The Newest Plot: “Vineplot” May 30, 2008

It all started yesterday. About 2 p.m., I got an energy burst. Don’t know from whence it came; could’ve been the 70% dark chocolate, or the perfection of the weather, or perhaps our toothing baby put the spur to my hide. In any case, it was suddenly time to build a new plot for my vine vegetables. I had desisted from doing just this for weeks, hemming and hawing about maybe building another raised bed, maybe going the whole nine yards and building a raised bed on wheels, maybe just filling up containers for my tomatoes, tomatilloes, and zukes. But, when yesterday dawned breezy and warm, the day quickly lifting itself up from one of the last slight frosts, it became clear to me that I must make a home for my vining edibles toute-suite.

I couldn’t be bothered to obtain more lumber or screw together wheel axles; Freya and I needed out of the house and the clock’s ticking on those tomatilloes, which are bursting from their tiny pots. I loaded the stroller with kitchen scraps to replenish the compost heap I intended to capital-p Plunder, and we hot-footed it across town.

First, I had to break ground. This is earth my mother offered me on Mother’s Day (thanks, Ma!). I rolled back the grass and weeds on this corner by the driveway, thinking that I would start small (about 5′x4′), but that we might just want to extend the plot further along the driveway in future years. Or in future months. (I think veg gardeners are more prone to sudden attacks of Carpe Diem-itis than your average human, so I’m not ruling anything out.)

That’s about where yesterday’s work ended. Today I went back, still all fired up, and commenced my interpretation of lasagna gardening. First, I laid newspaper over the bare soil, thinking it might stop any remaining weeds from growing upwards, while allowing vegetable roots to grow downwards, if need be. I covered that with rich stuff from the compost heap. (I turned our impressive-but-under-managed heap into a crater, hoping to hit the good stuff by digging down into the middle, and I dare say it worked.) One layer compost, one layer maple leaves, then another layer compost. By the end of today, it looked dark and thick enough to be called “chocolate dirt” — which is just what my neighbor called it, so it all began and ended with cocoa.

Huzzah! This weekend, I’ll plant out the tomatillo and tomato starts and sow some zucchini seeds. Still have to work out how I’ll support and protect them all from deer, etc. (a bamboo teepee? A trellis? A fence around everything?)

A huge smackeroo of gratitude to my faithful helper:

Who now smiles with the beginning of a tooth:

She is amazing, always loves an outing: was all smiles when we arrived home. I nursed her and watched her sink into a deep sleep, hoping she dreams of pink blossoms, buzzing bees, a yellow dog, chocolate earth.

Woodland Foodie: 7, Kate: 4 May 27, 2008

So. You win some, you lose some. Yesterday I lost a couple romaine and pea plants to something like a groundhog. That’s my best guess — some woodland foodie hit the back of the raised bed, the side closest to the house, leading me to believe he just zipped under the bushes at the corner. That’s a clue, as is the large pile of dirt abutting the front porch: We think something has dug a home there.

It’s the first major green casualty of the year, and probably the last. You can have my lettuce, bucktooth, but you’ll never get my vine crops. I’ve recovered and am plotting strategic moves; I’m building fences. And I know someone with a trap, a trap that’s seen use, a trap that she baits with peanut butter and apples. Am simply working up the courage to borrow it.

In my tally:

Yesterday I harvested three radishes. On a normal day, I don’t particularly like radishes, but I tried one, and it was a capitalized RADISH, a Rather Amazing Delicacy I Sowed and Harvested. Wondrous because I made it happen.

I’m also feeling pretty optimistic about my tomatilloes today. I think I think I think I see fruit:

Abbr. State of the Sprouts, May 25th, 2008 May 25, 2008

We have a new varsity basketball team: the tomatilloes are gigantic. I sincerely hope they fruit, because they’re going to take up a lot of real estate. Please, somebody tell me now if store-bought tomatilloes — particularly those bought at Price Chopper — are hybrids that will not fruit. Somebody dash my hopes now before I give these plants the penthouse suite. All would not be wasted — I would compost them, or set them up as a sacrifice crop…

On a happier note, it’s Memorial Day weekend and last frost dates are fast approaching. Soon I’ll set these out in the weather for keeps: Swiss chard, pumpkin, Black Krim tomatoes, and sweet peppers. I’ve essentially been “hardening off” for a month or so, ever since I ran out of room under artificial lights and chased everybody out onto the balcony. But, after they’ve sunned every day, I dutifully haul them in every evening, for fear of a killing frost (there was a hearty one just last night). Soon, those chores will be done. I expect we’ll forgo the raised-bed-on-wheels in favor of large containers in the driveway. Or maybe use the containers as a stop-gap until we actually do construct the biggest, most bad-assed “raw meal on wheels” anyone has ever seen.

And then, just when I think I’m an urban gardener, just when I think I can sneak into that crowd…tonight I heard a beaver slapping the water just down the ridge from the condo. I know it’s a beaver at work — I’ve seen the stumps of small trees that he has gnawed down, right by the river. He must go at them like he’s sharpening a pencil. I love this place.

Why I Want to Eat from My Backyard May 23, 2008

Here is Freya yesterday at the plot, with lilacs — my favorites. We here are all tickled because yesterday she successfully ate her first solid food, rice cereal. It was the third attempt and she really got it down and was tucking in like a champ.

On the garden front, the radishes are looking bigger and better every day, we ate the first few spinach leaves of the season (delicious), and those peas keep striving upward.

So it seems like an opportune time to really consider why I’m set on feeding Freya the best I can, whether it be homegrown or organic, hormone- and pesticide free, and how these choices affect climate change. I know they do so on a really very small scale, but, nonetheless, it’s there — everybody emits. (I smell a new children’s book in that one!)

I read an old article in the New Yorker that made this point: It’s oversimplified to judge the food you buy simply by the miles it’s traveled because, sometimes, organic and locally-grown produce has a larger carbon footprint than crops shipped in from abroad. Example: New Zealand inherently has a better climate and greener energy sources for growing many fruit crops; if your aim is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, buy the produce grown outdoors in New Zealand instead of that grown in an energy-hogging greenhouse locally. This is the case if you live in New England, anyway.

Then, this month, Wired appoints itself environmentalist myth buster and makes some provocative declarations. Example: “Don’t buy organic.” Their argument is that organically-raised meat and dairy cattle produce less for market while producing more methane. (In short, it takes something like 25 organic cows to produce the milk of 23 artificially-supplemented cows, so the organic method requires that many more belching and pooting cattle.)

Apparently, the current revelation is that the organic labels (that I so love) do not reveal unpleasant truths about carbon footprints. Now, personally, I’m not very impressed by Wired’s green cow example, because I try to buy organically-raised meat for a completely different reason — namely, because I don’t like the idea of us ingesting a lot of artificial growth hormones. I don’t really consider greenhouse-gas emissions at all, here.

The New Yorker article gave me pause, though. I’ve written here in this very same blog that I tried to buy seeds from New England companies, just generalizing that it was probably better to buy something that hadn’t traveled from Timbuktu. Turns out, that was grossly oversimplifying it. I had a hunch I didn’t really know what was behind it all.

Well, where does that leave us, eating as we do every day, about four or six times, while very much wanting to think more about reducing greenhouse-gas emissions? Very firmly in the “grow seasonal, eat seasonal” corner. I don’t really want to know how far my seeds have traveled, because, now that they’re in the ground, I’m growing something that will only travel from there to here, probably in my backpack or Freya’s stroller. In future years, though, I am going to grow heirloom; It seems like the best of all worlds to grow plants that I can harvest seeds from for use in future years, effectively perpetuating my little foot-powered flood empire.

And I really want to expand on the homegrown fruits and vegetables (strawberries, winter crops, and just more of everything, in general), because then I’ll learn more about what’s seasonal and where my money goes at the grocery store. I will probably always buy bananas flown in from a hotter country and meat that doesn’t eat itself or a lot of hormones, at the price of greater gas emissions. But. It feels good to be joining the ranks of the self-aware and conscious choice-makers. I’m becoming a backyard locavore. Plotavore, anyone?!