Tag Archives: vegetables

summer = stress?

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Around here, summer is more stressful than the school year. Between work travel, the kids zombie-fying themselves at home while my husband does his best not to throttle them, and the standard demands of housekeeping coupled with the increased yard maintenance, I can’t wait until the smell of sharpened pencils fills the air. Keeping up is always a challenge – one that I’m not exactly rising to this year. But, I soldier on!

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In the meantime, my tomato plants have verily hit the dust (with a few exceptions), but my beans, garlic, and onions have more than made up for the loss.

Oh, do I know my onions. I’ve been sneaking these babies out of their raised beds as I’ve needed them for cooking, which has been great fun in and of itself. This past weekend, I realized I needed to get these buggers out of the ground once and for all (at least the yellow onions, which I planted mid-fall last year). I estimate I’ve probably used about 15 yellow onions so far – and here’s the rest:

Thankfully, we have patient neighbors, who don’t mind (as far as we know, at least) when we make an onion drying rack out of clothesline and a couple of random 1x2s. There’s 47 happy little onions hanging out here – so from a beginning of 80, 62 isn’t too shabby. These range in size from 2-6 ounces, so not grocery store huge, but perfectly acceptable onions nonetheless.

I let a few go to seed just for the heck of it (when was the last time *you* saw an onion flower?):

The seeds are pretty amazing – they look like miniature onions to me, actually. If you follow the stem all the way down you can see how much smaller and less bulbous this guy is compared to his neighbors. But I’m hoping to save some seeds and I figured onions were worth a go, so a smaller bulb isn’t the end of the world.

In other news, the elephant garlic delivered:

This head was about 6 ounces, the largest of the five heads I grew. The smallest, about 3 ounces. Enough to keep us in garlic for a few weeks, at least. The green bean teepee also went nuts – with ten plants, I’ve netted two pounds of beans so far. (You can see the Parisian pickling cucumber plants threatening to intrude on the bean’s territory.)

So not a complete loss by any means, even with disappointing tomato ranks. Basil, dill, chives, and thyme are all doing fine, lemongrass and ginger are happy as clams, pumpkin vines are starting to stretch out. But I’m disappointed in my overall progress, especially considering the massive volume of seeds I purchased in the spring. Here’s hoping I can rally the fall greens in the onion beds and break even.

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Now for the numbers:

A few notes about the newcomers: I had lots of big and little onions, so I’m estimating based on an average of 3.5 ounces per onion. That’s a pretty impressive $25 worth of onions for $2.10 in initial investment. Green beans are also pretty impressive, but that may be because the only green beans in the grocery store were locally grown organic beans. But heck, so are mine.

So far, I’ve ‘earned’ back about one third of my initial investment. Not too shabby, considering I dropped the ball on much of what I wanted to plant!

Little boxes… made of ticky-tacky…

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 Not in my front yard! (photo courtesy of myfoxdetroit.com)

I’m one of many, many Americans who have the dubious distinction of having grown up in the suburbs. Though I can understand the thought process of some who live there – More land for your money! Lower taxes! Better schools! Everybody’s just like us! – I hated it. HATED IT. Especially where I lived, there was nowhere I could go on foot other than to the local high school. Which is cool for about all of five minutes. The closest grocery store and shopping area was a mile away on a road with no sidewalks where people (myself included, in my teenage years) regularly drove 20 miles above the speed limit. Not exactly a good destination for a middle-schooler on foot.

I drove through that part of town this past weekend to show my son where I used to live. It was the first time I hadn’t been over there to deal with something from my parents’ old house (cleaning 33 years of stuff out of the place has been over for a couple of years, thank goodness) and the first time in ages I wasn’t on autopilot driving through. All I could think of was “how on earth do people LIVE here?”

Maybe I’m a snob, maybe I’ve just lived in a city too long, but I like walking to the coffee shop and the bus stop and having a major supermarket (and in two weeks, a brand-spanking-new urban Tarzhay) within a mile of my house. I like walking there on sidewalks that actually exist, I like riding a bike there easily, I like driving there, I like being home quickly from work in 20 minutes on a bus that someone else drives so I don’t have to. Yes, I do like driving sometimes, but I like even more the fact that I don’t HAVE to. I can still function in society if I were to suddenly become carless tomorrow. Which is probably why I’ve lived within the city limits for 16 years now and have a graduate degree in planning. So I admit that I’m a little more extreme than most. But still….

Who doesn’t want their kid to walk to school? Who wants to make their kids fatter? Who wants to prohibit the planting of vegetables so that the neighborhood kids don’t know where tomatoes come from before they end up in ketchup? No one I know. But, alas, we live in a society where all of those things happen – and, as it happens, all things have been talked about (especially the last thing, those poor defenseless tomatoes) this week:

  •  The Safe Routes to School Program unveiled a new “walkability” checklist to determine the community value of a school – in part because “one phenomenon we battle everyday is kids’ inability to walk to school – or anywhere – because it’s too far” (sound familiar, childhood?). According to them, school siting away from existing populations, or residential siting away from existing schools, “has helped contribute to the epidemic of obesity and diabetes that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control has proclaimed.”
  • Yeah, that pesky obesity epidemic. Sick of hearing about that one yet? Me neither, because it’s getting worse. The catchy title of this year’s report F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America’s Future 2011 highlights both adult and childhood obesity. More than two-thirds of the 50 states have adult obesity rates over 25%. Twenty years ago, no state had a rate over 20%. Childhood rates aren’t quite as alarming, but this interactive map from last year shows that all states except one have childhood obesity rates less than 10% (yet another reason I feel compelled to move to Oregon). So at minimum, one out of ten kids are overweight. In my state, 15% of all kids are overweight. But not being able to walk to school has nothing to do with it, right? Neither does having the ability to grow your own food and learn that food doesn’t just come from a grocery store. Nothing at all.
  • Which leads me to the worst story of the week, as far as I’m concerned. Have you heard the one about the woman who is being sued by her city for growing vegetables in her front yard? Sadly, it’s not a joke. Gotta love complaining neighbors in small towns who don’t think raised garden beds are suitable for front yards, even though the municipal code specifically exempts vegetables from the prohibition of random things in yards. Yes, I’ve checked. And what struck me in this story (after thinking that Oak Park has nothing better to do than to declare war on vegetables) is what this supportive neighbor said: “I have a bunch of little children and we take walks to come by and see everything growing. I think it’s a very wonderful thing for our neighborhood.”

So let’s take away maybe the only place kids can see things growing that they might one day eat in a neighborhood because it’s not suitable. Thinking back on my childhood, I don’t remember any of our neighbors growing gardens, just my parents. Is it typical of suburbia to want things so ‘just-so’ that they don’t want people eating from their yards? That’s certainly the stereotype, and there are many documented cases of kids not having a clue where food comes from. 

I know this post may be wandering, but it also proves a point – everything is connected. If my kids don’t know where food comes from and the difference between processed and non-processed foods, and they can’t walk to the bus stop or to school because of safety or land use issues, it seems pretty inevitable that they will end up overweight. I’m doing my best to keep that from happening – and it’s so foreign to me that people, especially planners, who are supposed to think of the interconnectedness of systems, don’t get it. Then again, there’s a reason I don’t live in places like that.

hummina hummina hummina

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This is not a photo blog. I mean, I have photos here, but I’ve probably taken them with my cell phone and they’re not the best quality.

But why the heck would I need to focus on my crappy photos when I can find such fantastic ones elsewhere?

(photo courtesy of Karen Walrond at Chookooloonks)

This photo is one of many Karen took of an amazing vegetable garden in Tobago at Kariwak Village, which looks pretty darn cool itself. I’ve never seen myself as a ‘check out things close to the equator’ kind of person, especially since my skin burns in 15 minutes on an overcast day, but Karen’s photos and descriptions of this haven may just change my mind. Enjoy the eye candy!

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Ooooh! Her Trinidad market pictures from a few days ago are also fantastic.

unintentional farmers’ market tour of the mid-atlantic

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You never notice a specific type of car until you buy it. Then, when you’re looking for your car in the supermarket parking lot, there are suddenly twenty more just like it. Thankfully, the battery hasn’t died in the key fob yet, and you can beep the horn and flash the lights until you find it.

Apparently that is now my luck with farmers’ markets. Both times I’ve traveled for work in the last month, I’ve stumbled across markets without even trying. While the first one was fairly anemic, the one in Parkersburg, WV this past week was hopping.

The first thing I saw were these posters prominently displayed in public places around town – this one, in my hotel lobby.

The market setup (the day before) with the Wood County Courthouse in the background. A great setting in downtown Parkersburg.

Signs set up in the lot nearby for guaranteed parking spaces.

And when I checked it out over lunchtime on Friday, it was bustling. Just how you expect a farmers’ market to look.

My overall impressions? The advertising was fabulous, very professional and eyecatching without looking too slick. The vendors were a nice mix of local produce and value-added goods. The band in the nearby shell kept people tapping their toes. Having the market over a lunch hour (10am-2pm) is a smart move in a city that rolls up the sidewalks after 5pm. Having WV Extension information there (both a table with a person to talk to and lots of pamphlets and handouts with recipes for food found at the market) is a great way for people who aren’t familiar with vegetables sold there to figure out what to do with them. And I even bought a market reusable bag. Because I’m a sucker for reusable bags.

Can’t wait to stumble across the next market!

My yard ate my weedwhacker.

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Weedwacker? Weedwhacker? Spellcheck doesn’t like it either way. I give up.

At any rate, my electrically-powered-hand-tool-that-chops-up-weeds-with-a-string found itself temporarily (I hope) stymied by the weeds it encountered today. My yard has a history of swallowing things, including stone benches, pathways, and most of a clearing in the woods that was once bricked over – the bricks have themselves been weeded over, or at least leaf-molded over. A friend once optimistically described it as a “fairy wonderland,” whereas I usually tell people that it’s like The Secret Garden before Mary and Dickon started hacking at it.

What was solidly an old lady’s flower garden (with admittedly amazing spring bulbs) is slowly being transformed into a more workable space. Don’t get me wrong, I love the six different types of daffodils in April. However, on a 50′x200′ lot, with a house on over half of it, woods on about 1/4 of it, and a sloped front yard, there’s precious little space for gardening. So the bulbs are moving to areas that are less palatable for production, raised beds are going in, and trellises are going up. It’s our third summer here and finally it feels like it’s our yard. It helps that we water the tomatoes with water guns.

Little did I know that I was part of a larger backyard movement – I’ve never lived somewhere that didn’t have a garden in the rear (except for those shifty college apartments). I found You Grow Girl when I bought my first house in 2002, but it’s such an intimate site that it never occurred to me that this was such a growing phenomenon. To me, people always grew plants in their backyards. Strangely, it wasn’t until earlier today, when I viewed Leah, my veghacker friend, talking to local mainstream news figure Bill Flanagan about transforming flower gardens into usable food growing spaces, that I realized that planting seeds and getting out the watering can regularly isn’t something that people just know how to do.  So I’m thankful that my kids have an interest in doing this – even when it means giving up some extra space in the yard or time otherwise spent playing video games. Judging by my two year old’s attempts to string the pea trellises again with the twine I left outside, I think the kids will be just fine.