Dipper Gourd Ho! Honeydew Ho! Come In, Ground Cherry and Lemon Balm?

Growing Challenge update:  A dipper gourd seed has sprouted!  Just one.  In addition, I have one and only one healthy-looking Afghan Honeydew sprout, one and only one small Banana Pepper sprout.  The Mesclun Mix sprouts (a couple of dozen) are about 2 inches high.  A dozen or so Turnip sprouts, and half a dozen or so Rhubarb sprouts.  Still no sign of Ground Cherry or Lemon Balm.

In other garden seed-starting news, my healthy and fast-growing Cilantro sprouts were, I just realized, seeds packed for 2000 — eight years ago!  That’s encouraging to me that they stayed viable for so long.  On the other hand, the Simpson Lettuce seeds from 1995 have not shown any response yet.

I notice that I’m reluctant to plant seeds in groups of 2 or 3 as is often suggested, with instructions to thin out the smaller ones and keep the healthiest sprout in each spot.  Each seed feels too valuable to me to risk “wasting” them by thinning.  Where I have room, I’m instead just trying to sprout extra seeds, far enough apart that I can keep all those who grow.  But in a few cases I might have to thin a bit.  I’m also trying to decide when to just plant what I would want for myself (I don’t need more than 1-2 squash plants, for example, of each variety) or when I should plant many and then offer the starts for sale at the early farmer’s markets.  The market will be starting in early June, and I doubt there will be much for sale there at first, since that’s just about outdoor planting time around here!  Only what people have started indoors or in cold frames might be ready by then, and since this is a new farmer’s market, I don’t know that many people are growing for it.  Which might make any starts I have to offer that much more interesting.

In related news…

Sharon Astyk has presented a challenge she is calling the Independence Days Challenge.  You can read about it here.  The bottom line of the challenge is to do something each day for one year that forwards your level of independence:  plant something, harvest something, learn a new skill, cook something new, preserve food and manage your storage, help create/sustain a local food economy (or a local economy for anything sustainable or subsistence oriented, for that matter).  I’m going to try to do something that fits this challenge each day.  I might not post about it every day, but I will try to post at least weekly, listing my Independence Days Challenge activities for that week.  So far, for example, I have:

• Monday April 28 — I volunteered sorting orders at my local food co-op, and took possession of my own order, which included some bulk/storage food (25# rice, 25# black beans, 15# sugar, 3 gallons olive oil), and some food storage items (four gamma seal lids for 5-gallon buckets).  My order also included six organic butternut squash starts and six organic delicata squash starts.
• Tuesday April 29 — I planted eggplant seeds in a pot indoors.
• Wednesday April 30 — I planted Principe Borghese tomato seeds in a pot indoors.

See how easy?  That’s the idea, that each day’s action might take only a few seconds or minutes, but the challenge is to keep it up on a daily basis.  Come play along!

Good news…

… I found toilet paper growing in the yard!

It’s a bit hard to see in the photo, even after I cleared out some of the dried leaves clinging to it. Here’s a closeup:

That IS lamb’s ears, isn’t it?

:)

Spiking Food Prices, Hunger, Greed, and Triggering Change

Greenpa has said it better than I could.  Go here to read his post.

The spiking of food prices around the world in just the past few months, especially in the poor countries, has many causes.  It’s a coming together of effects from war, global climate change, drought, overpopulation, corrupt governments, and more.  There are many organizations out there that are trying to address each of these individual causes, and many more that are just trying to help alleviate the hunger that is a result.

But as Greenpa and others have observed, there is one truly shameful addition to the list of causes.  Pure greed.  And while the other causes of hunger are truly so complex that no one can be certain whether enough of the right actions are being taken until we look back in hindsight and see success or failure, improvement or tragedy, THIS cause could easily be simply turned off.  Regulated out of existence.  What we’re talking about is the derivative market of speculation on food crops.  People “investing” to “take advantage” of the “growth potential” of high food prices.

You know, we all wonder, as we watch the price of oil spike and sometimes plunge, or the price of gold or silver do the same, we all wonder how much of the price changes are truly a reflection of the demand versus the supply.  I mean, it makes sense for a price to rise when an item has become scarce, whether through long-term depletion or because of some temporary logistical supply interruption.  It makes sense for a price to rise when a static level of supply is expected to meet increasing demand.  But it makes NO sense for the price to rise because some traders have decided to “go long” or “go short” on corn futures.  And given the current situation, with hungry people rioting around the world because their barely-survivable food budget has suddenly become insufficient to keep them going, and given all the unavoidable forces pushing food prices higher at the moment (the aforementioned droughts, climate change, population pressures, peak oil-related costs of transportation, fertilizer, and all non-renewable energies), it’s absolutely *inhumane* that we permit a greed factor to be making it all worse.

As Greenpa says, this is one of those things where a rolling momentum, starting with bloggers, journalists, a grassroots awareness, can lead to legislative changes in fairly short order.  It’s time for a demand to be created to stop this practice.  In the USA, the pre-election year is as good a time as it gets for triggering national figures to take up causes from the grass roots.  It just takes more and more and more and more people talking about it, until it becomes a visible demand.

So, talk it up.  If you have a blog, post a link to Greenpa’s post.  Send this information in an email to anyone you know who sees the horror that this food crisis is, or the potential uber-horror it is snowballing to be.  If you know any politicians, rock stars, or tv producers, especially send it their way. If you participate in discussion boards that encompass current events or humanitarian issues or even just food, start a thread, put it in their sphere of consciousness.

Soon it will be on the news.  Then it will be on the legislative floors of the most affected countries.  It might not be on the floor of the US Congress until after November, but we’ll take what we can get.

Go forth.  Help get the snowball rolling.

It Has Begun…

Unfortunately, this is worth clicking on to see full-sized:

Growing Challenge — 3 Steps Forward and 1 Step Back

Three steps forward:  three of my indoor pots have produced seedlings so far:  turnips, mesclun salad mix, and brussels sprouts.  (I guess that means I have a brussels sprout – er, sprout?  :)  I haven’t grown mesclun mix before, so I guess that counts as another Growing Challenge item, though I hadn’t decided to plant it at the time I listed my inclusions.  I’ve grown brussel sprouts before, years ago, and I assume I started them from seed, but I really don’t remember.   Even though it was about 80*F here today, it’s supposed to get cold again in a few days, so I’m glad I’m starting all these guys indoors.  Within a week or two, though, I’ll have to put the turnips in the ground, as they’ll get too big for their pot.  But they’re hardy, so I have hopes that they’ll be ok.  As I mentioned before, I’ll plant some seeds straight in the ground at that time.

Now for the step back:  when I got home this afternoon, I checked in on the kitchen windowsill to see if anyone new had sprouted, and I saw that one of my containers was upside down on the counter and in the sink!  Potting soil everywhere!  Oh no!  It was the container with the dipper gourd seeds.  I think the cat must have been climbing up around there and stepped on the container, which extended out just a bit off the sill, due to the window being open to let a little fresh air in, so…  Darn!  I put all the soil back in the container.  I didn’t see any half-sprouted seeds, either.  I saw one or two seeds that still looked like seeds.  Hopefully they will still sprout ok.  Keeping the cat off the counter is another story though…  I’m pretty sure he was chasing flies — yesterday when it was so nice, I opened up two doors and a screenless window and just kept them open all day, to air out the house on such a nice day!  I hoped the flies etc would fly in and then just fly right on out.  Erm, it didn’t quite work — the house was FULL of flies and mosquitoes!  I’ve been snapping towels at them, catching them in jars to put outside, encouraging the dog and the cat to think of them as toys, anything!  Haven’t noticed any more mosquitoes today, I might have gotten all those, but there’s still lots of flies I haven’t vanquished.  I’d bet anything the flies were hovering in that kitchen window and Bear the cat was ‘only trying to help’ when he stepped on the potted gourd seeds.

OK, I’m over it now.

A Half-Baked Solution

When I moved into the new rental, there was a big ugly yellow desk there — the generic kind you see in offices.  The landlords asked me if I could use it and wanted it left inside; if I didn’t, they’d move it to the (huge) garage for storage.  I said sure, leave it, I can use it.  I’m setting up a “home office” in the living room, and I have only a small wooden desk, so I can use the desktop as organizing space, not to mention a few file drawers.

The problem, once I got my bearings in the house and started to figure out what I wanted where, was that the desk was in this corner of the room and I really wanted it over there.  It was empty, but even so, when I tried to drag it, it wouldn’t budge.  The combination of a heavy and awkward item (it’s one of those L-shaped things, two pieces bolted together) combined with the shag carpet and the lack of foot caps, meant this thing just wouldn’t slide.

I considered my choices:  I could get someone, or a few someones, to help me move it.  I could “buy the solution”:     (these are plastic disks that are slippery on the bottom and grippy on the top — you put one under each foot of the furniture you’re trying to move, and then everything slides around easily) which not only involved spending money and waiting days until the item arrived, but then would mean more plastic “stuff” I’d have to store or give away. 

I also happened to know that an office nearby had some of these, and I considered asking (I used to work there and they know me) if I could borrow them.  But in the end, I found a faster solution:

 

Exciting Happenings Around These Parts

The owner of the local cafe posted a sign much like this one a few weeks ago.  This photo is for the second meeting, happening Tuesday evening.  She’s started a new business across the street from the cafe, a commercial kitchen with all the accoutrements.  Her idea, which was discussed with high enthusiasm by 15-20 people at the first meeting, is to create a local food “brand”, by combining local growers with local “processors”, the latter being people with recipes and products they are interested in producing commercially.  In other words, if someone wants to produce, say, apple butter, or jarred pasta sauce, they coordinate with the local growers to get the right variety of tomatoes, apples, etc.  After buying their ingredients (mostly local as possible), they make their product in her commercial kitchen, which has all the certifications and equipment needed to be legal.  UC Davis will provide us nutritional analyses of recipes submitted.  Items produced in this way will be eligible for the local brand label, and hopefully the local markets will be interested in carrying these products.  Of course they could also be sold at the Farmer’s Market (for which, in a parallel project also coming out of the cafe, there are plans to hold a second Farmer’s Market each week, the new one being in the middle of town and held on Saturday mornings, so that tourists and 40-hour-a-week-ers will be able to attend — the current Farmer’s Market, which will also continue, is held on the hospital lawn, which is *not* in the middle of town — even if it’s only a quarter-mile away — and it’s held at 3:00 on Friday afternoons, and is usually done by 3:30.  Not too convenient unless you happen to be right there).

I was wary that the first meeting, which was attended by much of the gardening crowd, would produce lots of growers but no processors.  However, when asked to show hands, there were a good 8-10 people expressing interest in producing a product.  Many were also growers.

My role in this project is likely to be grower only, unless I discover something I really want to make as a finished item.  And, since I’m in a new place and don’t know the details of how the garden will do this first year, I’m pretty tentative in what I can offer anyway.  I’m more likely to bring whatever does well in my garden to the farmer’s market.  Committing to provide X pounds of tomatoes or potatoes or whatever, will have to wait at least one growing season, as I learn what grows well in my location/soil/water.  On the other hand, there are a dozen mature fruit trees in my yard, starting to bud out as I type.  I know most are apple, I know there’s at least one apricot, and I suspect at least one peach and one pear.  Soon as I can figure out what varieties they are, I can make at least a tentative offer to provide some of the harvest for any processor who needs those ingredients.

My other role in this project is that the lower fields at my house will be used by my friend KH, who plans for large garden beds.  Her aim is to provide produce for the cafe directly, plus for the farmer’s market, but it certainly includes providing ingredients for the processors.

There are so many things that might possibly go wrong, both in my yard and with this project in general, but I am so excited to see it being discussed and tried!  I think this is just the kind of conversation we need to be having now, so that when/if a time comes, next year or in several years, when this valley returns to being dependent on its local growers for most of its food, we’ll not be starting from zero coordination at that time.

Also, Growing Challenge update:  I started a few seeds from each of my items yesterday.  They’re on the kitchen windowsill, in the plastic tubs that I buy organic salad greens in from the market.  (Of course, once I’m growing my own salad greens, I’ll have to get my indoor starter containers elsewhere :)  There are lots of other garden items I want to try starting from seed too, but other than some catnip, I haven’t planted those seeds yet.

Growing Challenge — my selections

Okay, I’ve mentioned earlier that I’m participating in Melinda’s “Growing Challenge” for the upcoming garden season.  The rules of the Challenge are to grow at least one new thing in your garden this year, that you haven’t grown before, and to grow it from seed.  And, to report at least weekly, either to her or on a blog, about the experience.

So this week I’ve selected which items I’m going to grow for the Challenge.  Melinda started the challenge months ago so that people would have time to think/decide before buying their seeds.  Well, I went about it a little backwards — I bought my seeds months ago, as a hedge against the fast arrival of troubled times.  It just seemed like a good idea to have a good supply of open-pollinated seeds, so I placed my orders from Seeds of Change and Baker Creek back in November or December.  Of course, I figured that if my paranoia didn’t come to fruition, I could always make more seed purchases come spring.  But since I was ordering, I went ahead and ordered quite a bit.

So once I decided, just recently, to participate in the Challenge, I went through my stack of seed packets and pulled out any packets I had that were for items I hadn’t already grown before.  Then I mulled these over and decided which ones to use for the Challenge.  I realized as I perused, that I’ve grown lots of things before, but not very successfully!  So I still have lots to learn, lots to try.  But for the purposes of the Challenge, anything I’ve grown before won’t be officially part of the Challenge.

Okay, so here are my choices for the 2008 garden:

Sweet Banana Peppers (I’ve grown — barely — bell peppers before, but I maintain that banana peppers are different!) — I have some Ferry Morse seeds (last minute grab from the local grocery)

Turnips — Purple Top White Globe from Ferry Morse (ditto)

Lemon Balm

Honeydew Melon (Afghan Honeydew)

Ground Cherry

Rhubarb (Victoria Rhubarb)

and, the one I’m most excited about:

Dipper Gourd.

Now, I haven’t done detailed research about which of these items are best suited to my bioregional climate conditions or to my microclimate yard.  But I don’t care.  I have a friend not too far from here who grows bamboo in her yard, even though the zone charts say that would never happen.  She just tried it in a variety of microclimates until she found three places where it survived.

I’m going to further experiment by starting a few seeds of each of these things now, and then when it’s ground planting time, in addition to putting my starts in the ground I will attempt to sprout them from seed directly into the garden at that time. 

This will be fun!