Aspiring to be a dirt farmer

Talking Dirt
The Dirt Diva's Down-to-Earth Guide to Organic Gardening
by Annie Spiegelman

In the section on native plants she lists a European plant that is now considered invasive species in America. Huh?

But ignoring that minor boo-boo, this is an excellent little book of tips and tricks and a goodly number of plant variety suggestions. And this very useful warning, on pruning:

Even though it's tempting, don't prune during PMS or after a long wearisome phone call with or mother or immediately after a divorce. You'll regret your severe slashing and then you'll have more to sob about.  Put away the sharp objects and go get a pint of Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey instead.

I believe she's helped me with my quest for high nitrogen fertilizer to add to my compost pile. I was hoping to go pilfer from cow patties but then I got to reading about salmonella.  Apparently alfalfa meal can be obtained from feed stores in bags; soybean or cottonseed meal is better but both may be contaminated with pesticides.  Any of the above would be fine.

Looks like a trip to AgMart is in my near future.  And a recommendation--if you're just starting out in gardening this book will give you confidence and a whole heap of useful information.  And if you've been at it for a while, give it a whirl anyway.

State of the Garden Report, end of June

Before I get to the bugs, I must exclaim--

Pretty pepper! 
I don't know that I've ever seen one get ripe on one side first, but then, I'm not usually patient enough to let them get ripe at all.  As usual, I have no idea what variety it is, and it tastes wonderful.

We had an surprising arrival on Friday night--rain. Rain and plenty of it. For the last few years I've been out watering the little trees by this time--which meant we'd had six weeks or more of high temps and drought.  This year, I've not watered yet.

When I lived in the city and didn't garden, rain was just an idle thought. "Oh, shoot--it's raining." At best it was a break from the monotony of sunny+hot+dry that rules the North Texas summer; hail, thunder and lighting were an especially welcome distraction; fifty-mile-per-hour winds a bit of a scare. But watching the weather was something old people did--not me.

Now I'm not only watching it but I'm anticipating it, gabbing about it, and even writing about it without embarrassment. (Well...not much)  But I doubt that it's my readers' main preoccupation, so I'll drop the subject for now. No more mention of weather until I need to bitch and moan about the summer drought.

So I tried my hand at photographing pests in the garden. Most were on hiatus, but I did get this:






He's really quite gorgeous, isn't he?  Evil, bean-eating beast, but gorgeous.










And this dude who really loves hanging out on my tomatoes.  And not the plants--the fruit. Is he an evil sweet-sucking crop-spoiling fruit bat wannabe, or a helpful ally against some small enemy I can't see? 









He's a friend, best I can tell. I'm guessing some variety of assassin bug. I'm told they give a painful bite if you mess with them, but I'd just as soon not find our for myself.














After The Harvest --
My compost bucket, loaded with beet tops and probably a bug or two, under close scrutiny.  Most of the contents will be scattered over the kitchen floor in a couple of hours.

Lovely little creatures

I read that tarantulas are seldom seen wandering the streets except in fall when the males venture out in search of mates. But that doesn't jibe with my observations, which is that they venture out in spring and early summer about a day after a heavy rain. Did the rain fill up their burrows, forcing them to search for new ones?

This spring, with its infrequent but soaking rains, has driven more tarantulas to the streets than I've ever seen.  And other people have noticed, too.

On a different note, is my garden doomed to depletion because it lacks animal species to crop the vegetation and fertilize the soil?  And eat the parasites--I've heard chickens are especially good at all three of these. But I don't want to keep chickens. We tried guineas a while back, but the owls picked them off one by one.

I guess I'll have to make do with stolen cow manure and lots of grasshoppers.

Shocking reading, even for me

The Dorito Effect:
The Surprising New Truth about Food and Flavor 

by Mark Schatzker

Absolutely required reading for anyone who ever heard their grandparent complain that "food doesn't taste as good as it used to" and wrote it off to aging taste buds.  I was born in 1958 and even I notice that food doesn't taste as good as it used to. It is true that I use more spices and seasonings than my mom did--I was grown up in bland country and only tasted Indian food when I was thirty. But it's not just my changing palate--it's the food.

We're not talking evolution here, guys--we're talking simple selective breeding. If you are one of those people who doubt that it was man who took the wild strawberry (tiny, hard, intensely flavorful) and turned it into the supermarket strawberry (huge, tender, a little sour), then you're just stupid and you won't learn anything from this book. Selective breeding has been going on for millenia, and not just by humans. Any gardener knows how to create a new variety of rose--its simply a matter of labor and patience.

So...what happened to food when man stopped breeding for flavor and started breeding for good looks, fast growth, and durability when shipped long distances?  Plus a few other traits--insect resistance, tolerance for pesticides and herbicides, uniformity of size.  But taste and nutrition? Nope.

Have you ever noticed the intense cultural taboo against eating things on display in a grocery store?  Would you do it? Imagine going up to the stock boy laying out the cartons of cellophane-wrapped strawberries and asking for a sample. Imagine asking the guy behind the fish counter if you can sniff his salmon. Nope--I can't. The only exceptions are (a)Saturday at Sam's club, although the things the aproned people are cooking up and offering in little containers are typically not food*, and (b) any day at the deli counter, where you can usually get a taste of the potato salad before you buy it.

*food -- A consumable part of a plant or animal that provides essential nutrients to the eater.  Look at frozen nacho cheese bites and tell me what plant or animal they are from.

The book isn't nearly as preachy as I am and it's extremely entertaining. He's a good journalist and he didn't just sit in an office and munge this story together from magazine articles. The places he goes and the people he sees are all over the map--and then at the end he gathers them together for a good meal. I hope that wasn't a spoiler. I should have said, more accurately, he tries to gather them together for a good meal--but will the meal cooperate?

But there is one thing I have to get off my chest. After presenting evidence--piles on piles of it--of the harm man did when he tried to outwit nature, at the end he offers up man as the solution to our food problem.  Instead of trying to breed tomatoes for looking pretty after hard travel, all man has to do is to breed tomatoes that look pretty, taste good, and provide nutrition...after hard travel.  Can it be done? Yes, probably.  Will it?  Yes, maybe, but only if there's a profit in it. But in the end, will it provide what our bodies need?

I say no. Man can only select for qualities he can measure. If he does a chemical analysis on heirloom tomatoes and turns up forty distinct compounds, then he can breed for a tomato that provides these same compounds in similar quantities. But what about the trace minerals he doesn't breed for?  And in a highly competitive world of commerce, what if food scientists only bred for the three or four known nutrients or flavor components?  That's good enough, isn't it?

Skilled tasters can measure flavor, sure--but early on in the book he shows us how our taste perceptions can be fooled. With careful manipulation, you can convince people that corn coated in spices and artificial flavors (aka Doritos) tastes awesome.  In nature, good taste usually indicates good nutrition, but in the laboratory?  I dunno.

So while I agree with his general conclusion--mankind got up into this fix and mankind can get us out of it--I'm not sure with his idea that better breeding alone can fix the problem. Instead of trying to figure out how to create a tomato that can withstand hard travel and still taste like an heirloom variety fresh picked from the vine, why not figure out how to sustainably grow the heirloom varieties close to home?

When I was growing up--okay, okay, the world was a lot smaller then--our local A&P supermarket would offer bins of turnip greens, collards and mustard greens in season and purchased from local farms.  Kroger's says they still do that.  If I see the label 'locally grown' on a bag of potatoes, I'll choose it over potatoes from Idaho.  And is it not true that fresh beans start losing their flavor from the moment they're picked from the vine?  You tell me a region in the continental United State where green beans can't be grown. And even in parts of the world that are agriculturally challenged, there are sure to be crops that thrived in ancient times.  Why does mankind have to reinvent the wheel? Why not reinvent the axle, or the drive shaft--wheels can roll but without something to help them stay of course, they won't get much of anywhere.

That's my simple solution. Eat local when you can, and demand it when you can't. Mankind may not be able to produce the perfect tomato, but he can sure as heck produce a tomato in a whole lot of environments. He just needs motivation. ($$$)

State of the garden report, mid-June

This weekend I dug out a water leak and cut down a tree. But more importantly--
I made the best fresh tomato marinara sauce I've ever tasted!  Does everyone have a special food that's so saucy and rich and intense that it makes them want to swoon?  Apparently for me it's tomato sauce.

I made it from my harvest, plus a bit of grocery store onion and garlic. My home grown onions are a little on the small side and I was too lazy to deal with them.

I'm thinking next week's report should concentrate on bugs.  I'll try, but I stink at taking pictures of bugs. The picture below is supposed to be showing grasshoppers' fondness for beans, but you have to use your imagination on that little speck to the far left-hand side.

Aren't these the prettiest okra you ever saw?  But be warned--I haven't tasted them yet. I'm trying to cobble together enough for a fry.


And the flowers are even prettier--












The sole cantaloupe is baseball size, but still trying to hide.

Blogs on paper. Well...Kindle. Close enough.

I just want to pee alone: A Collection of Humorous Essays by Kick Ass Mom Bloggers

by Stacey Hatton 

and a lot of others

It seems like just a few days ago when I was whining about not wanting to read any more collections of short essays by various writers. The writers didn't seem motivated to try very hard and none of the writings were personal, thoughtful, or even very funny.

Then this came along.  It does 'personal' and 'funny' to a delightful degree and there's even a sprinkle of 'thoughtful' on top.  Is there a reason for that?  I dunno, but it could be that these are blog authors--aka aspiring writers--rather than people who make a living at writing.  But I'm not sure. I think these guys were just delighted by a chance to write for publication, so they put their best foot forward and dove in head first.

And funny it was. I listed at least seven 'mom' blogs that I wanted to check out.  But since that's such a subjective list, I'll leave it to you to choose your own.

State of the Garden Report, mid-June

As Barbara Kingsolver says, June is the red month.  Every tomato is getting ripe at once.

For a family of four, this would be a nice little haul. The big one for slicing, cherries for snacking, and the rest for the dinner's pasta sauce or salsa fresca.

But that's a single day's picking...and I'm picking them every single day.  If the beans hadn't stopped producing when the temperature topped 90, I'd be panicked. But the beans have given up for the year and the plants are ready for the compost pile.

Of the 'little gem' varieties, I planted a red cherry, a golden cherry, and a grape.  I will look up the exact varieties and make note of them for future. The red cherries are excellent; golden, darn good, grape, not so much. They're not very sweet and the skin is tough.  But it's a funny, funny world where "not so much" is still a million times better than what you can buy in a store.

See the fuzzy ball?  I think it's a cantaloupe!  Possibly a caterpillar, but I'm hoping cantaloupe.  Grow, fuzzball, grow!











And finally, much anticipated okra flowers are starting to appear. (see the little pod-shaped thing at the bottom-left of the plant--looks like Audrey Two)  I only have about eight plants so I'm not hoping for much. At best I'll get enough to supplement a box at the farmer's market for a crunchy, delicious fry-up  But as a dutiful daughter of my beloved mother, to plant a garden and NOT grow okra in it--
Not an option.