire tomato plants out by the roots and hanging them in the garage. This works well for tomatoes that are fully mature as described above, but if you aren’t fairly diligent about checking the plants, you’ll end up with lots of tomatoes fall off the vines and making a mess on the garage floor. So just be forewarned.

GrowVeg has a great post on ripening green tomatoes that mentions some of the same techniques I’ve already covered but adds a new one that is worth trying: adding ripened fruit to the storage container.

I had never thought of this, which is odd because I do this all the time on my kitchen counter to ripen green bananas and avocados! Ripe fruit gives off ethylene gas, which speeds the ripening process of fruit. So GrowVeg suggests taking a bag, box, or bowl of green tomatoes, and adding a ripe one to the mix. The ripe one will give off ethylene gas to ripen the others. I know I can ripen avocados nearly overnight using a single ripe banana, so I feel confident that this will work.

I give up!! How to use green tomatoes

Everyone’s heard of fried green tomatoes, but I’m guessing not many people have actually tried them. They are delicious and recipes abound (check out SouthernFood.com for the recipe I’m guessing my grandmother used or JoyInTheGarden for some modern takes on the old favorite!).

If you’re looking for something a little bit more on the light side (as I am), here are some other recommendations:

• Relish – Like pickle relish, green tomato relish is chopped vegetables mixed with sugar and vinegar. I love just about any sort of relish, so I think I’ll be trying this recipe and I may even try to modify Crunchy Chicken‘s now-famous spicy relish recipe to use green tomatoes instead of cucumbers!
• Salsa – According to the NY Times, you can substitute green tomatoes for tomatillos and make a mean green tomato salsa verde!
• Chutney – This is sort of like a cross between relish and jam, and Little Green Fingers’ recipe for Green Tomato Chutney sounds delish!

I understand the unpredictable nature of vegetable gardening, but I’m just not willing to let too many green tomatoes go on the compost pile this fall. Hopefully a combination of the tips and recipes above will help keep that from happening in my garden, and yours!

Continue reading »]]> When the garden’s bountiful tomato crop dove-tailed with one of our traditional Friday Afternoon Club gatherings, I decided to get creative in the kitchen. I skimmed through several recipes until I found one that met my requirements for a good bloody mary, including:

• Horseradish & hot sauce – if it ain’t spicy, I don’t want it!
• Multiple types of veggies – I like the depth of flavor that the other veggies add.
• Other spices – plain salt & pepper doesn’t do it for me either.

The winner was The Best Bloody Mary on Recipezaar and it lived up to its name, especially after a few tweaks:

• I used home-made vegetarian Worcestershire sauce, also from Recipezaar, because I didn’t have any on hand.
• In addition to the garlic that is cooked with the vegetables, I added a teaspoon of fresh garlic after cooking.
• I at least quadrupled the hot sauce (I think I still added some to my finished sample drink before I canned it!)
• I used Black Butte Porter instead of Guinness, because it’s what I had in my handon hand.
• Also note that if you’re going to can this instead of drinking it right away, don’t add the booze or the lime juice–add that to taste when you crack the jar open in a few months on a cold winter morning!

Here I would like to digress from recipes to comment on something I’ve noticed as I’ve been canning this season. I’ve really enjoyed trying new recipes that I’ve found on the Internet, but I’m rather appalled at the number of recipes that call for some seriously dubious canning practices. Neither of the recipes I mentioned above are guilty of this, for the record, so I feel like I can point this out without naming any names.

For the record, I learned to can grape juice in a dishwasher close to 10 years ago, so I understand how family traditions can lead to some pretty off-the-wall food preservation techniques. However, if you’re going to post recipes on the Internet, I think there’s a little bit of obligation to provide a safe recipe. For example, turning jam or jelly cans upside down instead of heating them in a canning bath CAN create a seal, but does NOT create the vacuum that is necessary to keep air from coming in contact with your home-preserved food. Same with putting hot liquids & veggies into hot jars and then putting hot lids on those jars. It’s the vacuum, not just the seal, that keeps food from spoiling. For more information, check with your local Cooperative Extension, pick up one of the many excellent books that are available on canning, or check out my canning primer.

So if you’re out looking for recipes on the Internet and find one that you’d like to try that uses one of these dubious canning methods, there’s still hope of canning safely. Let’s use the Bloody Mary Mix as an example. The original author of the recipe had no intentions of canning it, so I needed to come up with instructions that would guarantee a safe result. I consulted my Ball Blue Book of canning and found a recipe for Tomato Garden Juice Blend.

The duration of canning and the need for the addition of acids like lemon juice or citric acid is determined by how acidic the food you’re canning is naturally. Tomatoes are pretty acidic, but I didn’t want to use a plain old tomato juice recipe because there were so many other things in the Bloody Mary Mix. The garden juice blend was ideal because it had carrots onion, parsley, and salt in addition to the tomatoes–similar to the mix I was canning.

In the case of the Bloody Mary Mix, that meant adding 1 T of lemon juice to each pint jar and processing in my canning bath for 50 minutes (note that due to the altitude here, I have to add 10 more minutes to the processing time). A double recipe of the mix easily made 7 pints, and perhaps would have done more if not for my friends and I having a few on Friday afternoon!

Continue reading »]]> This weekend, I attended a talk by Kip Nash, a Boulder man who has turned many of the front yards in his neighborhood into farm plots as part of the Boulder Community Roots project. If the endless gorgeous seed catalogs, warm weather, and the kohlrabi, sorrel, kale, garlic, onions, garlic chives, and strawberries sprouting in my garden didn’t do it already, spring garden fever set in with a vengeance after his inspiring talk.

At one point, he referenced Richard Heinberg–a peak oil guy–and a pamphlet he’s published based on a lecture in which he called for America to train 50 million farmers to deal with the food shortages and rising food prices that will come as our petroleum demand outstrips supply. This article by Heinberg, although not mentioning the 50 million farmers, gives you a great overview of why he thinks there’s going to be a global food shortage.

I know this is hard to even fathom when for most of this winter gas has been at about 1.79 a gallon, but if global consumption continues at current levels (and the growth in India, China, Russia and Brazil almost guarantees that it will), we are going to run out of petroleum. And when we run out of petroleum, things like Kiwis brought in from the Southern Hemisphere and grapes from South Africa, not to mention all the other food products that come from places like China, are going to either get really, really expensive, or are going to completely disappear.

My whole life, being a child of the 70s, there has been talk about the loss of family farmers, the number of farmers that are leaving home for jobs in the city, Farm Aid, the Farm Bill, etc., etc. So it’s scary to think that, in a time when we as a society are losing our connection with the earth and with our agrarian heritage (my family comes from good farm stock, doesn’t yours?), we might suddenly find ourselves responsible in a real, tangible way, for producing food for our families. So how are we going to get 50 million people trained up and equipped to grow food on a local level so that we don’t experience massive first-world starvation when this happens?

We’re still in the midst of our year of eating local, and it’s going well despite a certain longing that all members of the family have for fresh fruit right now (yes, we’ve been eating US-grown citrus all winter, but even that gets old after a while!). But it still may seem premature to issue ourselves a brand-new food challenge. And yet, I will: We’re going to see how much of our food we can grow ourselves in 2009. We started in January with a little window-sill herb garden and lots of perusing of those beautiful seed catalogs I mentioned.

We continued last month by placing a huge seed order with some friends, turning and adding compost to our vegetable beds out back, and by securing a 50×50 foot plot across the highway where we can grow some more veggies. And today, we <em>finally</em> (emphasis from Gabriel, who has been begging/harassing me for weeks now) planted peas, spinach, and leaf lettuce. It’s only March 8, so I think this may be the earliest I have ever actually gotten my behind in gear for planting, and there’s more planned for this week.

Another neighbor who shares my love of veggie gardening is coming over this week to help me clean pots and flats so that we can get our tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and leeks started under the lights. Despite fears that people would think I was trying to grow a slightly more lucrative and less legal plant in the basement, I have purchased a roll of mylar (think shiny silver balloon material) and will be encasing the seed-starting rack Matt built me last year on three sides with mylar and on the front side with clear plastic to help hold in heat and moisture and reflect back light to increase the efficiency of my seed-starting this season.

What I hope to do is see how much of a dent we can put in our $250-300 weekly Farmer’s Market bill this summer. With all the preserving we do (yes, we’re planning, as I expected, to just keep on eating local when our official year is up in September 2009, although I’m guessing bananas and avocados, which have already made occasional appearances in our kitchen, will return to staple foods), it is hard to imagine that we won’t buy some items at market. I’m not, for example, growing broccoli, and doubt that the 20 cauliflower I have on the plan will be sufficient for my cauliflower-obsessed family. And even with a 50×50 plot shared between two families and the 500 square feet of garden space we have here at home, we’ll never produce enough melon and watermelon to keep my kids satisfied. Grains will also still have to come from the market or the local co-op–I just don’t have room to produce the quantity of grain my family consumes. But I do know a few local grain farmers, so perhaps I can get them to trade me grain for veggies. Hmmm….

Another challenge will be to see how much season-extending I can do this year (a la Eliot Coleman’s Four Season Harvest), which is something that didn’t go so well for me last year. I planted in August and again in September, but still didn’t get a harvest of anything (although a lot of the stuff is coming up now, so it wasn’t a complete waste!). Having frozen veggies in the freezer is wonderful, but having crisp greens, carrots, and other root vegetables is going to make the menu next winter even more delicious than it was this winter!

So what about you? Do you have aspirations to become one of Heinberg’s 50 million farmers? I know I do (and I have the dirt under my fingernails to prove it, starting today!).

Continue reading »]]> In mid-September, our family began what has turned out to be a fun and educational adventure in local eating. After months of canning, drying, and freezing every fruit and vegetable we could get our hands on, after many talks with other local folks committed to eating Colorado-grown food, after many, many trips to the Farmer’s Markets, we thought we were ready.

We quit buying bananas, veggie burgers, avocados, and most other packaged foods (I have ended up letting my children pick one non-local item on each grocery story run. Most often that’s Pirate Booty or Fig Newmans and I can live with that!). We continued to make our own yogurt and started making our own butter and sandwich bread too.

And we started to eat out of our freezer and our pantry. I have to say, I was just sure we were going to run out of food and be desperate for veggies by April when the farmer’s market resumes here in Boulder County. So I am pleased to report that not only do we still have plenty of food (OK, enough food to last through spring and into summer when the “real” substantial vegetables start showing up at the market), but we’ve still got fresh stuff including garlic, onions, potatoes, winter squash, pumpkins, apples, carrots, cabbage, beets, parsnips, and rosemary (the rosemary, in fact, is still alive out in the garden despite a few weeks of really, really cold weather). And nobody (including Matt) has asked for bananas. Surprises all around.

Now it’s late January and I’m starting to plan the garden for this-coming season. I’ll be gardening a 50×50 foot plot with a neighbor this year in addition to the space I have in my own yard, so you can bet that a ton of the food that goes in our freezer this fall will be from our own efforts! This expanded space is going to let us plant things that were either scarce or expensive at the local market, including:

• Cauliflower – We’re addicted! And they never had enough for our needs at the market. Amazingly, this is the first vegetable that we ran out of this winter, and not because we didn’t freeze much–we did a good 20 pound case of the stuff, but we’ve been roasting it with onions, olive oil, garlic, pine nuts, salt & pepper for an easy and delicious side dish that even the kids will eat!
• Tomatoes – I could never have enough and have been miserly judicious in my use of my dried tomatoes and canned/frozen sauce.
• Basil – Because you can never have enough pesto.
• Peppers – See basil, above
• Tomatillos – Hello, $4 a pound?!
• Cilantro – Oh, the Gazpacho I’ll enjoy this summer…

In addition to these garden staples, I’m experimenting in two new areas this season: beer gardening and tea gardening. And no, that doesn’t mean drinking beer/tea while gardening (although I often do!). It means that I just placed an order for five different varieties of hops from The Thyme Garden Herb Company and that I’m going to have one heck of an herb garden this year in hopes of making my own tea with medicinal herbs like chamomile, bee balm, ginger, and lemon balm, and tasty stuff like spearmint and stevia.

Of course all of this means that I’ve got work to do, so I’d better stop blogging and get back to my gardening catalogs (poor me!).

Continue reading »]]> I’m a bit of a worrier. Combine that with the company Matt & I work for announcing huge layoffs, war dragging on abroad, friends losing their jobs left and right, the economy spiraling ever downward, and finances therefore tightening, all at a time when I’d rather be shopping for fun things for my children, and you get a mama whose list of things to be thankful for is a little shorter than it has been in the past. Or is it?

Once I started working on this post, I realized that while I may not be thanking the powers that be for that big holiday bonus that didn’t come, for the refinance that keeps seeming to evade us, or for job security for ourselves and our friends, I am thankful for so many things.

I’m thankful that we’re healthy, even if we are potentially going to be broke I’m thankful that I started on this crazy food preservation/local eating adventure before I realized that having a lower grocery bill might be more than a nice-to-have this winter. I’m thankful that my children (and my husband) haven’t totally castigated me for making them live without things like boxed mac-n-cheese, bananas and avocados this winter. I’m thankful for my friends who are in the same boat with me, who have been swapping their favorite sandwich bread recipes and home-made Christmas present ideas.

I’m thankful that I know people like Crunchy Domestic Goddess (and many others) who were willing to put themselves out there to do things on a grand scale like get Obama elected president (oh, how thankful I am to type the words President-Elect Obama) and, on a smaller scale, to help pass an ordinance here locally to allow backyard egg production! I’m thankful for all the wonderful progressive neighbors I met volunteering for the Lyons Obama campaign, and that we’ve moved to a neighborhood that just plain feels like home.

I’m thankful that, in reward for all the hours Matt’s logged flying back and forth for business, we got to fly out to Washington to spend Thanksgiving with Matt’s family for free (OK, there was that $15 per bag fee, but still, that beats 4 $400 tickets!) and that in 3 weeks, we’ll be with my family in Florida. And I’m thankful for the opportunity all of this economic turmoil has given us to take stock of what is really important to us and what we can live without.

I’m thankful that my children are as entertained by baking bread with their mama, feeding celery to goats, and digging in the dirt as they are by hi-tech toys. I’m thankful that I don’t need anything for Christmas, even if there are things that I want

I won’t say that I’m over worrying. I won’t promise not to forget to be thankful during this next year, which will bring more economic turmoil. But I will say that I see positives in all of this. A great deal of introspection goes into tightening your belt, buckling down, and preparing for the worst. It’s a gentle reminder that, as the saying goes, the best things in life really are free…

Continue reading »]]> We have been immersed in preparation for our year of eating local and are happy to see The Eat Local Challenge blog join the mix of folks blogging about local eating adventures.

The Eat Local Challenge is working on a challenge for the month of October and so, of course, we’re game! They’ve asked us to answer a few questions, including our definition of local, exemptions, and our goals for the month.

Our definition of local
We are lucky to have a lot of food available to us here in Colorado. So I’m defining local as Colorado-grown. Within 100 miles (a la the 100 mile diet) would of course be a goal to shoot for, but most of the wines and fruit in Colorado are grown on the Western slope (more than 100 miles from here), so I do make some allowances. I’m being fairly strict about both produce and processed foods: all breads, crackers and snacks need to be produced in Colorado (although we realize that a short-coming of this is not knowing if the local producers are sourcing locally–if they’re not publicizing it, they’re probably not).

Exemptions
We seem completely unable to locate local oils beyond butter. And other staples like oats, flour, and other grains are available, but harder to come by than a jaunt down to the local grocery store. Of course coffee and tea are not grown here, so our caffeine is coming from outside Colorado. And I have to be reasonable about the kids.

Although I’m willing to make my own Mac-n-Cheese and granola, and Matt & I could probably live with the local goat and raw milk cheese, Gabriel & Lily require some cheeses (primarily string cheese and Parmesan) that aren’t available locally. Nuts are also a problem and although I sourced some local pine nuts, we’re still buying other nuts and nut butters.

Matt would like to add bananas and avocados to the list, but I’m going to hold out as long as I can on those. By January, I may have to concede, and we’ll probably allow some US-grown citrus over the winter, when it’s typically tasty and widely available. And local eggs are not always available, thus our decision to get some layers this spring and try for the best kind of local–grown in our own back yard!

Oh, and I almost forgot: condiments and spices. I made my own pickles this year and am still hoping to experiment with catsup recipes. I grew a ton of herbs and bought even more at the market. But there’s no way I can live without ginger, cumin, vanilla, chocolate, and cinnamon for a year, so I’m not even going to try. Sugar is also a concern, although we’re hoping to swap out as much sugar as possible and substitute the great local honey we have here in Lyons.

Goals for the month (or year)
As I mentioned, we’re really trying to do this for a year, not just a month. The goal is a year (September 15, 2008 – September 14, 2009) of local eating, but I say that not really expecting that we’ll succeed in only eating from Colorado for a whole 12 months. Instead, we’re really hoping to find as many local sources as we can (our research started this past spring, so we’ve learned a lot already!), try them all, and come up with a feasible, primarily local, mostly plant-based organic diet that is both well-rounded a not a hardship for little people.

This experiment, when we’re done, is setting the stage for a deliberate attempt to eat locally for the rest of our lives. I consider this not only a good choice for our health and the environment, but a statement of the need for our current food systems to change. I love that blogs like The Eat Local Challenge exist to help others realize the importance of being deliberate about our food choices.