A Days Work Gardening

In my mind, anyway, I spent the day gardening. The snow is virtually gone, and through the dining room window I can almost believe that spring is around the corner. So, I've been planning the 1st garden I've ever started from scratch.
Wanting to have a real vegetable garden certainly isn't a new ambition, but with all the reading that I've been doing this winter, I'm more convinced of the necessity of it. It pretty much horrifies me to think that even though I eat predominantly 'whole' foods, the food that I am eating isn't nearly as nutritious as I had thought it was. And it's not just about the food being grown in far-off places (that may not have the same restrictions that we have on pesticides...), or about how that food travelled, or how long since it was harvested. On top of all of that, the food that we eat has been consciously selected / modified / 'enhanced' to make it a better seller. What matters is how it travels, how it looks, how long it lasts on the shelf, how resistant it is to damage / disease / rot. What matters is that it is grown / raised anywhere and shipped to us here, just the way we want it. What we eat now are mostly products, commodities.
But a commodity in a truer sense than just a stock market item. The industry that provides the bulk of our food isn't really concerned with nourishing us. It's really about the sales. It's about creating a product, not about creating food.
We as consumers are part of the problem - we've been trained to expect tomatoes that are a certain shade of red, a certain size, a certain blemish-free alikeness to its neighbour. The lemons we buy are all the same size, the oranges, the apples (all 4 brands you can find in the supermarket). Our rice is white and quick-cooking, our oats are pale and quick-cooking, our potatoes are white and have no Vitamin A in them any more.
Is it that we don't know the difference? Certainly people older than me must remember what a real tomato (beautiful in its uniqueness of shape and colour and size, when compared to its neighbour on the vine) or a fresh grown garden carrot takes like. For people in my generation, I suppose it depends on whether your parents or grandparents had a garden. But, in the city, I didn't know too many people who grew their own food (except for the old Italian guy down the street who grew everything under the sun in his small plot). More importantly, I didn't know too many people who WISHED they could grow a garden, or even thought much about it. And the young people now... do they have a connection to their food outside of their relationship to a store?
So now, here we are in our fairly-wealthy, industrialized country, completely industrialized. Could we feed ourselves if we had to? And I don't mean just our country feeding our citizens, but each of us individually. Could we as individuals feed our own families without the help of the supermarkets / industrial producers / Kraft Kitchens??
So, I want to grow a garden. Firstly I want to grow food that is nourishing. Secondly, I want to be able to store that food so that in the dead of winter I am still eating nourishing food and NOT relying on veggies from Chile and California that have 1/2 the Vitamin C that they used to have. Thirdly, I want to see if I can eventually feed myself - despite my work schedule and my eating restrictions, I want to see if I can be fairly self-reliant. Mostly, though, I think I want to feel that I'm standing up for myself and my family.
And so the books and the magazines are spread all over the dining room table and I have my notepad and my stickies. I'm trying to learn how to garden. Thankfully I have a mother who will no doubt jump in to help me whenever I call, but I'm still anxious to do it as right as its possible to do on your first time around. I've got a plan for rotating the crops, I've got a plan for our crappy clay soil (raised beds!) and I've got "Carrots Love Roses" to help me plan our companion planting. It's pretty exciting. It's going to be so much work and such a mess on most days, but I'm sure that at least a few tomatoes will ripen and be eaten (ugly and blemished but totally yummy) and maybe even a carrot or two...

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Sump Pumps: The Unspoken Heroes

We waited for the January thaw that didn't come. Instead, we got more snow dumped on us every day. And now we're getting a ... February thaw, which is turning all that snow into little lakes scattered around the property.

The 2 sump pumps in the basement have been working non-stop all week. I used to be afraid of the sump pumps - the surprise of them turning on without warning at any time of the day or night, the sound of the water swishing its way across the basement as it headed for the drainspout... But today I realize that now I love my sump pumps.

Once it seemed a bit scary to see the concrete holes in the floor (slightly slimy and pretty rustic), but now the simple elegance fills me with confidence - our basement remains fortified! As soon as the water fills up the hole where the sump pump sits, the float triggers the pump and over the next couple of minutes the pump removes all possibility of flooding danger. And the best part about the sump pump is that it does its job without me having to remind it - without me having to turn it on or off (unlike the heating element around the laundry outspout!)

I'm not sure how much energy my little warriors draw, but it's pretty great to walk into a dry basement (grateful to only have to be worrying about the bat which we haven't found yet).

And HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO HAYDEN... the smartest, most loving 4 yr. old that an aunt could wish for.

Farm Fresh Eggs

After reading "The End of Food", right after finishing "The Omnivore's Dilemma", I was determined to find a supplier of local, fresh, "happy" eggs. I wanted eggs laid by cheerful, free-ranging, grub-eating, grass-scratching chickens. If you haven't read either of these books, let me just say that I no longer consider "organic" to be a reassuring term when it comes to eggs purchased at a major supermarket chain.
So I checked out the "Eat Local" blog put out by my municipality and came across Fenwood Farms. They have fresh farm eggs. They sell meat that they've raised, or that their neighbours have raised. Much of it is organic. They grow their own feed, a family member runs the abbatoir where the meat is butchured, and they sell their 'produce' in a family-run store out back of their house. They are what city folks would consider very "LOCAL".
Only having just found them, and it being winter, I haven't seen their happy cows grazing in their fields, nor have I seen free-ranging pigs rummaging through last years corn stalks. But I did get a lesson in "free range chicken" politics.
It seems that here in Ontario, chickens can no longer be let outside, free to wander in the field or garden or where ever they like to roam as they seek out bugs and grubs and grain. Due to the threat of Avian Flu, chickens cannot be 'free ranging' anymore. Apparently, if they are to venture outside of their barn, they must be enclosed by double walls of wire, with a roof enclosing those walls so that in fact they are contained in some kind of see-through barn. I suspect that few farmers would have the cash available to build such a specialized 'cage' for their layers... and how many eggs would one have to sell to pay for such a structure??
I will admit that I haven't done any research to date in an effort to confirm or deny the new law. But since that information came from a chicken farmer who sells "farm fresh eggs", I'm pretty sure it must be fairly accurate.
It seems that I'm not going to get eggs that come from free-ranging chickens. But the chicken-raising farmer was so proud, so excited about her flock (and also about her flock of turkeys!) that I could not help but believe that, during the winter anyway, her chickens are living a happy existance in the comfort of their warm barn without fear of predator, storm or starvation.
And when I got home and we tried the eggs I could honestly say that they were the best eggs I ever remember eating. Happy eggs.

Our Mailbox Full of Seeds!

I finished reading "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and started right away on "The End of Food", and have decided that we need to grow our own food. OK, maybe not our own grains or meat or dairy (yet), but certainly our own fruit and veggies. So in the past month I've come up with a plan.
I figure that we won't be able to have a full kitchen garden this summer - there is just too much to do to turn our heavy clay soil into nice fertile loam for the plants. So, this year I plan to plant a couple of raised beds with some tomatoes, beans, peas, radish, lettuce and carrots back behind the garage. Last year I put in an herb garden (fingers crossed it survived the winter) so this year I'll just replace the annuals like basil and dill.
Out in "the back paddock", I'm hoping to put in some red raspberries, black raspberries, and blueberries. I'm also thinking it would be great to put in some asparagus... so that in a few years we'll have yummy berries and asparagus. We had raspberries in the back yard of our house in the city, and I really miss going out into the garden early in the morning during July and getting ripe berries.
Then, I'm planning to put down some kind of mulch to kill off a section of the weeds in "the back paddock" so that come the fall I can till it under, and plant more things next year!
So, I went on line to the Terra Edibles site, ordered my seeds, and they arrived on Friday!! I'm very excited. Tomorrow I'm going to lay out the packages and make a plan of what to plant, when to start, etc. I'm going to use this blog to track my process. I'm sure that it will be quite the learning experience, but it's going to be so great.